Yep, the clouds in MSFS are seriously lagging behind the rest of the sim in terms of visuals.
And its a massive shame because we fly in the skies where the clouds are, not on the ground where the 3d rocks and animals are.
It is like the sim is for being on the ground and taking photos rather than flying.
I mean it’s great that the buildings look awesome.
But the clouds are terrible.
I must say that I am dissapointed in the conversation regarding weather on the April 2026 Dev Update. Everytime I hear Seb talk about weather he always defers back to what’s possible in preset mode. Most of us don’t use preset mode. If we wanted a really good preset mode, fine then open it up for developers like the Hifi team to have more control on preset creation with no transition. I’d argue we had better management of weather in the old ESP code. I again bring up the point of what we had in Active Sky Next and their ability to give us literally tornadoes in live weather, TCU and even wing fade.
Secondly, this constant conversation about CFD dynamics is great, but you don’t have the visuals to back it up. I have not seen a towering TCU formation ever in this sim. When I mean towering I mean what you would see in real life up to the flight levels. I hate to be the one that brings the X-Plane conversation back, but if anyone has doubts of what is possible versus what we have, look at what they do with their towering clouds versus what we have
Finally, Everyone who is frustrated with the current weather status should really make their feelings known. I keep hearing that they “monitor the forums” for feedback no what get’s prioritized. The basic reality is that we are not happy with the weather state. We have made it clearly apparent in many places. Anywhere you look, their forums, here, reddit, the list keeps going, so if they are so attentive to what the community is asking for, why are we still not having a serious conversation that involves the cloud depiction.
Here again is a topic with 300 votes on the matter. Where are the cumulonimbus clouds?
TLDR: We need a serious conversation on weather depiction with LIVE weather. CFD dyanmics are great, but do they matter if we can’t even see it in the sim with Live weather?.
I agree with absolutely everything you said. Just a point I’d like to make - when MSFS2020 came out, it actually was able to portray convective weather. It was only visual (no turbulence), it looked like ash clouds, but I distinctly remember flying through a mesoscale convective system. Plenty of lightning and Cbs all around, including a cirriform anvil.
So their engine is definitely capable. They probably just don’t have someone who is a weather enthusiast and has the time or skills to put it to use while coding the sim.
It’s a pity, because to me it seems the weather as a whole has degraded over time instead becoming better. Even the sky colors are weird during specific times of day where the horizon has an unrealistic way too green color to it.
Agreed. I started a topic today to discuss this and it was merged with a wishlist item here I recommend we reignite this conversation. As Jorg said, keep the feedback alive in the forums. I guess they prioritize that.
