Thermals, Up & Downdrafts - Realism Update/ Airmass Simulation

I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I have no turbilance or gusts. I even turned off Live Weather and selected Storm. I have set many wind shifts with gusts.the plane just flies straight ahead. You can see that I have crosswind. But it’s not bumpy. I’ve turned on CFD. I can see, how is wind working. But no gust no bumpy. I flown with Asobi a320 und FBW A320.

Well, I guess I know what you do wrong - you test it with heavy aircraft in the first place. Try it with some smaller ones like the C172 or C152. Other than that select a warm and sunny day and fly in some region with changing ground (fields and woods and some hills probably). From what was told by Seb you will get shaked as air will go upwards from dark areas especially. Wind does not play the biggest role in that currently from what I know.

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I rewatched the Q&A before the last one (starting timestamp 33:50)
There are a lot of explanations I totally forgot about!

at 35:56 Seb said this is gonna be in Sim Update 9 (the current one)!

So yes we definitely have an first implementation of reworked airflow (thermals, up & down drafts and turbulence) created by temperature, surface differences (like are you above water, a large cornfield or buildings and stuff like that).

And it’s noticeable, I was able to use a glider in live weather for the first time and actually gain altitude, and also got some nice turbulence :smiley: the air feels much more alive, I love it!

(+ it’s not necessary to use any fancy weather presets with super dark clouds and insane temperatures anymore!)

Also Seb said at the end they gonna improve it from here on. The future looks bright :slight_smile:

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I have a thermal preset in my preset pack that is now very over the top. Will be glad to get rid of the dark volcanic clouds and mad temperatures to get some lift :grin:

In the Discus over Namibia with Live Weather I was able to maintain altitude with small pockets of lift and it felt more natural too. Step in the right direction

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They talked about that and it sounded like they are not very optimistic about finding a solution soon that doesn’t absolutely murder the performance. Because currently it’s a matter of light bouncing around in the clouds and their computations are simplified to make them perform better. This is what causes the ashen look in some circumsctances.

What he specifically meant was the gliding preset clouds, in order to be able to glide at all. They were super dark and big and if you used them, every place on earth looked the same.

Gladly they are now a thing of the past and we don’t have to use over the top presets anymore.
Live weather looks 90% of the time very good and natural imo (specially after SU9).

What I’m also happy about is that you don’t get ‘‘guaranteed’’ updrafts/ thermals, like everywhere and all the time, which is a sign that the new airflow simulation works good/ realistic.

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I can confirm Thermals over cornfields created by temperature differences are working perfectly!
I used the Meteoblue map to find a spot with good ‘soaring flight distance’ and just started there.

No clouds or mountains in any direction which could have an effect and the thermals are working properly!



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I wish we could have a Meteoblue forecast map into the sim instead of that VFR map with tracking of our plane :blush:

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I guess that will be implemented with the glider release this year.

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Sounds so cool! :heart_eyes: Tks for sharing! :dash: :small_airplane:

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Sorry posted in wrong thread :smiley: Trying to make those complaining about turbulence learn how weather works.

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Thanks, I posted there as well. I don’t blame anyone for complaining, because a lot of people just don’t know how airflow works in reality.

I just hope that Asobo stays on the real simulation path and doesn’t go back to the arcade like behaviour like they did last year.

Because only a few are complaining and many many more people are enjoying the new airflow simulation. So I hope they literally keeping it real this time and just educate people instead of making everything smooth and unrealistic again.

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I changed the opening thread post since a lot of things have changed with simupdate 9.
If you have any additional wishes/ ideas in connection with this topic let me know :slight_smile:

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Eh, still not there yet. And I suppose there are still no gusts. Haven’t lauched the sim in a while, but I will give it a try since Fenix is out.

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I wonder if the thermals is reduced under 5kts in live weather too or if it was just in the custom weather they talked about in the latest Q&A. I’m really happy for gusts to return in su10 though.

Besides i think it’s a good thing to generate less thermals below 5 KTS because if there is no windspeed it can’t be thermals either because the cold air should take the hot airs place and that creates wind to move. The real improvement will be when we have the CFD that covers 20KM radius. That will be awesome actually. That will create high and low pressure zones locally :slight_smile: That will make the air feel real! As it is now they only have added the low pressure zone where the air rises but IRL it needs both.

I think this explains it really well for those that want to know how winds work,

What do you think about the changes? Maybe it will be harder to find thermals? Because often in clear weather there is not much winds but it could be turbulence anyway. The air is really complex. Everything really needs to be simulate to be realistic.

