No Ridge Lift wherever there are trees

Bug Reporting Hub Weather & Live Weather
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:wave: Thank you using the Bug section, using templates provided will greatly help the team reproducing the issue and ease the process of fixing it.

Are you using Developer Mode or made changes in it?

No

Have you disabled/removed all your mods and addons?

No, but I run no Weather related Mods

Brief description of the issue:

No matter how perfectly perpendicular a Wind of enormous Strength hits a nearly perfect 45° Hillside, there will be no Updraft if there are trees on it.
Once you fly over a cleared Area you are catapulted up so abruptly and at a rate that will overstress the Aircraft.
This makes flying Porta Westfalica and Bezmiechowa (famous Ridge Soaring Spots) pretty much impossible.

Provide Screenshot(s)/video(s) of the issue encountered:

This is flying Porta Westfalica

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image1920×1002 192 KB

Provide coordinates (DevMode > Options > Display position)

Provide time & date of the observed Weather issue

Detailed steps to reproduce the issue encountered:

Try and fly on a Wooded Ridge, Porta Westfalica for example, with a normal Preset and Winds set to Perpendicular to the Hill.

PC specs and/or peripheral set up if relevant:

Nope

Build Version # when you first started experiencing this issue:

SU11, Glider Update

:loudspeaker: For anyone who wants to contribute on this issue, Click on the button below to use this template:

Do you have the same issue if you follow the OP’s steps to reproduce it?

Provide extra information to complete the original description of the issue:

If relevant, provide additional screenshots/video:

2

This is definitely a major bug - the only reason it isn’t getting more upvotes is glider pilots are so lost with the current implementation of rising/sinking air in MSFS it’s hard to know where to report what. The entire design of lift/sink is a remarkable disconnect from anything we’d recognise.

It seems likely that the flawed implentation of “ground lift” is conflicting with the implementation of “ridge lift” in that the “ground lift” implements sinking or rising air over every ground type, and “trees” is a ground type that probably generates sink. The scale of the sink/lift generated by this “ground lift” is greater than anything else implemented in the sim (probably “cloud lift” and “ridge lift”) effectively negating the value of those other lift types.

FWIW we (glider pilots) use a necessary workaround for the broken “ground lift” in MSFS by setting all flights in the coldest winter months, with a departure time typically around 10am. This has the effect of reducing the strength of the “ground lift” which also reduces the strength of the “ground sink”. This means the only lift available is ridge lift, so gliding flights are limited to that, but that is the best we can do as of SU11.

9 Likes
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i’m out of votes/ , upvoted by this comment

2 Likes
5

Well, the bump was worth it.

1 Like
6

yeah. It deserves the votes though because gliding with the SU11 weather is basically impossible to set up. If you’re ok with ONLY ridge lift you can set a strong wind at 10am on a winter day and some ridge lift will be usable. But that kills any chance of getting a thermal for any hops between ridges. The alternative is to set the flight in the daytime and have ground lift (and sink) absolutely everywhere but the ridges won’t be working.

3 Likes
7

The Foundations of using the Ground to Model Lift are a solid base to build on, but right now still needs some tweaking.

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One thing that needs tweaking is the pixel perfect sampling of the surface type.

Flying over small water bodies or forest patches produce instant sink and vice versa with lift producing surfaces.

This results in a very rough flying experience and is why our gliding community is now mostly flying in winter months.

There needs to be some accumulative calculation to smooth out these surface related up/downdrafts.

Same applies to the ridge lift. Not every small hill should be factured in the calculation the same way a huge mountain is.

3 Likes
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This is the single most glaring problem with lift in MSFS.

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I suspect the lift at the aircraft uses a ‘keyhole’ sample of a small area of ground under the aircraft, regardless of how high the aircraft is. I think Asobo had an idea of sampling a patch so that you would feel the updraft of a wind hitting a building (quote) i.e. the sample area may be detailed but only a few meters across. Actually given a finite number of samples a much more effective strategy is to sample the ground across a MUCH larger area, e.g. with 15 samples it’s worth including samples from 5
10 km away, and bias your ground sampling significantly in the upwind direction. An incremental improvement on this is to widen the sample pattern as the aircraft gets higher. The effect on the aircraft is a combination of these samples taking into an account of how high the plane is. I know Asobo could radically improve their current simulation by adding these changes, but I’m not sure they’ll understand that the ground sample points don’t need to be evenly placed in a regular pattern immediately under the plane (this is good at 50 feet but pointless at 5000 feet, and I think Asobo is still doing this when the plane is at 25000 feet).

1 Like
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Flying over small water bodies or forest patches produce instant sink and vice versa with lift producing surfaces.

I flew in Italy one of the Sim Soaring Club or Got Gravel tasks, there, ridge lift seems to work fine even over forests, but even there, if there is a creek on the hillside, there will be sink just above that creek.

Looks like water kills ridge lift too


1 Like
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Please add ‘glider’ tag to this report for better discoverability.

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Tree/wind interaction is not just glider related though - there are some massive turbulence spikes over trees which affect anyone in a small aircraft.

2 Likes
14

Unfortunately there was no mention of this in yesterday’s dev stream.

It really is a big problem.

It seems like the surface type (forest in this case) simply subtracts a sink value from the vertical wind above, regardless whether that rising air is caused by heat (surface thermals) or wind (ridge lift), which makes no physical sense.

If Asobo cannot distinguish between the different forms of rising air, they should consider decreasing the sink values for forest type terrain.

3 Likes
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keeping the topic open . upvote again

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Unfortunately it doesnt seem like this is being addressed in SU12 in any way.

Devs, please consider tweaking the up-/downdrafts created by different surface types.
They are way overdone.

  • Too much lift created by any kind of urban landscape
  • Too much sink created by forests
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Indeed , the glider devs and regular glider pilots are hoping to not only help Asobo to fix the weather for us , but for all simmers.
As you would agree its a fundamental of flight , even birds

3 Likes
18

I have reproduced this error description and agree

19

Same here: flight now around 40min around LOWI and can’t find uprifts to gain altitude. that said, sink do work, glider get back to ground 100% sure. 100% is also affect for motivation, and feel like stop even try gliding with msfs.