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Yes
Brief description of the issue:
Thick cloud layers seem to add a sort of polarizing filter effect to the scene.
Provide Screenshot(s)/video(s) of the issue encountered:
These stills taken from landing challenge videos recorded during 2020 show the more natural looking atmosphere in contrast to screenshots from recent versions.
Iâve realised the weather has been a thing Asobo has used to increase performance for some reason. Why do that when atmosphere is the most important thing in a flight simulator. Besides i used RTX 2080 super at release of this sim in 2020 and i didnât have issues with performance in clouds. Now i have even better GPU but the graphics are worse. No point to upgrade if the graphics gets worse in future updates. I thought graphics should improve when new updates are released not getting worse.
Besides Asobo also mention they are afraid to increase details in clouds because of the complains of performance. That also to me means that they have reduced quality in clouds to make those complaining about performance happy. But that thing made everybody else unhappy. I preffer lower fps with higher quality. Makes the environment i fly in feel believable.
Same with the METAR they integrated, Made those that complained the weather didnât match those happy but all of the users that didnât need it to match METAR unhappy. I expected it to match Meteoblue, nothing else. Makes the weather/atmosphere i fly in behave realistic/believable.
From your screenshots, it appears that the optical density of the clouds has increased. I wrote a post last year where I used the custom weather tool to experiment with how MSFS draws clouds. Hereâs a link to that post if youâre interested:
My tests last year suggested that the low optical densities in older versions of MSFS were producing clouds that were too thin (with the sun still visible through an overcast cloud layer, for example). Based on your screenshots, it looks like they have increased the optical density. Using the current weather system, I donât think there is a perfect solution to this. Either the clouds will be too translucent, allowing a pilot to see the ground from deep inside the cloud, or they will produce this overly dark occlusion at the cloud base like you showed in your screenshots. Any improvement will require Asobo to make a more fundamental change to how the clouds are rendered, rather than simply tweaking the optical density parameter.
Marc - the density parameter was added to the custom weather menu about (or maybe at) the same time that this issue appeared (to my recollection).
To me, both this topicâs title and the complaint would be restated as "too much yellow in the clouds and too dark and wrong colored(due to additional yellow) shadows "
Because you work with this stuff, how would âincreasing optical densityâ have changed the colors to be more yellow or would it have done that in the absence of other graphics changes?
BTW - as I remember, sun visible through the overcast was not a problem that existed at first. It appeared after some people complained about it being too dark under the clouds and whatever Asobo did produced the sun visible through overcast problem as well as the âaircraft arenât being shadowed while in heavy cloudsâ problem.
At release the sim was quite capable of beautiful and thick higher level cloud decks like this:
I know the density slider existed about a year ago when I made the post I linked above. Based on the feature discovery video on weather from before the sim launched, I think theyâve always used a density parameter as one of the variables for drawing clouds.
The yellow color is probably caused by a basic property of the default cloud pattern which is accentuated by increasing the optical density. In general, high optical density accentuates properties that are defined in the default cloud shapes. The dark shadows are one example of that. There appears to be a very limited set of default cloud patterns in the sim. Those patterns are somewhat noisy and lumpy in texture. When the density increases, those lumpy textures become very apparent and cast shadows on adjacent parts of the cloud. By contrast, low density causes the lumpy features on the surface of the cloud to look softer and less obvious because they are more translucent.
Looking at the example screenshot you shared from near the release of MSFS, it looks like those clouds are high-altitude clouds. Iâve noticed some different shapes in high altitude compared to low altitude clouds. Maybe thatâs part of the issue? The default pattern for high altitude clouds might have less yellow hues than the default low-altitude pattern. Thatâs speculation on my part.
Interesting! Thanks for sharing this. I wonder when the density slider was added.
I suspect that optical density was being used behind the scenes from the beginning. Adding the slider simply made it available for simmers to customize. MSFS uses a default cloud pattern and then modifies it with the scatter, coverage, and density parameters. It would be necessary to define the translucence (or density) of the 3-D cloud pattern to render a volumetric cloud effectively.
To my mind, the issues boil down to:
The default cloud pattern is very noisy and lumpy. If density is set to a realistic value (to ensure the sun isnât visible through the cloud), the result is a really rough appearance with dark shadows cast by all the lumps on the surface.
