There is no debate that flying around in MSFS looks amazing, however I feel the atmosphere could be easily made better, as it looks unrealistically astonishing at the moment. I was playing with XP12 yesterday, and while graphics is of a much lower quality, it felt that clouds, haze, and atmosphere in general were far closer to the truth than in MSFS. Let me be more specific:
1 - visibility in MSFS is always good. I can see at distance all the time. Anyone who has flown would know that haze is there and much more than what you see in MSFS. This is not fog, but the fact that in 10/20/30NM stops being crispy. MSFS simulates this, but quite “optimistically”. Again, too nice to be true.
2 - I can’t get MSFS to simulate a close to zero visibility. You go down as far as 200/300m but that’s all. Even presents bought to do that, fail. Also, low visibility seems to be simulated with clouds rather than fog.
3 - colours are always very saturated. Everything is extreme to the point that you feel you are always in a 90s picture. It gives amazing screenshots but poor fidelity.
4 - clouds are always of one kind. Generally very dark and thick. Generally well bounded with a clear shape. There are odd, thin, small, undefined clouds but are few and in between. This means that, both live or using presents, I am always surrounded by the same kind of clouds. XP seems to have a very trivial approach with almost only puffy clouds, but together they give a more realistic (and boring) representation of reality.
It really feels that MSFS has already all in it to “downgrade” the atmosphere and make it look realistic. It would be nice to have the option to do that!
Valid points OP and talked alot before release and ever since… looks like its to be as xbox friendly? … Not a pixel has changed in regards to color and atmosphere but then that’s just me being very cynical. They are tweaking the clouds and arent there yet. You never know, they might do something about it now xplane 12 is a thing and its lighting is overall much better and even improves on xplane 11. Although xplane clouds are not great either so there something in common there.
I have accidentally got MSFS to do this lots of time, and I only ever use Live Weather. I live in UK and fly mostly in the evenings (Real Time) so I want daytime flights, so the other day I decided to make a flight from the top tip of New Zealands south island across to the bottom tip of their north island, and the weather was absolutely atrocious… I could barely make out where land was when crossing the strait, almost downed it a couple of times as I thought I had followed the compass correctly and landing on the very west side of the tip but ended in the middle where there’s foresty hills everywhere and the visibility was almost nothing, occasional blue sky above with a break in the grey cloud but below the clouds MSFS done an absolute excellent job of showing how much visibility is reduced by heavy rain, I was astounded by it.
This all on xCloud, so therefore I guess Xbox Series X hardware.
It’s possible that you’re assigned a virtual Xbox Series X for some reason, but of course they don’t have a huge data center with millions of Xboxes standing next to each other.
I may not have captured it but my visibility dropped to just off the nose of my aircraft. It faded in and out as the weather changed but at times I couldn’t even see the runway edge lights. It was more like 5-10 metres.
Close to zero visibility is often experienced flying into Paro using live weather. This is common, especially early morning flights and will necessitate a divertion to the alternate.
As others have pointed out above, it is common. All depends on weather, time, and airport.
Live seems to deal with fog much better than presents, but I still feel they are just very dense clouds rather than fog. Taking all clouds properties that fog doesn’t have. Don’t mistake me, it’s absolutely lovely but it’s a big miss operationally if you want to set a present to simulate low visibility/zero visibility operations and you can’t. If you have found a way to set fog in presents, I would pay you to tell me how!!!
As I was mentioning in the OP, you can get dense clouds but I am talking about fog, sorry if I haven’t been clear. And even with clouds I never managed to go below 100/200m
You will often see fog generated around airports, source from METAR, easily identified if you are far enough away as it covers the vicinity. They are quite unlike any other forms of clouds in the sim, never any “clumpiness” to them. I’ve seen them quite often in valleys.
When they first did the weather update with SU7, they put in haze. And the community was in an uproar, they had to hotfix that a couple weeks after it was released. And this is where Asobo just can’t win. They add in thermals and turbulence, and people want that dialed back, while others think its great that it is realistic. They put in haze, some think its great and realistic, other are in uprage over it.
The problem is, this is a very very very large community. 2 million plus. And if Asobo does something for realism, then there is a large percentage to the population that is saying it is ruining their flights.
I don’t know what to reply to this… Haze is part of the atmosphere, not sure what arguments could go in favour of not having it in a game that simulates the real world.
Asobo should stop listening to people who complain about realistic visual conditions. It’s a flight simulator, not Google Earth on steroids. This is the sort of haze levels that I would like in MSFS when conditions call for it:-
I am not avoiding the discussion. What I am saying is, haze WAS present for 2 weeks with SU7. The forums erupted in “OMG, there is smog all over! This is so unrealistic and immersion breaking! Asobo, you need to fix this ASAP”. Tons of those. So there was a tweak 2 weeks later, and then there wasn’t the haze anymore. And you can say “Well, we should leave this up to real world pilots”. Well, the problem was, “real world pilots” were chiming in on both sides of the argument.
So the problem is, Asobo is going to cave to public outcry. And if they put something into the sim that general users don’t like, realistic or not, if there is an outcry, then it will be removed.
