And I bought my xbox series X for this game, otherwise I would have stuck with PlayStation. The weather will be back to what it was, people who have performance issues can always lower their settings on pc. On my xbox I never had problems with the clouds, and even if I did I’d rather a few seconds of lower frames than this mess we have now 
The clouds before SU5 when the game was changed for Xbox were in a different league to even how it was pre this last update. Not that I have a problem with Xbox, but they should have kept ultra at what it was, or given an option to go beyond ULTRA and keep ones old clouds. With SU5 I just gained FPS I didn’t want or need in return for a reduction in visual quality.
Also this reduction in quality wasn’t just for Xbox, but also because people were complaining about performance, they could have simply turned down their settings to gain performance rather than the what happened was inflicting lower settings on those who didn’t need the increased performance
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That’s not quite right. 
But yes, better than some others
Don’t let the stripes confuse you, these are reflections in the canopy. (not FS)
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I think they must have had to re-write the code just to get clouds working on Xbox and in turn, wrecked it for everyone. Otherwise, they would have just done what you indicate. Nothing else would make sense.
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On release, my first flight. Live weather.
Melbourne, August 2020
And we all know when this was:
Shanghai
Alp de Huez before any addons arrived for it
October 2020 when the Matterhorn came out:
So we can clearly see more stratiform clouds in these…
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Those were the days…
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And they have broken all .
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They did not broke it, they have improve it! 
I just can’t enjoy the fs anymore. They completely spoiled my fun with all these covertly downgrades over the time since release. 
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It upsets me that we don’t have clouds like this in the sim anymore.
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Yes, this pictures are gorgeous. Miles away from what we have now.
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Whats broken right now is the interaction between the weather engine and the cloud drawing code.
The sim is perfectly capable of producing good looking clouds as in these pics using a custom theme I created.
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I agree. The sim is still capable of drawing stratiform clouds. I suspect the code which translates weather data into the MSFS cloud parameters was fine-tuned for the pre-SU7 weather data. The parameters will need to be retuned for the new system. The new weather data might also need to be tweaked to ensure low-level overcast is properly represented in the data, because the cloud drawing system appears to favor cumuliform clouds if the coverage percentage is even 10% less than 100%.
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I also hope they change or adjust their cloud coloring and lighting. Their cumulus clouds have too much darkness in the shadows and the stratus like clouds are not dark enough overall imo.
In my opinion, all clouds should start out as a blueish grey that matches the haze and cumulus clouds have brighter tops and deeper shadows as they grow taller – but not as dark or as oddly colored as the current ones can be. Theres too much yellow (ash color) both on top of clouds and in shadows. Things should be blue in most daylight conditions. Even clouds that look yellow, brown, black and grey are still usually blue. my opinion of course…not a meteorologist. or an optical physics major. Asobo changed something a few months back that actually increased the yellow and made cumulus shadows darker. Hopefully just a bug.
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Have any mods/devs acknowledged this thread? There is some very useful info for them here.
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@OlieTsubasa443 just tagging you here as there is a lot of really great info and discussion in here if you hadn’t seen it already
Many thanks
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“Going to give it a break for Christmas”
Christmas Day, here we all are on the forums!
I’m just in the habit of checking my phone every 30 mins or so on followed topics, hoping that they say the weather is now working ha.
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Thanks for this post. It was a pleasure to read.
Indeed, the sim used to create super good looking (and imo realistic) cloud formations that i can’t wrap my head around why they would want to tweak something there. I also feel like they don’t really acknowledge this specific issue, which makes me miss it even more because i feel like we will not be seeing nice clouds for a while.. It was such a joy to see, and i miss it so much to the point I just don’t turn the sim on anymore…
Let‘s hope, this post will be acknowledged and maybe even worked with - it would make a huge difference
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Updated forecasts every few minutes are entirely possible.
OK, only proper, accurate analyses every few hours, but from that data model, it is entirely possible to run several forecasts out to several hours into the future.
Unlike normal forecasts, where weather tomorrow or next week is being predicted, all that is needed is a forecast as far ahead as the next run twelve hours later.
The difficulty would be merging the 12-forecast with the new actual weater when the next run is finished, but isn’t that what AI is for?
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The current model goes out 24 hours, run twice per day, so it should be refreshed every 12 hours. I doubt they are going to change it. As it is, the NEMS 30 model is one of the few global forecast models that actually has 24 discrete forecast hours from initialization time. Most global models like the GFS, are only every 3 hours.
Quick correction: The GFS now outputs hourly data files. Not many websites offer hourly data, but it has been available for at least a year or two.
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