Maybe the default cloud pattern has a very slight yellow hue. Or perhaps the sunlight scattering off the cloud is a bit more yellow in the sim than reality. This is not apparent unless the density is increased to near a maximum value, when the yellow becomes most apparent. Iâm not sure whether the cloud pattern has a color of its own, or if it simply scatters sunlight in the sim. I suspect it might be the latter. That would explain how pink and red sunsets are produced. The color of the sun could be shifted to a pink or red color, and the clouds scatter that color in a variety of directions.
Iâm not completely sure when they added that. As we know they not mention all of the changes in release notes. But i found this in su7 release notes:
Updated .WPR file versioning for weather preset edition. Now handles both coverage and density for cloud layers (Formerly density became coverage). Backward compatibility has been handled
for what its worth:
When I first started playing with the weather menu I noticed that the top layer produced a different cloud that was in fact whiter and softer. It was also the one that suffered horizontal banding issues as seen in this pic:(above the runway)
But just a few days ago I was messing around with weather and at the moment, all three layers act pretty much the same and all have the horizontal banding so Im not sure what they are doing. I know they are doing something⊠something.
Marc - you should learn to trust what other people tell you. I can always be wrong but Im fairly observant and Ive been messing around with the weather longer than you have it seems.
Very interesting examples. Thank you for including these.
I owe you an apology. I was in too much of a hurry to type a response, and I didnât slow down and fully digest your observations and questions.
Iâm interested to learn that the upper level clouds appear the same as low-level clouds now. Thatâs disappointing. After the tests I did last year, I came away with the conclusion that a larger variety of default cloud patterns would be better than one or two, as long as the sim could display them in a way that looks natural.
Returning to the yellow appearance of clouds:
In the example screenshots you shared from early in the simâs history, I see a slight yellow tinge to the low-level clouds in this picture:
But your second low-level example has almost no yellow at all. Maybe at the far horizon there is the faintest hint of it.
I can only speculate on what would cause the yellow appearance. My strong hunch is that optical density alone would not cause it, but it could accentuate a yellow tinge that exists for other reasons.
I am fairly certain that before the density slider was added to the weather menu, there must have been an optical density parameter pre-determined in the sim code. Admittedly, that is based on educated guessing about whatâs going on behind the scenes to calculate what clouds look like in the sim. To realistically render shading on all parts of the cloud from any angle, I suspect the sim needs to calculate on the fly how much visible light is transmitting through the cloud at a bunch of angles. Optical density of the cloud would be a key factor in that.
Thank you, Marc. Iâm sure if we work together we might be able to figure out what Asobo has done and/or is doing with the clouds. The picture you referenced as having more yellow was taken around 10am I think â right at the start of my trip â and I think the âmorning lightingâ was still wearing off. I am sure that âdensityâ as a concept has always been used in cloud shading but they definitely made a drastic adjustment at or near the same time a âdensity sliderâ showed up in the weather UI.
They are working on the clouds and I am personally quite impressed with low level clouds on many of my flights nowadays but the upper levels used to be considerably better and I hope those return.
OK, so, the topic as I see it is the âtoo much yellowâ and I believe it is caused by a change Asobo made to the way stormy/cloudy conditions are represented overall. The idea seems to be that both sky and clouds should be darker in stormy conditions which is very reasonable. But Iâm not sure that starting with a highlight color of yellow and then shifting down from there gives realistic results.
I do not know how shaders do their job of creating the sky that we see in the sim. I am used to the FSX model where a texture is stretched across the sky dome and changes in appearance are produced both by mixing different textures throughout the day but also using portions of the texture for things like haze. The shader system, to my knowledge, still does rely on a texture but its now just a very tiny strip of pixels⊠I donât know how it works âŠI wish I did.
So, I think Asobo saw that the old system remained âtoo blueâ in stormy weather and it didnt cause enough of a red shift in horizon clouds. The fact is that it did produce a shift, but maybe not enough. I could actually agree that there might have been too much blue before but I think they went too far in their efforts to create more darkness and more red shift and the result was more yellow clouds overall with darker shadows.
Here is an image that shows the extremes of low altitude, complete coverage, maximum density clouds:
I think (but definitely dont know) that the very dark line (which is actually just forcing the sky color to be lower â the line measures hue 157 at its lowest in the pic; toward the sun its its around hue 32) â I think that is part of the shader âset of pixelsâ that draw the sky and as such, I think they could easily adjust it.
They act like changing the lighting would be some huge undertaking but the fact is that they have already done it once. I just think they overdid it and need to come back a bit.
I know Seb explained about the volcanic ash look in a q&a and said much of the issue is because of performance. They canât make it any better with current cloud rendering without loss in FPS. They need to change the rendering to get it better without loss in FPS. I would request to have some lower FPS to get the weather more realistic looking.
And to have better performance is a request since release of this sim even if we had really good performance at release. I could run the sim on my really old pc at release in over 30FPS if i tuned down some settings. But that type of performance were not enought for the community it seems. They wanted to use ULTRA with old hardware and now we all run the sim in lower graphics on ULTRA to get some more FPS. The only thing we can improve now by upgrading hardware is the fps counter to increase.
In my experience since su 7 was introduced, the yellow/brown/dark colour is dues to the weather system not working properly, when the clouds are not what they should be because of METAR interference. Every time the clouds for some reason are what they should be they have the propper colours, plus they apoear soft, without any grainy texture. So uo me itâs not a separated issues, the issues is caused by the weather engine not working properly.
We can only hope for an update that really focus on the weather to feel like weather again. Until now the only focus has been to make it accurate to METAR.
This thread isnât about the volcanic ash thing though as it includes before and after pictures and the volcanic ash thing has always been since day one of the sim. I know Seb said he spent two weeks working on it but in my opinion if he just made sure that any cumulus over maybe 500 feet tall would not be dim yellow but rather more blue. Its never made sense to me why this is an issue because the sky has always been a mixture of clouds that are more blue and clouds that are more yellow and so they should be able to just change the rules for taller and more dense cumulus clouds. Its only low density clouds that should appear dimmer and more yellow anyway as I see it. Low density clouds have fewer particles to reflect light and therfore appear dimmer. A well formed cumulus by its very nature is denser with a great many more particles to reflect light.
This is interesting. I donât know that Iâve paid enough attention to what the weather was supposed to be in a given area versus how much brown was in the clouds. Its always seemed to me to be a mix of clouds where some are more yellowish and some look much more realistic.
This issue though that I refer to, that I think this thread refers to, is the increase in overall yellowness that occurred in SU7 I guess it was. Hereâs a post I made showing before more yellow and after more yellow: I have an idea about why the clouds color is off, brownish too much sometimes - Interests / General Discussion - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums
What I have discovered recently though is that if you have ab nVidia GPU on PC, you can make specific adjustments to decrease both red and green channels which reduces the yellowness. Iâve been flying in HDR mode lately with some nVidia Control Panel adjustments and sometimes the sky and clouds look absolutely real⊠or real enough with their exact shapes/âtexturesâ being the limiting factor. Their color/transluscence up against a perfect sky color (after adjustments)⊠its amazing. But whether it matches the METAR I have no idea. and Iâve come to hate both the acronym METAR and the the idea of VATSIM. But at least Ive found enjoyment flying my C172 in the clouds in Florida.
Well i agree the volcanic ash is out of topic but i think itâs the same issue. They needed to decrease the density in clouds to be able to decrease load on our GPU. That results in more light from the sun to go through the clouds. And Asobo want the clouds to look dense and applies some tricks to make them appear a bit more dense than they actually is without increase of gpu load. And those two things i think result in that yellow tone in clouds.
I could be wrong but they told us to make the clouds look more real they canât just tune the colors. because if they do they will look too bright instead when it looks good now. They need to change the rendering of clouds to make them look more real in tone and have real density without reducing performance.
Only Asobo knows what to do for sure though. Only my thoughts about it and what i understood when Seb talked about the clouds.
Hope to see some improvment of weather soon. I have waited for improvments since release 2020 and have seen none actually. Only seen it getting worse and worse.
I just find this so hard to believe though. I mean, they have no problem changing the colors of the clouds during sunset or sunrise. The color changes follow a very specific pattern where lower clouds are first to change but also those clouds in your view that are farthest from the sun and that makes perfect sense. You can create an overcast and watch the colors tick across the cloudsâŠliterally tick⊠the suns movement still does that from FSX daysâŠand all of that is fine but to me it shows quite clearly that it wouldnât be/canât be that difficult to change those cloud colors to more realistic tones â like they had when the sim was released and for almost a year after that before âthe clouds sucked out the atmosphereâ
Yes, i hope you are right and the fix is only to adjust some tones. I wish they never touched the weather at all to start with. Now it feels like they need to fix more things than they needed at release of this sim 2020.
Check those pictures OP posted. To me the the weather looks less accurate/realistic now. But the look is not important in flight simulators it seems. As long as itâs accurate to those METAR or the fps is high i have learned here at the forum. Well, i rather fly with a bit less accuracy and a bit less fps
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