Glad to see this is included in the “under investigation” tag.
Hope the devs can take a look and make all the clouds much more dense. The smaller the cloud, the denser it should be (unless very very rare conditions), otherwise, the visual depiction of cumulous, thin flat layers of clouds and many other clouds looks quite bad.
In general, small and/or thin cloud layers tend to be quite opaque, and tha’t what I hope to see in a future when using live weather:
Using the Scattered Clouds preset, I must admit clouds are really nice (Ultra), like pre-SU7 and very good frame rate
What would I give to see such a sky again. It actually hurts to see this.
I find this changes depending on the time I fly, like right now 2200z, the cloud density looks higher. Typically though this will change around 0700z and become less dense and generic cumulus, like reported in this thread here: Weather like pre su7 before 8 AM UK time, photos and videos provided!2 - #226 by utd4life12
The fact that in some hours of the day, clouds are thicker is quite hard to explain tbh …
Post your previous picture with the darker cloud base lined graduation here please https://forums.flightsimulator.com/c/sim-update-11-beta/weather-and-live-weather-bug-report/341
Please Asobo, add this effect, this is important to improve realism, others addons (like xenviro for xp11) have this effect and this is wonderful, add more realism and imersion. Below, real pic of 737MAX speak for me!
This is a great point. Maybe it IS that live clouds simply are never anything beyond 0% density. It makes sense. The cloudscapes are never dramatic and seem to be the same light puffs.
What I’d love to see
And just to quickly take a look, I flew into a cyclone down near Hong Kong using Live Weather. I looked at the weather debug menu in SU11 beta and cloud opacity never got above 0.01
When I manually changed to a preset and set the clouds to 100% opacity, the weather debug menu seemed to showed 0.25 right in the middle of a cloud. It’s confirming our suspicion that live weather does not seem to inject any clouds above 0.01 density.
I agreed 100% on that thought, it would make the flight much more realistic. This was implemented by Active Sky inP3D and it made the flight experience much more realistic. Please Asobo give this matter some attention. Thank you.
They have put this item into the wishlist lifetime October 2022. Its under investigation #41 wishlist. Thats good NEWS. Hope they can fix this as we want.
Can you share the link to the tracker.
good news.
Very true observation, this needs more votes!
The last time I was in this post it was the beginning of the year and we only had 138 votes! Now we are over 400. I have faith people, keep voting to get this within their scope compared to other posts that have more votes and make ours in a less better position.
My hope is that they don’t only bring the effect of fading but also the noise that it makes when you get into cloud high speed and turbulence depending of the cloud composition.
For confirmation and emphasis:
I have run the weather debug window quite frequently in recent days and I haven’t seen values greater than 0.01 for cloud density.
Thanks for reporting your testing that confirms the issue. Hope this thread will be moved to feedback-logged soon.
Further evaluation showed that depending on the weather conditions and position inside the cloud the values for cloud density differ quite largely, so simply reading it inflight is obviously not very scientific.
Taking the drone camera inside the clouds today in (bad) Live weather around EIDW showed cloud density values up to 0.15.
I also discovered that cloud appearance from the ground is determined by the value for cloud column density, while the cloud density value obviously determines the density inside the cloud.
So unfortunately imho the dependencies between weather conditions, these values and their impact on cloud depiction in Live weather needs further evaluation.
the problem is the high light penetration rate of the clouds that are further away from the player. This results in an unrealistic glow of yellow light scattered in the clouds at sunrise and sunset. Clouds should have a much greater ability to block light and cast shadows than they do today
I agree, with that and also the low density in clouds. Mostly i can see the blue sky through those puffs of clouds. I bet it’s because they have changed the rendering of clouds to increase performance. If they increase the density now it will look like volcanic ash instead.
My main complaint at the moment is how thin/translucent the altocumulus decks are now. They have been thin, weak and anemic for a while now – for at least a year – since SU5 or SU7.
First and second pics are from yesterday and the remaining pics show how it was from sim release until it was changed for the worst.
and here is from before the change:
this bottom shot shows how the old system produced multiple layers that looked good together including an upper level cloud deck (upper level whitish clouds seen here)
The old system had better coloration of clouds (I can’t believe you actually INcreased the yellow!) and it had much better layers. How many more times are we going to have to ask that this be addressed?
By the way, the three bottom pics are from three different flights. having good looking altocumulus decks used to be quite common as it is in real life but I havent seen anything anywhere near this appearance in a year. My top pics from yesterday are the thickest most substantial altocumulus deck that Ive seen in a year and thats just sad/pathetic. Its a FLIGHT simulator and flight environment includes clouds and cloud layers properly represented.
