Well to the gliding community; I figured out what ACTUALLY breaks the thermals to the max. LOL. It’s the ICA temperature. This setting is a global benchmark in the real world about 59F at STP sea level. If you increase that the thermals are magnified proportionately.
It’s gimmicky, but I used it to get this stunning high altitude pic.
The clouds were to about 30,000 feet max height setting.
Well high temperature affecting thermals is a thing known and exploited by MSFS gliding community at least since october 2021 - around SU5, way before official gliders have been implemented - see this post| at MS Flight Simulator Gliders facebook group.
Since than countless hours were spent by the community trying to reverse engineer how MSFS weather model works, what and how it is wrong and what needs to be fixed.
I suggest you read everything MSGamerTag01 wrote about weather as he has huge RL gliding experience and also been programming gliding addons to MSFS since many years.
Also worth joining is Sim Soaring Club at Discord where some weather discussion takes place.
I’ve seen only one of this threads so far and it was fascinating. I definitely wish they modeled the atmospherics even more. As I’ve learned about gliding there’s dynamic soaring and I’m certain that’s impossible in this game based on how wind layers seem to just “average” together.
Mountain waves would be nice.
There’s a lot of stuff that would make this “sim” even cooler; life support for altitude. Like you could lose cabin pressure and black out. That’d be awesome to simulate.
- around SU5, way before official gliders have been implemented - see this post| at MS Flight Simulator Gliders facebook group.