It’s clear that cloud depiction is one of the main factors in the performance of the sim. For as long as it’s been released, there has been a constant ask for optimisation, performance, performance and more performance.
It’s particularly obvious in VR that clouds massively affect frame rate.
I imagine that one of the easiest ways for Asobo to garner more performance is therefore to change cloud rendering.
Perhaps it will be improved in a couple of years when we’ve all upgraded our rigs (again)
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But this is terrible reasoning. If people weren’t happy with performance they should have just turned down their settings, not have the sim degraded for everyone so even those happy with performance in effect had their settings turned down.
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I agree with you. Flight sims have always been hard on hardware, but hey, lots of voices can have an effect…
Yeah it’s ludicrous. Dumbing down the graphics has achieved nothing for anyone. The ULTRA setting should be as high as it can possibly can be, for those with the absolute top hardware. Everyone else who doesn’t have that should use lower settings.
They’ve done the same with the LOD distances, and lighting. Just people wanting to run on ULTRA when they should be on medium. But they’ve got what they want now, they can run ULTRA because the current ULTRA is what MEDIUM used to be. And now the rest of us are forced to use lower settings.
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There’s a lot of people with older systems who cried out for better performance, Asobo SHOULD NOT have to cater to this to an extent. People need to move with the times and upgrade, if you didnt want to play that game should’ve stuck to consoles.
We need the flight sim to use its full potential and let users dial down their settings accordingly. Taking things out and optimizing it to a point where certain things have to dumbed down is ridiculous.
The sim has shown what it was capable of… in earlier builds and im not allowed to say which ones apparently for legal reasons… the night lighting looked spectacular… then they added a sepia… then they removed the sepia but stuffed the night lighting all up… same can be said for clouds… was good then got exceptional… people cried out… now they look ok… not exceptional.
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I keep coming back to see if I can get the same experience I had when this sim first release. The obvious answer is no. It keeps getting worse and worse. Thanks Asobo for saving me money as there is 0 drive for me to get a better pc now.
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And this is how live weather clouds are looking these days in the SU10 Beta.
Absolutely brilliant - apart from the huge quality loss by converting HDR to SDR to be able to post them on this forum.
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With the release of the Su10, I had some hope the clouds depiction could have been improved. Sadly, that’s not the case. The sim is also unable to barely depict the metar. Puffy, low density “cumulous” are all over the place. No coherence at all, no resemblance of any meaningful sky, these places weather would have look amazing with pre-su7 weather 
. Looks terrible. Feed up with all this, see you in 6 months!
LEIB:
LEMG:
Maxed settings.
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It’s not supposed to. The sim uses Meteoblue forecast data for clouds, not METAR data. If you would like them to start using METAR for clouds, how about a suggestion thread? If you think the clouds look bad using Meteoblue data, I think you would be in for a pretty big awakening if they started using METAR data for cloud generation and tried to blend that with Meteoblue.
How do we know that the weather in your screenshot is supposed to have big dense clouds and not light clouds without the raw data to compare it to? METAR data or real life photos are not proper sources of comparison as MSFS uses forecast data that could have been generated up to 6 hours ago. All that matters is whether or not the weather matches the Meteoblue data they have received.
Pre SU-7 clouds often didn’t match METAR either since only Meteoblue forecast data is used. In fact, your complaint in this post about the weather not matching METAR\real life was the biggest weather complaint before SU7. This isn’t new.
1- That’s why I said “barely”, because even if metar is not used for clouds, at least, I expect the visual depiction of them to be more or less accurate (as before, to meteoblue, something that was quite usual before), which is not the case by a HUGE margin.
2- There was a time when live weather looked amazingly beautiful AND amazingly accurate to live cameras and what I could see throught my window. Not anymore. 1 year later.
3- No, the reason for this post is not “only” that clouds don’t match metar, but also, and mainly, that the visual depiction is horrible now!. All I get is the same G od ■■■■ puffy ■■■■!!
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How can the visual depiction of clouds always be accurate if the data they have isn’t always accurate? Clouds are generated from the data. The entire point of Meteoblue is that we are getting plausible whether that may or may not be accurate since the forecast can be upwards of 6 hours old… It is incredibly difficult to predict the exact cloud positions and density with perfect accuracy that far in advance. The fact that they get it right more often than not is impressive to me. Perfect accuracy is an unreasonable expectation when it comes to forecast data.
#1 is a matter of opinion and #2 is a matter of luck. Neither of which Asobo can fix. Again, the biggest complaint before SU7 is that the weather didn’t match METAR or live cams. In fact, I think the thread is still going. Might be one of the longest ongoing threads on this forum.
I can only assume that you’re not properly testing the system (as also evidenced by the fact that METAR and web cams are your basis of comparison and not Meteoblue), because the sim is definitely capable of generating more cloud types. Seriously, look at Meteoblue’s cloud map and test beyond your home airport. I have personally posted probably upwards of a hundred images showing various cloud types in SU10.
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/good-job-on-the-improvements-to-the-weather-engine/529227
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Yup “every update a downgrade” that’s what I hate about Asobo. They seem hell bent on going backwards in most things other than “accessibility”.
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I came here because I was trying to fly out of LPPR (reporting BKN009 at the time with FCST TEMPO 2200/2209 5000 BR BKN005 PROB30 TEMPO 2200/2208 1200 PRFG BKN001) and in my sim was a big old and fat CAVOK!
I learn from this forum that MSFS was using meteograms to create WX, so thank you for that.
Having that said, it is ridiculous that the only way MSFS can “create” clouds (Yes, fog is
a cloud) is from meteograms when wx reports are present (metars, tafs and even specis)
carrying that to real live, unless I am planning a flight 12/18/24h ahead to a place that does not have reports (90% of the time will be a special ap due preformance issues) I couldn’t care less about models, especially Meteoblue ones (former meteorologist speaking)
It was (for me) a really good day in MSFS with the update (I have learn that this issue does not occur from the update), was really happy with the results in my setup but… there is always something to take down a bit your “happiness” with MSFS I guess
CS
regards
Which meteograms are they using do you know?
Those of you that are interested in this issue might find interesting this post too
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Hi,
your real life picture is not corresponding to METAR neither. At best you should have a broken layer with that cloud coverage. METAR is only a picture in time. You can’t expect to have something true to life at any time.