The difference between these two photos is appalling. Come on, AS. They aren’t embarrassed to release a piece of software that they term “the next step in flight simulation” with clouds (a vital feature in any flight simulation) that look like this?
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They don’t care about clouds and weather at all. They’ve done nothing to improve them since the release of 2020. They’ve only got worse.
Best hope is that they will open up the weather to 3rd parties who can hopefully do a good job.
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Exactly, the only cloud they care about is the one they’re trying to force on us with their “clean client” idea. No option to download everything to my PC? God knows I can handle it, storage is cheaper than ever. No local install, no buy. I’m happy with FS2020, even with all is bugs. I’m very upset about the support that they promised, yet we haven’t seen anything for 2020 in months.
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It is sad to see that their engine is so great but isn’t utilized to its potential. Although there are chances of artifacting when we push the engine to its limits, Asobo really needs to do what X Plane does with how it handles datarefs. We need to be able to control cloud density in live weather to help with ugly looking translucent cumulus clouds. We also need better cloud on cloud shadows. etc etc
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Just like Asobo will never produce an A320 like Fenix will, so too they will never make a weather engine like Hifi would. They need to open up the weather API so 3rd party devs can access it, just like they can create airports, cities and aircraft.
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There is a huge problem with MSFS 2024 clouds.
So many like this, the quality is just horrible. This is ULTRA setting. It is way worse than MSFS 2020.
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This is so bad, it has to be a bug, they cannot have designed it like this, so I will make a bug report for it.
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While making the bug report, do highlight that the fix should not be to reduce the volumetric local cloud density to make it just look good from a distance.
Asobo’s dev team seems to be saturated with the breadth of the sim and the top managements’ aggressive deadlines, leaving no time for them to listen to and actually fix the concerns of flight simmers.
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As of the latest SU1 beta, the live weather clouds still mostly have the density of 0. This can be diagnosed by setting up a “similar” coverage in the custom weather and set the density.
Besides the wing fade, this too low density also basically leads to absence of cloud shadows. In reality, most of the clouds are not transparent for the sunshine (only translucent, for the scattered light). The visibility is also in the order of less than 100 meters, which means that an aircraft should be completely enveloped and without any ground or sky visibility one second after entering the cloud.
I can understand that the density may be graphically expensive, and the screenshots still look gorgeous, but if the system cannot handle proper representation of clouds then maybe the solution concept should be reviewed.
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It will be great if clouds can actually obscure parts of the wing when flying through it, especially for large airliners. This will significantly increase the immersion and sense of speed when flying through clouds. In real life a 100 feet wing can be obscured alot at different sections when flying through fog and clouds
Currently it’s a very flat/static experience. Same issue in DCS
Thank you
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Yes That’s missing in MSFS, and it’s a huge part of the speed experiencing missing in VR. It took me a while to finally know why flying through clouds feel so slow and static.
This is also for developers. Those heavy engines wobble and shake in turbulence and hard landing! So far only FBW A380 is able to simulate that. in VR it’s so apparent that everything is static. Those of use flying on a big monitor, the only way to experience those immersion is through those visuals. I get it might be a FPS impact, but its 2025 with GTA6 coming, adding physics should not be a problem
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Pmdg 777 also has engine wobble. It’s pretty cool to watch in vr.
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So that PMDG 777 engine shake is a keyframed animation, it’s just not dynamic enough, It looks pretty bad. 3 months ago I flew on a 777 and I sat upfront, those engines when they spool up, they wobble around the engine strut and even the strut moves a bit, and you see them vibrate and swivels. I see a lot of car sim games able to simulate some of those intense vibration animations, I wonder if flight sim developers can add those details.
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Let’s keep the discussion focused on the cloud density and sim side effects, not something the addon developers have added.
Wing fade and the “Sense of Speed” is missing mostly because Asobo’s volumetric cloud algorithm has not seen any real improvement over the past 4 years - the way they do it now gives undefined blobs afar, and cumuliform clouds near you. No isolated CB, no thick cumulus or stratus layers to fly out of that would obscure the wing. For a FLIGHT SIM, they seem to care very little about the most important part of flying, which is the air and the atmosphere, compared to marketing gimmicks like procedurally generated rocks, career mode “missions”, etc.
It is true that effects like wing vibrations and engine vibrations should have a native way to be added to the airplane based on the forces it is experiencing. This might have to do with the SDK and how the aircraft is written on the software side.
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I could not agree more with these words.
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Another day, another post with hilarious looking cirrus clouds. Not as bad as some other images i have seen but still.
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[4K] – Full Flight – Alaska Airlines – Boeing 737-990/ER – MCI-SEA – N448AS – AS291 – IFS 1013 - YouTube
The descent and approach here is just beautiful. Come on Asobo, make them clouds actually cause turbulence 
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Beautiful. Another striking difference is how quickly the light changes compared to MSFS.
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Wingfade example - Improve clouds in Live Weather - #154 by ogu1271