That is a great example actually, that is exactly the feeling I get when I see FS2024 screenshots…
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You should really get the entire program so that you can check out how it does weather in a wide variety of conditions. Aside from cloud weirdness and what I consider to be too much haze (overall)(which may be required due to graphics limitations), XP produces a much more realistic atmosphere than FS.
FS falls short on so many levels that its hard for me to know where to start. In XP, the haze realistically alters the colors that you see – like when there is rain in the area and clouds look pinkish or reddish and the sky looks more blue green (where I live anyway). FS doesn’t do that.
In XP a less dense cloud or part of cloud will be darker. In FS its just more transparent.
FS has this system where ‘few’ is represented by a handful of translucent blobs and the blobs may be different shapes but still translucent and unrealistic looking. ‘Scattered’ and ‘Broken’ simply add more and more blobs. If only they could find a way to get away from everything being made from blobs (dots, puffs).
XP has much more realistic turbulence and even ground effects. FS seems to have every surface being bumpy and uniformly bumpy. With XP, you are taxiing and its smooth and then you hit a bump and then its smooth again. Similarly when flying - smooth and then a realistic bump and then smooth again. FS is constantly rocking and swaying about. Im not a real pilot but I don’t think thats realistic.
I’ve actually lost hope that anything will change towards my perception of ‘better’. They have their methods and they are quite proud of them. Right now its all about helicopters apparently and any mention of weather radar will guaranteedly not have anything to do with clouds.
in my opinion.
BTW - neither REX nor Active Sky are available for X Box and Ive never been a big fan of either anyway. I used a program called OPUSFSX. Those people knew how to create cloud layouts. I wish two things - MS/Asobo would allow 3rd parties access to the code that creates and lays out the clouds and other effects - and second, that Opus FSX would come back.
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If it ever goes on a deep sale I would consider it. It’s quite possible I would only ever use it to make comparisons with MSFS, and I could get two decent planes for the price of XP12, which I would make far more use of.
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I’m not sure if the full version has better effects or if its just being able to fly where you want unencumbered but having time to start cold and dark and setting up your flight and flying point A to point B - with realistic weather changing as you go… the demo just doesnt do it justice.
but to each his own. It doesnt go on sale often thats for sure…but Im very glad I bought a copy.
I suspect its main difference is world data being complete, so I doubt I am missing out on any eye candy. It was the same for 11.
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Its not really eye candy but rather all the different types of weather that you get at various locations. The demo area is small in both area and time and that greatly limits the weather and its changes that you can experience. Some of my favorite XP pics – Ive only seen those exact scenes once… its a bit like reality that way.
Please note that Im not trying to talk you into anything but it is a fact that the demo is limited and limiting.
concerning cloud design:
FS builds clouds out of translucent puffs and relies on overlaps to build clouds. I don’t think the individual puffs look very realistic. XP also appears to use puffs but they’ve chosen both better shapes and better layout.
FS puffs tend to appear flat with one edge maybe brighter or thicker - I cant tell
XP also appears to use puffs but they are each a better shape in my opinion.
While flat looking roundish puffs do exist in reality, I think its more common and would do more good in a sim to have more hairlike, wispy puffs like here
or here
heres one of my favorite cloud pics that I took which I found quite useful in my cloud making
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To be fair it doesn’t always look like that. But in the past I don’t ever remember looking at the sky, and thinking “I wish this could be better”. Not once did I think that. Some stills from some video I shot back in August 2020.
Occasionally MSFS gets close to this again, but it tends to be quite rare. If you want it more often you really have to use external tools like Active Sky, or play around with manual weather. The engine is still capable of doing this, but it comes down to the eternal guesswork of whether its the source data from Meteoblue, or how those data are ingested into MSFS, interpreted, then rendered out.
When I saw that I uninstalled X-Plane 11.5, and never re-installed it. It was that good.
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The thing that bugs me the most is the clouds in a perfect line / on tracks look? It comes and goes and often looks most terrible at night. I’ve tried active sky to remedy this and it’s even worse. There was a time maybe during the SU4 beta where clouds were starting to look much better. Now they’ve really regressed in SU5 beta? Also a lot of small popcorn looking clouds all mashed together? Active sky can look really good on the ground when you first load in but rarely holds up with their injected transitions?
Not in live weather. I certainly haven’t had any and I’ve been paying particular attention to this.
That is odd! I fly every day, live weather all the time and there is turbulence in clouds and it’s very significant with storms/rain!
Its my understanding that turbulence and other wind effects have to be enabled by the developer on a per plane basis. How strong or correct the turbulence is - thats another issue.
I’m not sure it is. If they reset all changes made to before they added a density slider to the pseudo weather panel which was also when they changed the lighting and clouds became darker and blacker in their shadows. Is that even possible? I think they made changes to the clouds to allow room for avionics improvements – thats how I now feel.
The same weather/clouds that I created before those changes looked quite different after and with subsequent changes. I really dont think the engine can do this anymore:
I’d love to be proven wrong because the original system had a lot of good qualities but when they changed the formulas for density and changed the formulas for cloud lighting they then discovered that they had to make clouds more transparent in an effort to decrease the darkness of their shadows. This is all just my theory though because they never tell us anything really. At one point I remember Seb saying they made no changes to the clouds but yet Jorg was insistent that the clouds were better now than they had been. Ive gone back several times trying to find those quotes I remember but Im just tired of it all. I had a good day of flying with real weather in the C172 in California. Maybe they’ll make better overcasts and improve the fair weather clouds…maybe they never will. ghosted by better clouds.
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What’s the connection between the clouds, and the avionics?
Whatever the difference, with Xplane screenshots I always have to look twice to figure out whether it is real or not. I rarely have that with FS2024 screenshots, usually you can tell straight away that it is fake. It is the clouds, the atmosphere, the colors and lighting, everything.
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The thing that gives it away for me are the tree, and building quality. That breaks the illusion, and terrain in general. It’s a bit like 3D rendered movies. To me the most important aspect isn’t the quality of the texturing, its the quality of the lighting. That effects everything you can see in the scene.
The only way to achieve that, for me at least, is with Atmos Core. Even before that, when Nvidia drivers weren’t nerfed, there was an ability to adjust saturation, and contrast, and turning those down about 10% stopped making trees, and grass look like plastic AstroTurf, and more like what I see out my window here in the UK.
While typing this I was letting XP 12 update to 12.4.1.
Here is the demo area at Portland, at 4S9. Pretty good overcast, light rain, but some issues with the clouds here. You can see angular structures, lines, in some of the cloud formations.
Now the same place in 2024.
Now add Active Sky.
@POS 021124Z 19007KT 10SM FEW014 BKN022 OVC030 05/03 A2983 RMK AS DEPICTED
(Cloned by: KUAO, closest weather station when the aircraft was on the ground)
Then Atmos Core. Not a huge change in the scene here.
ASFS has the edge here in Active mode, but 2024 did a pretty good job though.
Same deal, this time at LOWI at 09:00, but in reverse as I have them all running at the moment.
2024, Active Sky, Atmos Core
2024, Active Sky
2024
A weird saddle shape to the clouds there, in that last one.
Finally XP 12.4.1.
First with no weather just to ensure the scene is as close as possible.
Now with live weather, but not live time.
Checked the LOWI METAR:
LOWI 021150Z AUTO 08003KT 040V190 9999 FEW032 BKN050 06/00 Q1015 NOSIG
I think 2024 wins here, even without addons, though the snow may not be accurate! The airport itself does look better in XP12, and that is a payware LOWI for 2024 I think. I put that to more realistic ground vehicles, actually staying where they should be rather than roaming around aimlessly.
Its just an assumption I make that the avionics improvements that have been made must have needed both more memory and CPU time and so they ‘decreased the bandwidth for clouds’ (or something like that) as you once found a quote of Seb so saying… or maybe it was in release notes… anyway - thats the connection.
I think the XP shot is the winner there. I often think XP is too heavy with the blue but in that case, to me, it looks very realistic. FS has shifted to too much red pretty much everywhere. It works great with clear skies but causes issues in many other conditions. Heres a FS2020 pseudo weather pic I took that I think is more realistically toned:
also - the ‘weird saddle shape’ as you say – Ive been seeing that a lot lately. I think its a bi-product of them thickening the clouds but also trying to assure an actual overcast instead of just ‘broken’ with large cumulus which is what it always actually is. There was a time when localized overcasts were quite possible. I always go back to this situation I encountered near cape Hatteras
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