A few days ago I was curious about the general turbulence implementation and started experimenting, after reading this post: MSFS is breaking the VR golden rule: don't move the camera, the user is
I used the drone cam to set a fixed camera with a long focal length, and flew towards or away from the camera (as smoothly as I could from this view) to see how much vertical movement the aircraft had. The weather was set manually, with rather strong and gusty winds, but I HAVE come across similar gusty conditions with ‘live weather’ too.
Summary:
- In normal, gusty wind conditions, the air appears to have NO vertical movement whatsoever. Just the strong horizontal, yaw-inducing gusts. That said, I was fairly low which may be a factor.
- Around hills, as we know, there are updraughts and downdraughts. The journey over mountains can be quite a roller coaster ride at times.
Here’s a short video from a couple of the recordings I saved at the time. This shows how the regular wind + gusts appear to be horizontal only, and the last clip shows the strong downdraught on one of the landing challenges. Not very scientific, but if it helps illustrate some people’s points, maybe it’s useful:
