Please remove the LOD that was added to clouds in the distance in MSFS 2024.
This issues was not present in 2020, and whilst some improvements have made to the clouds, especially with regard to lighting, they look really bad from a distance, much worse than in 2020.
It is a big regression and the sim should be moving forward and getting better. not going backwards.
The clouds in the distance and now just semi-transparent, low resolution blobs that do no not look like clouds at all.
So I have the same thing, especially when you fly at larger heights or it is more obvious
It is not just about the quality of the clouds, but about the whole quality of the weather. In part, the FSX had more details.
As you can see all the screenshots here - you usually see the same weather only cloud more or less.
I donât know what methods to wear here, METAR from the METEOBLUE, combined with FORECAST and supported by satellite images - yes the position of the weather is common - but neither the cloud type, nor the number of layers nor the upper cloud layer etc. - it also often seems to depend on the position as the weather looks.
Partly it looks good, but not nourishing what looks in the X-plane, for example, and they use
also the METAR / Forecast method
However, the resolution is even lower than in the FS2020 and not to talk about the comparison before SU5 MSFS2020!
You will be right!
The resolution definitely has something to do with the bandwidth!
There would certainly be more possible, the engine can do it if you look at the presets, itâs just the data that is reduced (presumably) to show a compromise between look and performance. (but apparently on the basis of minimum)
The only âstrangeâ thing is - that would have been ok 10 years ago but not today where the hardware and especially the internet speed are higher than ever before. And we still have some of the visuals of FSX (a bit exaggerated now) - but for me that has more to do with capabilities and not with the âlimitationâ !
And if you continually reduce the quality because not everyone has a high end pc - then you might as well stick with FSX !
Yes comparing to MFS202o the clouds are way worse⊠we are begining to loose pacience with this development pathway for MFS2024⊠this is nonsense we paid for the software not to become beta testers.
Im playing more and more DCS, thats a good spot for the MFS2024 developers to see how itâs done, the clouds I mean.
There are shapes to clouds in 2024 that just are really completely unrealistic.
It is a shame because if you use Active sky for the live weather, the clouds are a much much better shape. It is clearly possible, but for some reason Asobo just canât do it with their own sim.
They should remove the horrible clouds LOD, or at least let it be on a setting, where ULTRA is absolutely no visible degradation in clouds over distance, and also fully open the weather up to 3rd parties. If Active Sky had access to make a fully global weather, unlike what they have to do now of just letting 1 METAR station apply to the whole planet, the weather would be leagues and leagues of ahead of what is it now in the sim.
They let other companies to do aircraft and scenery, and cameras, etc, please why not the weather. It is so core to the sim, and it is in such a bad state.
I donât even like the lighting. Itâs good for airports but not atmosphere. The whole sim has a gamish look to it imo. But this has been argued so much no need to argue it anymore.
Another issue with the clouds in the distance is that they are semi transparent and blueish.
Clouds in the distance are not a different colour to clouds close by in real life. Nor are they semi-transparent.
The clouds may look a slightly less brilliant colour in the distance in real-life, but this is not because the clouds themselves are a different colour, they might look slightly less detailed in the distance in real life, but this is not because the clouds themselves are less detailed, it is because of the atmospheric scattering over the distance.
Asobo should have the clouds still white in the distance, and if they want the atmosphere to be more realistic and then the clouds to look more realistic, they should work on the atmospheric conditions. We have seen how this is possible in 2020 using 3rd party tools.
If the developers think that they have made things more realistic by simulating less detailed clouds, the wrong colour, and the wrong level of opaqueness in this distance then they are severely mistaken, what they have done is a cheap cop out that doesnât work. They need to actually simulate the atmospheric conditions properly, not just use nasty changes of colour and detail in the distance to make it look as though they have done this.
In some conditions they get away with it, if there are other clouds in front of the very poor ones in the distance, for example, that block the view. But in many conditions what they have done is clearly as exposed as a massive regression.
I suspect that because in 2024 they were aiming for more detail on the ground, such as tree leaves, rocks, etc., which is obviously more important in a flight simulator than clouds and atmosphere (attention: sarcasm!), they reduced the resolution of clouds and/or distant clouds in 2024. This means that people with lower bandwidths can still enjoy the view of a pebble thrown onto a lake shore, for example.
I understand Asobo trying to optimize for lower-end PCs, but there needs to be an option to disable this LOD reduction if we wish to, because it looks awful. They should not force this degradation on everyone.
IMHO we should also have the option to disable the new ground details so we can keep our FPS balanced while raising the cloudsâ LOD. Asoboâs priorities are quite backwards; it is a flight simulator and not a walking simulator. The sky and weather should look good, and if thereâs more room FPS-wise they should improve the ground textures. I think Laminar got it right. Now MSFS is chasing XP; who had that on the bingo card?
Rocks are more important than distant clouds when youâre flying a tail dragger in the backcountry. The opposite is true when youâre flying an airliner up at altitude. It just depends on the type of flying youâre doing.
This isnât even the issue here though, and you can have both without impacting the simâs performance thanks to draw distances and levels of detail. When youâre up at flight level looking at clouds on the horizon, the simulator is not processing or downloading ground details.
It would be great to hear from the team whether this massive regression from 2020 is intended, and if so why was it considered acceptable to include such a huge graphics downgrade, or whether it is a bug and when it is planned to be fixed.
