Lightning in Live Weather - Excessive and where Lightning should not Occur

On areas where the weather should be nice I keep get lightning and thunder one after another, there isn’t a single time I cant hear a thunder on background, its like 10 lightnings a minute on a VFR condition with some clouds. Anyone knows a fix?

Thank you.

That’s just Thor doing some superhero stuff.

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Tell him his ruining live weather D=

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Seek professional help! :slight_smile:

Very insightful

I have never encountered that problem.

Justfly anywhere over Brazil, or (I think) any other place where Bing and microsoft wheather app does not work (I mean, everywhere outside US and EU)

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I flew around Rio De Janeiro several weeks ago for over 2 1/2 hours with about 40 or 50 others and no one complained about it either.

Flying tomorrow at 19:00 Eastern USA time. It’s on the Events Calendar.

We will be flying around Asia. I think.

Maybe a bug related to some specific GPUs. They may be interpreting something wrong. What GPU do you have?

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This was a known issue introduced with the second sim update. It has gotten better, but it does still happen.

I’m guessing there’s a specific set of conditions that cause MSFS to generate thunder and lightning (and it’s not just where reported in real world). Once it’s triggered it seems to go completely overboard with the frequency. You don’t encounter it that often, but when you do - oh boy!

I last found this problem flying in equatorial Africa a couple of weeks ago. Only good news is that they seem to have improved the impact on performance … originally it was a complete stutterfest every time the lightening effects occurred. That is better now.

I just ignore it. Exactly like you wouldn’t in real aviation.

Lots and lots of debate about it last year…

blue-skies-and-lightening

lightning-in-mostly-sunny-skies

lightning-causes-frame-rate-drop

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If you fly anywhere with high humidity, especially in the tropics, this seems to be a common issue. The lightning and thunder engine obviously works independently from the cloud model… I fly in the Philippines a lot. Always get lightning and thunder :zap: It is annoying and hope Asobo will eventually actually fix it. I think they fixed it at least once, according to their standards (which of course means it’s not fixed at all, but likely made worse).

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I was looking closely at the instrument panels so I didn’t see it, but I just heard a massive peal of thunder. Weather looks like this. I am flying from DNAA to DNAK.



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Darwin, Australia today:

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Great to see others notice that lightning doesn’t have to be the sky’s strobe lights.

I’ve included clear visual comparisons of the lightning in MSFS vs IRL below.

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Lightning at DNMM again today.

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That’s just Chris Hemsworth goofing around with Mjolnir.

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Flight Simulator is a serious documentary, not a Marvel movie! Harumph!

I’m guessing the clouds are generated using a randomized 3D noise pattern. So they don’t actually know where the individual clouds are, or how large they are. Even if the current weather has a cloud layer 20,000 feet thick and atmospheric conditions that support thunderstorms, if the clouds also need to be scattered or isolated, then most of these clouds won’t be anywhere near the size needed to produce lightning.

For example, given this volume, it might be filled with randomized clouds, some tiny fragments, and some really large chunks. They probably need to sample the volume and find clouds of sufficient height and volume. Not a trivial task, and I can see why a real fix got put aside given the breakneck speed at which they’re developing.

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That does make sense. But why wasn’t it an issue during beta and at the first release?

There was no Live Weather lightning during the Tech Alpha or at release. You could turn lightning on manually using a custom preset and the weather menu sliders, but the feature had not yet been implemented on the Live Weather side. Lightning was the least of our concerns at launch, however. The game launched without working Live Weather winds, and vast areas without any Live Weather at all. Much of the Live Weather was just missing during the Tech Alpha, so there wasn’t much for the testers to test. A lot of us naively assumed it was going to be in a much better state at release, not that they were simply going with the largely broken weather we already had.

The lightning appears to be dependent on the meteorological conditions of the area, perhaps humidity or atmospheric instability. You need more than that to get lightning though. You need an actual thunderstorm to be present, and that’s what the simulator is neglecting. It seems Asobo’s “fix” for this bug was to just make the meteorological conditions in which lightning appears more strict and dial down the lightning frequency, but the underlying problem of there being no actual storms remains. The real fix is to have the simulator check for cumulonimbus of sufficient depth before lightning is active.

So now that temps are starting to get warmer in northern hemisphere are we gonna be back to having this ridiculous lightning constantly washing out the screen? Flying through some almost transparent clouds over the gulf of mexico right now and it’s just one slow washed out flash after another. Not an actual thunderstorm cloud in sight. Since asobo clearly doesn’t know how to fix this, how about an option to just shut it off? Who in there right mind over there thought “hmmm? this looks good?”
Sorry for the rant…but this is just so immersion killing and I can’t believe that this continues to happen

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Totally agree.