One of the worst things of this new live weather system. The upper clouds are especially bad. Go take a look at the screenshot threads and most of them now have that characteristic MSFS look. Fuzzy steamy anemic clouds. Your bottom screenshots look photo realistic in comparison. Why are so few users bothered by all these downgrades to the weather? I don’t even feel like continuing a flight after seeing this.
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The question is, is it intended (maybe because of some complains of low FPS) or is it a bug? I’ve never experienced low FPS in the amazing clouds we had at release 2020. If i did i for sure would preffer some lower fps if i could get my amazing weather back again. Now we have even better graphicscards to buy than we had back then but it’s no point at all to upgrade our hardware because our ultra setting is now limited to run on old hardware. Even older than we had available at release. Can’t say that is to improve performance. Thats more of a downgrade to me.
I bet we should be careful of what we ask for. Who actually knew we had bad performance at release 2020? To me it was running perfect. But still i could see complains of performance at release 2020.
If it has good performance the only option for the devs is to tune down graphics on ULTRA for all of us. Becuase the users that complains can’t set lower settings depending on hardware they are using. All of the users want to set ultra even if they are using really old hardware.
Still i blame the most of the issues after su7 on the implementation of METAR though. Because that were thing mentioned they changed in su7. Only Asobo know if there is other changes than that. If it is more changes, then why do they not tell us that in the release notes. Impossible to give constructive feedback of changes if they not tell us all of the changes they make.
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This bothers me as well. They obviously made changes to the clouds. It would be nice if they said what they did and why. Surely they have a reason. As for the rest of us, all we can do is speculate and I’ve come up with several possible contributors to what happened to upper clouds in particular. First, people wanted cirrus and I think they changed the upper clouds in an attempt to get them. There were complaints about high level temperatures being wildly wrong and so maybe that played a role. There of course is the METAR bit. And the color issue, I wonder if they didn’t hear the complaints about color banding and figure they could solve it by making ALL clouds more yellow instead of just some.
Only Asobo knows 
I just hope they start paying attention to our little portion of the community that cares what the sky looks like.
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I am providing a link to a really interesting post from a meteorologist that tries to understand how clouds are drawn in MSFS. Density is part of course in his explanation. Also hope it will help the devs to correct the issues with unrealistic clouds in Live weather if they are planning to work on it in a future SU.
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Hope Asobo/MSFT seriously consider this! Clouds in general need to be thicker! A lot of times, even during heavy rain, you can see the sun! Hopefully they will add this effect! It will be awesome!
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the effect will really be an immersion game changer, hope asobo pick up the request
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please Asobo, consider this!
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Yes it’s an big immersion breaker, you don’t get the feeling of actually flying through a cloud.
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Not sure if this is the area to post but since it is weather related I will post anyways. Just got home from flying STL-SMF. From about 24000 down nothing but flying in the ‘soup’. I sat at the back of the plane and kept note about the wing fading as we went through the clouds or were in them. There weren’t any instances where the wing totally faded. You had some ‘dimming’ but the wing was still extremely visible. Part of this comes from the amount of displacement that the engine causes around the leading edge from the wing and from a passengers perspective there isn’t really any fading at all. With prior sims and engines which made the wing completely disappear, that’s just not realistic or at the very least it’s way overdone in its effect.
Sure there is, you just need to fly through some thicker clouds.
The clouds in Flight Simulator are volumetric but the condensate is not very dense at all. I think this was done intentionally for a variety of reasons: performance, hiding visual artifacts that the volumetric slices create, and the aesthetics of the shading. Anyway, this probably goes in the other thread linked above.
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Appreciate the digging for examples. I honestly can’t remember the last time I actually saw the wing disappear. Sure it happens but it’s not like how the effect is in the sim where EVERY cloud results in your wing disappearing. Unfortunately there’s no way for the effect feature to know the type of cloud so it is more of an off or on thing. Flying through every cloud would produce the effect. That much I remember back from using ASN.
The effect is present in Flight Simulator:
It’s just that most of the time the clouds aren’t dense enough to really show it. This is the lowest visibility I could produce using 60,000 foot tall clouds, 100% coverage, and the highest density, precip, and humidity settings. It’s still much less dense than the above video example. There’s also the problem of the sun bleeding through the clouds, no matter how thick they are.
It’s relevant to this topic of Live Weather not matching because the Live Weather clouds are almost always not dense enough. They instead usually look like translucent puffs of mist, even when the sim is attempting to show lightning producing cumulonimbus.
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The cloud density is a thing that has needed to be worked on for quite some time. I think until that issue is fixed aside from flying into complete whiteout conditions or overcast I think people will misinterpret the effect not being there when it’s really just the lack of cloud density. You took that shot from a forward outside view. I think when people make their comparison it’s typically done from inside and the passenger view looking at the wing. If you could manage to try it at that angle it would help. But from inside the plane per my actual flight, I always had a visual of the wing/wing tip and there was maybe a brief second where it somewhat disappeared but in no way the way people are expecting and what the effect from the previous sims looked like. If my memory serves me the wing would pretty much disappear with almost any and all clouds, not very realistic.
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I tried to increase the clouds density to 5 “highest” and it still didn’t work. I think there should be a certain effect added. I hope Asobo can implement it in the future.
What do you mean you increased the cloud density?
The option in the weather panel
Yeah I don’t use custom weather, so I was a little confused when you mentioned being able to manipulate settings, thought you were talking about live weather.
Yeah but cloud density is not the reason. I believe it would be a kind of effect around the wings.
Well I suppose someone has to 