Brief description of the issue:
Hello,
I want to report that visibility becomes unrealistically low and it becomes too dark when it rains lightly or heavily in the sim.
In real life, visibility never goes under one mile while it rains even heavily, but in the sim we have visibility as low as a few hundred feet even with light rain. Provide Screenshot(s)/video(s) of the issue encountered:
Detail steps to reproduce the issue encountered:
Might there be a configuration file setting that we users might tinker with and increase the rain visibility up to a higher value than is set in the sim as default ?
Well generally, rain never creates this level of unbreakably dense fog, this is an exception in the vid.
Fog and rain must be separated in the sim engine.
Same fog issue occurs with snow as well, at least a few miles of visibility is there in real life; whereas in the sim you cannot even clearly see your 30 feet front.
If you are going to say that the Visuals are incorrect, and show Images, you also need to provide the accompanying Weather data (Metar or Atis).
What really is the issue, Weather is incorrect or the depiction (eye candy) of typical weather is incorrect
It’s the graphics created by sim so as to depict the rain / heavy rain conditions as I clearly state in the main body of the report, namely the excessive fog that accompanies normal to heavy rainfall must start after at least one mile or slightly more not a few feet out your sight.
It has got nothing to do with whether the weather is real or preset or anything else…
BTW, live weather data and its implementation in the sim becomes increasingly better with each update, IMHO.
Try hunting around for more examples where there’s rain with live weather. I’ve still been able to see the runway from miles away with light to moderate rain.
sorry to dissapoint you, but this is very realistic. At least where I live (central europe) thats what it looks like when it is raining and not only locally but in the whole region.
I saw rain with blue skies as well, but that was at the maledives with a small raincloud forming for a quick shower as not unusual near the ecquator.
But else in rain visibility can and does go down significantly.
Yeah, I wanted to do circuits in rain but it made the whole airfield disappear. It seems the game likes to pretend there is always fog when there is rain. It is super rare to have fog when it rains where I live.
Where do you and OP live? I think that’s part of the contention here. Most of us midlatitude or continental folk are used to having the temp drop to near saturation in a heavy rain. So it does get pretty foggy usually.
The deeper issue here is I think the sim’s ability to create different visibility conditions. Boundary layer haze, mist, and that familiar fog in the rain are all dependent on the humidity. The sim doesn’t appear to have that implemented really, or it’s crudely approximated in certain cases such as with the rain shafts and cloud layers. I’d vote up one of the visiblity feature request threads, and this should help this issue here as well.
South Australia.
Like winds I think they tie too many effects to a single slider. Thinking more about it. To get rain over a reasonable area the ground always because very dark. I certainly experience that level of rain where the ground and visibility is much better/lighter.
I think light rain in specific clouds and heavy rains are done very very well. I think what I am having trouble with is a good amount of rain in the middle area. Where we have a lot of high level cloud producing rain but still plenty of light on the ground.
From memory the rain amount slider was not very linear so maybe that is where my issue is.
Another possibility is that I’ve only ever flown in a light drizzle in a circuit once in my life. I’m a VFR only pilot. So it isn’t impossible that my expectations are wrong from an in-air perspective. This is were real pilots with real experience in said conditions is good. Maybe what I see from my window doesn’t translate well to a circuit.
Though common, it is always a mistake to assume we know the cause and solution to an issue. I have customers try and do that and it is rarely accurate. So I can’t say much other than what I experience.
You are absolutely right and I tried to explain the same: it depends on where you are.
Here it sometimes can get so foggy and cold it even starts “raining” out of fog without a cloud layer above. But that’s something very different of course…
My understanding is, that for Airports METAR should be the source to generate weather. And METAR includes precipiation and visibility alike.
That this is not alway very accurate in the sim is another story…
Rain in the sim seems to have been modeled with cold climate data hence bringing about unrealistic fog, mist and haze for the rest entire world as well, whereas most of the regions on our planet that gets a lot of rain are in the mild to hot climate that does hardly create excessive fog with just a few yard visibility during rainfall as the sim generates.
The dev team shouldn’t have modeled the rain according to the substantially colder Central-North Europe and North America alone.
To be fair, that’s where the devs and probably 95% of the userbase and aviation in general are based, and they probably just didn’t have the time to make this more encompassing. But the sim is lacking features here for sure. I think what you’re after is better humidity based visibility conditions. Not a perfect fit, but vote this thread up:
Ideally there should be a relative humidity slider in the weather controls, and an absolute visibility slider that is the product of the other sliders combined (like aerosol, precipitation, cloud, temp, etc…). The devs shot this idea down in the past saying it was “unrealstic”. I don’t think they really gave it proper consideration, and we just need to keep asking for it.
well, your screenshots are from geneva.
Are you sure it is modeled the same in let’s say sydney?
Because it should actually read the METAR and that will give the visibilty, not rain.
So check an airport that has currently rain and see what live weather does…
