Do you have a source on that? In the Weather Feature Discovery video they said they’re using a scattering model to accurately compute the angles and visibility conditions for rainbows. However, the rainbows themselves are probably still “painted” on the screen when certain conditions are met. A realistic model handling the dispersion, refraction, and reflection of an actual rainbow is extremely complex. That’s tough to do and beyond the scope of even many dedicated ray tracers, let alone rasterized game graphics like Flight Simulator that “fake” a lot of effects through simplified or precomputed shaders.
If there’s too many rainbows in the sim, it’s probably for the same reason there are too many red sunrises and sunsets in the sim. The scattering model spitting out these effects is always “on” and many times IRL these optics are blocked by layers of cloud and atmosphere.
It was in one of the videos that Asobo and MS do and I am pretty sure it was the director that mentioned the way rainbows appear as a consequence of conditions and that they are not artificially generated. To be honest I could spend spend hours wading through videos trying to find the brief 5 second comment he made on this and get nowhere so I wont be bothering. Dont take this offensively but it doesn’t matter to me if you believe what I posted or not, its just what Asobo said and I have no reason to doubt it.
Thanks, not offended at all, just super curious since I do a lot of graphics work and find the topic fascinating. But I also don’t take what the Asobo staff says at face value either. They’ve made some rather dubious claims over the past few months for one reason or another. Sometimes the higher ups don’t fully understand their own product. Sometimes they’re well intentioned but over promising.
The part on rainbows from the Weather Feature Discovery video at 2:00:
Asobo had to program the rainbows to appear in certain circumstances. eg if its raining, and its daytime and the users viewpoint is x show a rainbow in this location.
There are different types of rainbow in real life, you can even get Moonbows under certain circumstances.
I’ve got 440+ logged hours (likely missing a lot too due to the log book not working right) in various conditions, including some where rainbows would potentially be visible. I’ve only seen them a couple of times so far.
As I said, the way it was described by the developers was that rainbows appear because of interaction of light and water within the sim not because of the crude "if x is true and y is true show z.
Obviously the rainbows are coded the whole sim is code like everything else on a PC but its not a fixed modelled object like a building or a tree, its an effect that occurs when certain conditions are met, that’s what the developer said anyway.
Interesting. Maybe you had the cloud settings too low to render far out but the sim knew there was some atmospheric conditions ahead causing the light refraction. I mean the sim does simulate 600km of weather. Unless the skies are completely clear then it’s hard to know if its a bug or not.
I don’t think people mind that much if effects are slightly exaggerated or unrealistic.
It’s when it gets to the point where it feels like you’re flying on another planet (re: excessive icing, rainbows, wave turbulence etc) that it starts to feel silly.
Agreed, and at the cost of a more complex interface, I would like to have the option of decreasing that exaggeration. I don’t care if they put those extra controls in an external configuration file and make it something only advanced users feel comfortable with. In general with this sim, I would like Asobo to put in more internal controls over a lot of things, and then expose the interfaces to modify them with hacking the sim.
That’s what they said, but the rainbows definitely appear to be “painted on effects or textures” that are activated when certain conditions are met, rather than an emergent phenomena of the sim’s model of light and water, or the result of dispersion and refraction calculations.
For example, if you drop the sun angle, the atmospheric scattering model correctly colors the light red (because the blue light has been scattered away). The rainbows, however, are unaffected, and still show the full spectrum evenly (rather than red and yellow being brighter and blue and violet pretty much gone).
It’s cool that they took the time to implement them, getting the angles and visibility conditions correct. And I think this is what they meant in the trailer video. It’s not just a fixed thing that turns on and off, but is a dynamic object. They always seemed a little fakey looking to me though, like they’re too “flat”, like a painted texture map rather than glowing with natural light.