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Explanation of the current thermal / updraft implementation and future plans and the comeback of gusts with SU10

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Yes. they talk about it because I added in Dev Q&A forum section question about if here https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/can-you-explain-what-factors-are-currently-taken-into-account-in-thermal-updraft-model-and-what-are-the-future-plans-for-realistic-soaring-weather/517667 (It is still worth reading as I made there some suggestions.) - sadly they have some policy about not advertising questions so I didn’t post abut it here when it was active, thankfully it got enough upvotes.
I am thinking about preparing another “loaded” question about the scope of features they plan to add with official gliders support.

User “GurtTractor” at Discord did a transcript of their response:

`In SU9 it computes the amount of watts, the energy recieved by the sun, which will depend on if it’s day or night, how high the sun is in the sky, how thick of atmosphere is crossed by the sunlight, if it’s humid or whatever if there’s haze etc, if there’s clouds. And so at the end there’s an amount of watts remaining that hits the ground at a certain angle, and then you know how much energy you get, then it calculates all sorts of things like how dark, albedo basically, how much energy is reflected, how much is kept. This transforms into heat, and then you know how much basically your ground is heating up. When you ground is significantly warmer than the air it builds up hot air which then wants to go up, and here you have your thermals.

Right now this is SU9, what we are adding with SU10 is to make this a little bit more comfortable, we are blending in the wind factor so that when you have absolutely zero wind you will get less thermals. … So now when you have low wind speeds the thermals are going to be much less than before, if you want strong thermals put at least 5 knots of wind or something … We also made these turbulence a little bit weaker at high altitudes, like I would say 20k and above, you will see less thermals. In SU10 you will see more gusts however.`

`And something we are currently working on but that will not be for SU10 - the problem with this system is that is it’s really working very locally, and generates local thermals that don’t combine when the go up and create, like the air which goes up somewhere else it needs to go back down, it doesn’t create any vortices/turblences on the side of thermals, anything like that yet. So there’s a research work going on which basically took the CFD of the airplanes and expanded that 20ish kilometers around the plane, so that’s a really very very very big CFD running, and it goes pretty high as well.

And we hope that sometime this year we’ll get that to, basically manage to simulate those airflows in the atmosphere to get nicer updrafts, nicer wind, that can combine so that only bigger fields get updrafts when you are going higher up, that you get vortices with air going back down, and all sorts of different local wind effects that we don’t really get with live weather, like live weather gives us wind gusts and direction but it’s something a bit more for the area, and not really (Seb interrupted by someone in his building, also briefly mentions looking into thermal effects over snow).`

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What i understand from that part about less thermals in less winds is that they make it like that in the meantime we wait for the improved CFD right? When the improved CFD is implemented that will simulates it self right?

How winds work is like this. Cold winds slows down (low windspeed) and drops down to ground (downdraft) then that wind moves (higher windspeeds with more gust) near ground to the hot area and then slows down again (low windspeed) and rises (updraft) then that wind moves toward the colder area again (higher winds but less gusts).

That would be awesome :clap: More realistic winds than that we can’t have i think but i think it will be hard to have correct windspeeds and direction to what METAR and Meteoblue says. I don’t need it to be but there is alot of people here that needs that, those will complain for sure. I could be wrong though.

I think it’s more realistic if the winds not matching METAR all the time. The winds should not be forced into a state. The winds from those sources should only be the main ingredient and then let it be. Not force it to stay like that :slight_smile:

Edit: Thought about a thing. The thermals should be reduced when there is higher windspeeds and high gusts. It should be the way around. Correct me if i’m wrong here. Gliding is done in good weather. Not in storms.

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It’s a liitle bit hard to understand, but I think he means when you have about zero wind (below 5 knots) you will also get less thermals, which makes sense, because thermals are not created by wind, but they ‘‘create’’ wind. And this is an workaround until the advanced CFD comes around.

If I understand it correctly the advanced CFD simulation will blend in with the meteo blue data, so at the end you should still get almost correct wind speeds, but it’s gonna be more like in real life where the predictions also don’t match absolutely 100% of the time and that’s a good thing for realism.

I also hope they doesn’t mean the thermals gonna scale completely with the genaral wind speed. If there is absolutely no wind I can understand that there are no strong thermals. But as soon as there is like 5 knots of wind strong thermals should be possible. But Seb sadly didn’t describe completely how this is gonna work.

But overall it sounds like they gonna reduce current thermal effects until they have the advanced CFD simulation ready… which is currently only in research.

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Agree with that :slight_smile: It makes sense. It think it’s good workaround as well in the meantime we wait :slight_smile:

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