When it first came out, MSFS gave us a sky and lighting better than we’d ever had. Recently though, looking at improvements from other sims (I’m thinking about DCS and XPlane12 specifically), MSFS’ sky seems to be falling behind.
The degradation of clouds post-SU7 has been noted by many, but I think a lack of atmospheric haze (unless specified in metar, which is no use at all for large areas of the world), lack of any color change with temperature / latitude, and a less-than-blinding sun increasingly have me feeling…meh.
Starting to … ? Always has been! Even FSX / P3D used simple 10 day of slightly varying sky color to convey the sense of actually being in a slightly-changing sky.
MSFS tries to be super clever with quantum-level computations (going from the slide decks when they introduced atmospherics) of things like smog particles yet completely fails to utilize any of the troves of data available to produce anything remotely better than what we had in last 10 years or more! And don’t get me started on that night-time skybox …
I guess this is so all the marketing shots have ‘sameness’ on Xbox and PC, but its the most disappointing part of the experience for me - ‘The SKY is calling’ is the tag line.. but the SKY is BORING!!
I think when they added more yellow is when the sky started to look ‘not so good’. The sky should be darker. It is haze that brightens up a sky and there is no global haze to give us a constantly varying sky. It’d be nice. and you’re right about reflections being seemingly brighter than the sun itself. they glare more. The sun just sits there like a ball of brightness but the reflections are dynamic. Clouds don’t have any dynamic reflections at all anymore that I can see. They need to adjust their colors. If the sky was darker by default, the clouds could be made more reasonable colors and still look good. Asobo always starts with the notion that ‘light enters a cloud and then’ … but when a cloud is just forming, it nearly matches the sky. Most clouds start out dark until they are dense enough to start reflecting really well. Dynamic sun, dynamic reflections – I could swear it all used to be there… before… SU7? SU5?
Dont know if this might help, but have you guys experimented with turning the post processing (mostly) off? Then again, yeah, the sun isn’t as bright as it was at all.
in the usercfg.opt (open with notepad) i changed the post processing for 2d into this:
But, i only changed to this, because i found the ground to be oversaturated in color and not very realistic…just maybe, it’ll transfer to clouds as well.
Having played about a bit with presets and my own weather, I’m wondering if my feeling was mainly due to the fact I almost exclusively use Live Weather, and it has no humidity (apparently).
Bumping up the humidity in my own playing around gave some nice bright sun and different sky colors.
So maybe the engine is capable of it better sun and lighting, but Live Weather’s lack of humidity is hampering it?
and what about those terrible gradations of light on the clouds, I think it started after su 12, I didn’t see it before - at a low cloud ceiling as the light passes through, you can clearly see “steps, stripes” I don’t know how to explain it…
Maybe it is indeed a live weather coincidence but not once have I gotten the blue dawn/dusk tones that precede/follow the more dramatic red tones of the sky. It’s such an amazing sky system we have (the hours leading up to golden hour feel very spot on since you start to get the gold tones from the sun but still the ambient shade of the blue sky above. But then dawn/dusk rolls in and no matter where I am (ground/sky/location) I always get red ambient shade (or purple, if I get lucky). I totally get the effect it’s going for (which is what you get with high cirrus clouds reflecting the red light from the horizon Rayleigh Scattering), but after a while it kinda gets old every time it being dramatic lol.
I was wondering if something changed at sunset. I remember getting gorgeous orange sunsets in the right conditions that reflected off the ground water. They matched what I’ve seen happen flying in real life.
I also remember beautiful cloud reflections with rainbows that were easy to get lost in. But I don’t think I’ve seen any of that lately.
Agree. I’m getting pretty tired of overly red, orange & purple sunrise/sunsets which just isn’t realistic 95% of the time, it’d be fine every once in a while but i have over 600hrs & it’s virtually all I’ve ever seen. It’s mostly to do with skybox colouring being too harsh or too limited but cloud transparency & the way light behaves with clouds also plays a part (something MSFS handled better when we had the better clouds nearer release).
For me at least, this is what MSFS seems to think every sunset looks like when in reality it’s fairly rare.
Absolutely, it’s the lack of variety. It suggests the humidity, pollutants, time of year, latitude etc. is having no influence on the sky colours.
Doesn’t feel like part of a living world, but having played around with humidity settings in user-defined weather and seen colour differences, I think the capacity for varied colours is actually in the engine…?
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