Hi Asobo! Thank you very much for your hard work and dedication to bring gliding to the sim. It is amazing to experience our great sport in the beautiful environment that MSFS offers. I would love to one day be able to properly fly cross country in MSFS, and we are getting there. But the thermal system can be improved, so here is my feedback!
- Perhaps it is a good idea to have more direct control over thermal creation. For example some weather presets, or sliders to adjust thermal creation. Think of the density of thermals, width, strength and altitude. Make sure the altitude is connected to cloud base
- Currently there is no connection to Cumulus clouds. Very important to hook these up, as cumulus clouds are results of (thermal) convection. Therefor, in real life we use the clouds to read the sky and make decisions on where to look for the next climb. Currently we cannot do this in the sim.
- Wishlist: Visualse thermals with one or a couple of birds (in my experience I find approximately one in twenty thermals due to birds circling).
- Turbulence and slight airspeed increase (~5-10km/h) before entering a thermal is missing or can be improved.
- Audio cues for thermals are far too strong. In real life this cue is created due to airspeed increase (+5km/h) and a bit of turbulence. This is usually very subtle, but in the sim this is very loud. Can be tuned back.
- The variometer seems to be just a vertical speed indicator. Variometers are compensated to only show the increase or decrease in total energy (Kinetic+potential energy). This is important to find thermals. If you pull up a VSI will give you a climb rate, but this is also happening if you are not in a thermal. It gives a false positive so to say. When you bleed of your kinetic energy for potential energy without lift, you cannot do this forever and just waste energy instead of finding new. With a variometer it only increases when lift is actually present and increases the total energy. In other words make a variometer that uses both the static pressure (potential energy) and dynamic pressure (kinetic energy) to supply the variometer.
- Current thermals are very close to one-another. In real life the distance between thermals is approximately 2 to 4 times the cloubase. For example if the cloudbase is 1000m above ground level, I expect to find a next thermal around 2-4 km away. Currently they are generated very closely.
- Current thermals are very chaotic. With this I mean that they don’t really have a core, but are rather a couple of strings of rising air. It is hard to center on these strings. In reality each thermal is different of course, so sometimes it happens that they are hard to center. But in good conditions I expect more or less columns of rising air that are more or less circular and wide enough to make turns with radii of 180-300m without too much changes in rising or sinking air.
- Current thermals have high peaks in indicated climb rates. These spikes can be downplayed a little bit. On an average day here in the Netherlands my variometer will peak in the range of 3-4 m/s with a total average climb of around 1.5 over the whole thermal. Perhaps a bit difficult to get right as this is very much place,weather,pilot dependent. My gut feeling is that the max indicated climb rates I see currently are a bit too much. Problem can also be related to variometer physics?
For now this is my feedback on the thermal system. To fellow glider pilots: Please comment what you think about the current state. I look forward to the next iteration. Keep up the good work!
8 Likes
Thank you for your feedback about thermals - every RL glider pilot feedback is very valuable as current thermals implementation although ambitious is seriously lacking basic thermal properties (like lacking spatial connection between thermals and clouds - there are strong blue thermals above condensation height surrounded cumulus clouds without thermals below them, also in msfs thermals often do not access cloud from the bottom but rather hit it from the side).
Those are serious issues for cross country soaring - me and other RL glider pilots did some test during SU11 beta - here is our feedback thread [6] Improved atmospheric simulation with a big focus on Thermals and general tweaks for the CFD
I am considering filing those as bug reports as it prevents realistic gliding (with current state best (but unrealistic) tactic is to avoid clouds as they limit you climb height and go for those strong “blue thermals” in between).
Current active wishlist for thermal improvements is here Thermals, Up & Downdrafts - More Realism Updates please consider upvoting and commenting also there.
As current organisation of forum is not very glider-interest friendly - to help msfs gliding community to grow and beter find gliding posts there is also a proposal to add a glider subforum, but we need more support as mods seem not to be that eager to create it - Glider forum
It’s like in a RL aeroclub - if we won’t be vocal about deficiences no positive change will happen, so glad to have you here. 
3 Likes
Agree. The thermals are not as polished as they are in real life and the Condor simulator.
Do you have feedback on the ridge soaring updraft as well? I find one has to fly very far from the mountain/ridge to get the updraft. The uprising air diminishes too quickly towards the ground surface.
Excellent post. Maybe you would like to make it into a wish list item or add it to one of the existing wish list threads listed above by EPPRglider81.
Putting it there is more likely to get it seen by Asobo, who are the only people who can do anything about fixing the problems.
It would be great to be able to feel the lift under a wing, in real-world gliding either the port or starboard wing can be lifted when a wing is pushed upward by lift. An experienced glider pilot turns in the direction of the rising wing. The inexperienced ab initio pilot gets pushed around by thermals and eventually falls-out of the sky. The implementation of lenticular clouds and atmospheric wave lift would be great to see in the future. If we could have cloud streets too, that would be pretty amazing however, I don’t think the atmospheric physics are ever going to match the real-world.
At present, the thermals do not appear to have cores into which I can centre the glider. Real-world centering technique does not appear to work. There are other considerations too, a glider often fly’s through an area of increased sink before flying into lift and when leaving the thermal. Flying/transitioning into air that is rising/sinking quickly also effects the airspeed of the glider. Flying down through a steep wind gradient into air closer to the ground which is moving more slowly, will slow a glider/aircraft down too. It would be amazing to have gliders/aircraft that respond to well modelled atmospheric physics and gliders with better aerodynamic modelling. Currently I don’t think that the cumulus clouds are associated with the lift in the simulator. How good it would to be able to see a cloud developing from a milky condensation into a boiling cumulus cloud with lift under it…
Charles.
2 Likes
I flew the ridge lift tutorial yesterday and had the one wing lift up when the one wing was experiencing the lift from the updraft.
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Well observed, and that is good news. Thanx for sharing…
Charles.
1 Like
Nice feedback, as already linked Thermals, Up & Downdrafts - More Realism Updates
some of your points are listed there, feel free to copy paste your feedback there as well maybe, I and probably many others agree with it
You may want to try this excellent free addon with specific clouds presets for gliders that just have been added to the last version: Floyds Epic Clouds » Microsoft Flight Simulator