VFR is no fun with new "Haze/Fog"

VR hasn’t been fun for a week now(unless I’m using P3D) since SU 7. They sure messed this one up.

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You mean the Live Weather system which implements winds aloft at ground level? Thats what I would call ridiculous.

Something I noticed on my VFR flights over the past few days through the Mojave:

The haze is only affecting a certain radius around airports that report METARs.

Every airport reporting a METAR IRL was reporting temps in the teens to twenties above zero (Celsius), and dewpoints in the minus teens to twenties Celsius. This is a temp-DP spread of 30-40 degrees in some cases. RL visibility was reported 10SM in all cases.

However, the in-game ATIS or AWOS was reporting a dewpoint of 10°C for every airport. Each of these airports in-game had haze with 2SM visibility at best. KLAS, KHND, KEDW, KMHV.

Now, I notice there’s a new “humidity” slider in the weather menu. I do not know what the number represents, but increasing the slider increases the apparent haze, reducing visibility. Is it possible that the game is interpreting a narrow temp-DP spread because of a buggy dewpoint and jacking the humidity, thus lowering visibility?

Whaat…?

Even less sense than the previous post.

“Winds aloft” at “ground level”?
So you are referring to surface winds?

Not sure how that relates to using METAR data from another airport to generate weather at an airport with no reporting.

METARS do not include winds aloft. Nothing does. Winds aloft are not reported. They are forecast.

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Yes, thank you for that - please keep up. I was saying that the alternative is MFS’ ‘Live Weather’ system, which quite often implements winds aloft at surface level - meaning that the speed and direction are all wrong. I’d personally say that is more “ridiculous” than retrieving the nearest weather station’s METAR, but to each their own.

They’re both flawed options, so it’s a lose/lose situation when the destination hasn’t got a METAR report.

Not just me - but the rest of 425 people.
I was first discovered this bug by checking my home airport, and there were ground clouds miles ahead.
Cannot believe people think it is actual fog.

You guys realise that they’ve taken the METAR vis 9999+ as exactly 10km (or around 6 miles for those inclined to be different from the rest of the world). There is no METAR data for visibility above that, so they’ll need another source or work it out using whatever data they have.

Hopefully they figure out that they can tap into the AQI indexes from around the world to get much more accurate figures.

We also need visibility layers, so we can have inversion layers for example.
And that visibility range needs to go right down to CAT IIIB, 75m amounts.

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Agree with your post, right to this line. :wink:

If 0 vis then let’s have 0 vis. I just drove through a fog layer recently where I could barely see the road in front of my truck. Daylight fortunately or I would have been in the ditch for sure.

Visibility is one phenomenon that can never really be appreciated by the earthbound. Aviation has a perspective that most never see. Except for the cold, crisp days experienced well away from human habitation, “unlimited” visibility on the ground is very rare. We have been conditioned within the sim to expect ‘LOD 400’ visibility. I remember very few days when any significant detail could be seen more than a dozen miles. Sure you can see there are mountains and trees and buildings, but crisp detail is a computer generated fantasy.

There are also days when you can’t even get off the ground. Days where you wander aimlessly in the direction you know you parked but just cannot find your aircraft. If you were already airborne chances are good you will be in an extended hold or heading for your alternate.

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It may indeed be haze in the OP’s case and many of the reported instances. It’s also irrelevant in this discussion since the sim doesn’t know the difference between mist, haze, or fog when setting the visibility conditions.

Just for the folks who are driving by and don’t know what all the fuss is about, and so that the same info can be found in this thread as other threads that discuss the issue: Many airports with METARs that max out at 10sm visibility are now always (less than) 10sm visibility in the sim. This means that thousands of airports across the US and elsewhere (North America) are now perpetually and unrealistically blanketed in way too much haze. Lots of folks who only fly in places like Europe where the METARs are formatted differently, aren’t experiencing this issue, or experience it differently depending on the location.

Clouds being unrealistically drawn too low such that they’re on the ground, which would also appear as fog or mist from inside of them, is another issue.

When the haze/mist is realistically portrayed in the sim, it adds a challenging dynamic to VFR flying. But when it’s always overdone, I agree with the OP, VFR is no longer any fun.

It’s a real drag loading into the home field and seeing this “10 mile” visibility every single time, when in real life it’s much higher than this.

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Its worse when it’s below freezing. The plane freezes on the ground sitting on the taxiway even on a clear blue sky day.

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Just to be clear, Haze and Fog are two different things. Fog is a nice touch if it’s the current weather conditions.
Haze however, appears to have been added everywhere gratuitously to mask or reduce draw distance for frame rates or some other reason. It’s overdone, unrealistic and i hope they get rid of it.

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I enjoy it. It adds depth and in most of the world there’s some kind of haze.

I just want the clouds off the ground.

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yep, get those clouds off the ground

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Don’t really care what ya call it…I just want it to be a reasonable facsimile to the real world. Since SU7 Clouds, haze, mist, humidity, or dust in the air isn’t even close here in the desert southwest of US.
It was much better before SU7. Also, they did such a good job tweakin the graphics it’s a shame to cover them up.
I’m just hoping for an adjustment.

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Keep in mind also that VFR is generally possible down to 5nm visibility. I would purposefully take my students up in that kind of vis to show them what the legal minimums really looks like. Most of them were shocked, as it looks like you’re completely fogged in.
So what we have here IS legal VFR, just not as nice as 50nm vis… But many places around the world will not see more vis than that depicted in your pics above.

Totally agree with this…

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Me too, it’s overdone. Some people like it, so we should have it turn-on-and-offable.

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Ive been gamming for 40 yrs, I agree with this. It is what has been done in other games BF1942 as a example. The graphics have been dumbed down. They didn’t show all this fog in the original trailer of the game as they showed clear bright skies. It was advertised as a sightseeing game.

Whats the point of buying a 3rd party airport if you cant see it ? If you look at the opening screen shots when you load into the game, you don’t see much view obstructing haze in those shots.

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The excessive fog was not added to improve performance. Adding this kind of fog would actually decrease performance since it’s a volumetric effect that scatters light, rather than a simple z-fog effect that 20 year old games like BF1942 and Flight Simulator 2000 used.

Instead it was a bug caused by the improper reading of METARs when METAR based visibility was added to SU7. It’s fixed in the SU7 hotfix/update beta from what I’ve seen.