Request for Enhanced Cloud Shadows in FS2024

[TotalMoon980154]

Another vote added

[smitty9792]

I see ray tracing mentioned in this thread, and the great computational cost it would have, but is it really necessary?

The sun is far enough away that the rays are parallel. so all that really needs to be done is to get a 2d image of the clouds from the sun’s angle in the sky and project that as a light mask on the ground. When youre in or under the cloud, mask out the sun’s light so you dont get shadows in the cockpit. Im sure theres enough data available in drawing the clouds in the first place to use for light masking.

Theres no need to jump to ray tracing and tank everone’s fps.

[AbhishekDey1594]

No, it’s not that trivial. It may work somewhat if we assume the sunlight is coming directly from above only. But still it won’t be very accurate. You should not get shadows from smaller patches of cloud when they are very high up. Also, you should get diffused edges which should differ based on the altitude of the cloud, this may be approximated, but again may not be accurate enough.

But the bigger problem is when the sun light is coming from an incident angle. Then the shape of the top down cloud mask alone is useless, you will need information about height of the actual cloud patch itself and its shape to calculate reasonably accurate shadow shape.

I am smart engineers can figure out how to do this with some degree of accuracy and may be a little performance hit, but I am sure it’s not that trivial as you are making it out to be.

Edit: After reading your post again, I see that you actually mentioned the angle of sun. But the problem still remains. If you look at the original post, they are talking about more accurate shadows as seen in real life instead of course patches of shadows, also real time updates to those and also terrain interaction, possibly meaning mountains and tall structures interacting with the shadows. I think to achive that with any degree of accuracy, you will need some kind of ray intersection and traversal computation. Or it can be faked which will not look right in a dynamic world like MSFS is.

[Giankiller86]

Vote for this wishlist because above 20,000 ft the sim seems like a cartoon… there is no depth… maybe activate an on/off option for more powerful PCs… above water it is even worse…

[ROMASDCO]

Yep! We need that! Voted!