I believe this is something Seb with Asobo was looking into. He said it’s about two weeks worth of work to get the cloud densities right and they are working on it?! Hopefully it will be part of SU16! He has mentioned this in at least two Live Development Updates (not the last two months, but the two or three before it).
Fingers crossed!
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I’m moving to 2024 anyway, but my hope for 2020 is that of all the bugs still remaining, and with the emphasis on 2024, the little quality of life things start to float to the top of the stack now. There are some little UI bugs that would take 5 minutes to fix, and spending some time on those would be welcome.
Cloud density doesn’t seem like a tough nut to crack, and I still wonder if performance issues were what was holding them back. I can see no legitimate reason for cloud quality to have been effectively ignored for so long other than it negatively affects the consoles. We know they can make code changes independent of the platform, but perhaps the weather is different in that respect, and it can’t be different between platforms.
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If the simulator is actually being held back by console horsepower, then they need to sever the development.
One size does not fit all.
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I think that is the reason why we are getting 2024 at all. An attempt to refactor the sim to be more console friendly by reducing the amount that needs to be stored locally, as well as optimising how, and what, it pulls down from the cloud.
Everyone will benefit from it I expect, but console users the most. If this doesn’t end the black screen avionics issue, though, they really need to accept that 16GB of memory just isn’t enough. Sadly, the console mid-gen refresh I read about has the same 16GB specified. A case of failing to learn from history is about to happen, I feel.
This is what I want Seb to launch into one of his technical explanations on.
For a long time now it has been seen to be the most efficient to create mip mapped compressed format files and then load all needed files into memory but now they are changing all that – or are they? Will only Asobo’s stuff get this new file treatment or will all scenery items? If all addons were still downloaded and stored in local storage and then those files dealt with in the same manner they are now (DXT5??) then there isn’t a lot of memory savings when the main problem is a user using a complex addon aircraft in conjunction with a complex addon airport. Where’s the savings?
I hope they’ve invented an entirely new approach to file management and I hope they describe it in detail because enquiring minds want to know 
don’t let this die, we need the wingfade effect on the clouds.
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From what I have gathered, it seems weather system is mostly untouched in FS2024. Ideally this version should have been weighted towards massive weather improvements since that’s the weakest link in FS2020.
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Mostly untouched? Massive disappointment then …
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Yep. It’s terribly sad. The weather and clouds are pretty bad in 2020 and I wish that they had improved them for 2024. But the clouds still look poor. Yes the screenshots look nice, but you can make nice screenshots in 2020. Watch live action of the new sim and it is pretty much just the same as the current one with clouds that are the wrong texture, wrong colour, wrong shape and low resolution.
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As usual, they use weather presets with carefully made clouds instead of live weather… probably because they know how bad it is.
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as I said in another post unfortunately even the cloud fading is only enabled in the presets while in live time there are only transitions like 2020…
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im getting a lot of crossed messages around this one
i read articles and hear youtube hosts talking about a completely revamped weather system… awesome!! you say
but then i look at videos in ACTUAL gameplay (not something tailored by a marketing dept) and the weather really looks around the same… so i dont know what to expect
It looks the same.
They might have improved the ‘accuracy’ of the live weather, but it actually still ‘looks’ bad, the clouds are still the wrong colour and the wrong texture with the wrong lighting.
The youtube people are simply building the hype of the game and saying oh its awesome the clouds are so much better. But often these are the same people that think the clouds look good now, (hint, they don’t).
If one looks through all the various videos and actually tries to find gameplay rather than screenshots of the aircraft extremely close to the ground or to animals in order to show off the new features, one will see that the clouds are still bad.
Just watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyMNAr6cGiM&t=1s
This is what to expect, very little difference, clouds still look unrealistic.
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I honestly thing ActiveSky in 2020 does a better job than 2024 natively. My hope is they have made some changes, but they aren’t showing that off currently for some reason, but ASFS will be able to leverage those features.
Some improvements inbound in 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9-BdUePkhM
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Moment of truth… is here
No wing fade effect in 2024 
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This topic has been ongoing for years, and yet there’s still no update on this important issue. A new version of the flight simulator has been released, but there’s still no update for cloud effects? This is truly disappointing for the flight simulation community. This is such a critical update something that should have been fixed on day one!
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Weather has been just copied over from the FS2020 so all that was missing previously is still absent.
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IMO they have made definitive changes to cloud rendering + density in live weather. I’m seeing a marked improvement in this for now. But what is missing is the clouds actually obscuring aircraft parts like the wings while flying through it - This is what gives the sensation of speed and they are not there yet.
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