You can set the file to read only, which will keep the settings but I am not sure if the game changes them anyway. For myself the clouds are way better than before I did the reset to everything…
Here’s the Ju52 over London using pre-set clouds early evening.
No, the sim holds my LOD changes, but it reverts all the other changes back to 3. Doesn’t like 4 
Edit: sorry misunderstood, I get what you mean re setting to read only, will try.
The 0-3 value translates to Low, Medium, High and Ultra. There is no higher value like the LOD sliders that have numerical values.
Seems it’s mostly a case of tweaking the colours using filters, but IMHO it’s like trying to fix a badly compressed image.
The dynamic range has decreased globally, this could be the cause of the colour banding:
Before:
After:
Thanks for grabbing those screenshots, illustrates the issue well!
Not sure what else to do to get some confirmation their’d be a fix to this than continuing to post examples of banding/dynamic range issues. Here’s one from the user screenshot page that illustrates the banding well.
Are people more bothered by the banding or the reduction in quality of clouds, or do we think the banding has caused this reduction?
Tried a rare morning flight this weekend. It really does seem the red and green banding is most evident in the evenings and mornings. This short clip filmed flying north over the Irish Sea off the Dundalk coast.. Live weather.
Good question. I for one don’t care that much about the grain in the clouds or overall quality of clouds. I agree that more cloud types should be added, cumulonimbus clouds and stratus clouds need some work, but overall they look nice.
The color banding is obviously still there, and as was said in a different thread, it seems that a compression (downgrade?) of the render engine is the culprit. If it is a bug or if it was done because of performance increase, I don’t know. But I’d rather have less FPS and no color banding, because at certain angles and times of day it looks really, really bad.
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/color-gradient-artifacts/451281/198?u=sydicek
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/color-gradient-artifacts/451281/199?u=sydicek
Also, I don’t know if the quality of clouds is somehow linked with this, but what I find really annoying is how the whole world is still overexposed and the Sun is still leaking into the cockpit. Something is definitely wrong with the clouds but I don’t know what exactly. It seems like they lost its thickness or something.
You can see the compression artifacts and color banding on the color palette here:
This is how it looked like in version 1.17.30:
Something is definitely different in the color palette. And it is possible it’s the reason for the color banding artifacts in the clouds, sky and water.
They are in the cockpits as well.
In this topic, I want to touch on one important point and this is the visual part of graphic rendering.
After SU5, a gradient of color stripes appeared. This is especially visible in the sky. Glare from the sun and clouds have various greenish and purple hues of color
here is a theme that technically shows how the color palette is now displayed in the simulator
https://devsupport.flightsimulator.com/questions/1110/projected-mesh-rendering-strangely-in-performance.html?childToView=2876#comment-2876
and we can compare that graphic rendering impairs color palette transmissionGood day to all!
Again touching on the theme of visual perception of the simulator
in the photo, we can see the color bars and the coarse gradient of color transitions.
Agreed, it was all heading in the right direction it was soo good in early builds. I don’t know why they threw this simulator in the wrong direction I really really don’t get it. It was so beautiful all they had to do was iron out the bugs and add sliders to adjust for slower systems. Why they visually downgraded it as a whole is beyond me.
Night time currently is a joke and I’ll keep being very vocal about it because they actually got it soo right in the beginning and then completely wrong after in newer builds.
It might be to sell more 30X0s. Or maybe to appease those with lower end systems. System envy?
I have been saying this for such a long time.
These videos + the early tester leaks showed some amazing visuals of the sim.
I am also wrecking my brain why Asobo decided to go this route making it look so unnatural now.
It really looked great, especially the night lighting.
the night lighting bulbs are MASSIVE at this moment, and the more you go from 1080p towards 4K the blurrier and bigger they get.
On an ultrawide the lights even get stretched it’s killing immersion.
The grain indeed is a immersion killer as well.
Sharpening is overdone making it look like the entire scenery has some fine sand over it.
Too many things to mention…
I know the sim is still not in a mature state but it’s been a year, and seeing these things aren’t getting corrected or even mentioned at all is blowing my mind.
EDIT: probably the biggest immersion killer right now is those cartoon~ish oversaturated colors, if they tone it a little bit down it would allready make the sim look amazing.
and again, all these blunders suggest the separation of simulator versions into 2 parts on PC and Xbox
I wonder what prevents you from making the same content for the two platforms, but different graphics settings?
For PCs with a large set of graphics flexibility
Fixed Level of Detail XBOX
but all content is one for two platforms
Wish they add an option to bring back that night lighting, this is what we have now:
WU6
Alpha
And look at the vehicle lights reflecting off the buildings!
I mean aside from all lights being orange, they were on the right track…
Nights look horrible atm, i don’t wanna fly at night.
I’ve been avoiding it for months.
Also another issue → night lights are made for 1080p, the moment u go 1440p / 4K or Ultrawides it gets to ridiculous sizes and blurs out.
Here is an example of 1080p night lighting bulbs (even zoomed in it is sharp and clear):
Here it is on my 3840x1600 native res: (it does this for runway lights & papis as well btw)
Thanks for reminding me of the awesome graphics back then in these pictures and video! Now im sad 
The ambience really was breathtaking and the finetuned lighting made it look almost photorealistic.
If we have many consonants on this topic, we can hear and correct the visual part of the clouds, the gradient of the colors of the sky.
I have raised these topics many times. I need your support from the majority!
I don’t know why they threw this simulator in the wrong direction
Microsoft needed to sell more game pass subscriptions.
Hmm 16 days have passed and this immensely important thread is already dieing after 10 posts. How can we manage to reach out to Asobo with these topics? They have not logged any of this as some kind of “bug” as they did in plenty other threads or is this already tracked by them somehow?
You really mentioned in here all the crucial points i was criticising since SU5 and even deliver the comparison via the trailer videos and screenshots.
Are there really only that few people who care about it? Unbelievable actually that Asobo just gets through with this and everyone just silently approves. i just cant believe that everyone is just that indifferent to something that impacted the whole sim in such a way
