In 2024 in general, while there have been some improvements to clouds in terms of lighting, and slightly less volcanic ash clouds knocking about (though there are still some).
In many other ways the clouds have regressed significantly from 2020. I cannot believe this has been done on purpose as the new sim was supposed to be an improvement on 2020. However, I believe the devs will probably never acknowledge this as they have been pretty silent on the issues with the clouds for coming up 5 years now.
One of the way the clouds are a lot worse than 2020 is the aggressive LOD that has been added to them. Clouds in the distance look so poor compared to 2020 if you get a clear view of them. You can see that they are just some sort of extremely low quality blob.
Compare with clouds in the distance in 2020, they just naturally become less clear and defined, as shown below. The 2024 low resolution blobs just look absolutely awful. It is a massive regression.
Another way in which the clouds are worse in 2024 is that the there are some types of clouds where the density is all wrong. You can see that the clouds âstand outâ too much from the atmosphere. Itâs like theyâre just cartoony stuck in to the sky rather than being part of a living environment. Contrast with 2020 where the clouds look much more natural.
Itâs really disappointing to see such a regression in a product that was supposed to bring improvements. The cloud and sky are so important, this is where aircraft fly, and yet the focus seems to have been on introducing what to me are tribal things such as individually modelled 3d rocks, and adding animals. I even saw something on here asking for insects to be added. By all means go for this stuff once the rest of the sim is great. But sort the atmosphere and clouds out first, as the sky is where aircraft fly.
Yep, I really donât understand how these regressions and graphical downgrades made it into 2024. It is so blindingly obvious.
Of course I am not saying that the clouds are always bad in 2024, and there have been improvements in some areas, particular with the lighting. But these regressions outweigh the improvements significantly.
There was no need for LOD on the clouds in 2020, so I donât see why they have to look so absolutely terrible in the distance in 2024.
They could be significantly improved by removing this awful LOD and also decreasing the density in the distance so they donât stand out so obviously, but rather fade into the atmosphere more.
It is like they have tried to achieve this by a cheap trick of making them less detailed and by making them a sort of semi translucent blueish colour. But it really doesnât work. It just looks like a really nasty attempt at proper atmospheric simulation.
So far release build has been the best for me on Series X. Release was beautiful with terrain sharpness and buildings/trees out to the horizon.
SU1 nerfed the terrain detail and object distance by half.
SU2 put them back about 2/3rds of original and nerfed clouds and textures are uglier.
Each update has all kinds of little improvements and makes the over all sim world more ugly and less lovely.
I would love that Nov 24 build back. It crashed out but it was beautiful to look at.
It doesnât make sense to me that SU3 Beta can be ready so rapidly after SU2 is released as stable. That means they were cooking SU3 out of a build that isnât the stable released build. Essentially every update is a new remix cocktail/soup made of mystery parts. So many fixed things from one update are mysteriously missing from the next Beta. Is this the leap frog rapid development or whatever they call it?
Yes, very much so, but thatâs not surprising. The GPU has to push a lot more pixels around. But even under worst conditions its tolerable in my opinion.
Iâve noticed that nVidia Surround and AMD Eyefinity reduce this effect by dropping the resolution on both the side monitors. It used to worry me but most of the time I am looking ahead anyway, and TrackIR minimises it. With TIR I can easily look abeam with a custom profile.
When I was experimenting with different arrangements it was very noticeablre that the frame rates under Surround (for my original 3070TI) and Eyefinity (6800 XT) were much better than simply putting the main image on the central monitor and stretching it as a windowed image oer all three screens. The latter was horrible, and slow.
I want to share a solution to CTD while loading. I had a folder in Community folder, that did not follow Community folder structure. It was fine during SU1 but with SU2 that would cause CTD 90% of the time at 2%, if it makes it past that I would be okay. Once I removed that folder out of community I can load just as reliably as I did in SU1.
Edit: âdid not follow Community folder structureâ, by that I mean it was not a livery, aircraft or airport or scenery.
Iâm use an X-box series X. Sim update 2 completely broke the in game EFB. it only works in aircraft where it is a built-in feature. another bug that arose which baffles me has to do with the X-box control curser sensitivity. it only recognizes the buttons and menus that I donât want to use. case in point, I spent 2 minutes trying to hit the record button in the in-built flight recorder, but the curser refused to acknowledge that it existed. however, every other button available to push worked. Iâm now convinced that my x-box controller is possessed.
It would seem that I have low standards and I am easily satisfied. I again decided that I am OK with the simâs clouds after a couple of recent SU2 flights. Some examples:
I have âEnforce Flight Plan with ATCâ turned OFF. First thing I checked.
With Live Weather at any airport, the sim is exhibiting 2020 tendencies to allow upwind, downwind and cross-wind arrivals and departures, despite ATIS indicating active runway in use.
different day, same flight, same weather, traffic, settings etc. Went from 120fps to stuttety 20fps, enough vram. Lowered settings to low, from dlss quality to performance etc., no change in fps.
Wiskey, Tango, FoxtrotâŠ
Has anyone had the issue with terrain level being low, struggling to catch up, and actually managed to fix the issue?
Zendesk sent me a list of things to try, to no availâŠ
Not sure if it is just me, but other than a 5-6 medium cargo missions most of the previously available 20-30+ have now disappeared completely. Does anyone else have the same issue?
Are you talking hours, if so yes, I do not see any long missions any more. There was mention that they may have fixed the length of these and made the time actual - ie you fly for as long as advertised. Sadly, The CJ4 needs mission payouts of around 10,000,000 to make it a worthwhile profit wise plane to operate. So no long, long missions is a problem. Maintenance is breaking my will to fly this plane!
Injected aircraft (from e.g vPilot) is still extremely unreliable and at times impossible to see. The render distances are broken, sometimes aircraft donât appear at all.
When I own the company as an employee it works fine but when I switch to freelance soon as iâm in the air after getting rid of the fire the plane decides to shut off and crash.
