With the latest patch it seems live weather is going to produce lighting regardless of actual weather. This is the first time I’ve got a good look at the lightning is the sim. My question is why is it so hard to make lightning look good. Every sim seems to always struggle with this creating some slowly fading on and all bright white light with a rather generic looking lighting bolt that washes out the whole screen. Is there some reason why lightning is never modeled well? Here is a video of what I feel lightning should look more like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT3FHgVdlsg
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Performance.
They probably CAN make it look similar but it would likely cause stuttering with every bolt. I remember past falcon4 community patches, some looked absolutely amazing but it made the sim a sideshow during a TS.
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The lightning is too slow, does not flicker like the majority of real word bolts and it’s far too bright. I think asobo have bigger things to fix at the moment though. These kind of things may come form third party’s such as REX or active sky hopefully. I’m looking forward to see what a third party could do with the current system.
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The issue is from what I am hearing asobo doesn’t want to open up the weather at this point. I don’t know how true that is but I really hope so
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Asobo and MS have said they are not in favour of opening up the weather system to 3rd party developers, they want to keep that in-house and get it working as well as they can. So if we dont like aspects of the default weather we need to lobby Asobo for changes, not rely on external help.
Just make a wishlist thread and let people vote on how important that is for them.
I for one would be happy to see much less thunderstorms than they added in the last patch, which is a far bigger issue to me than how they look. 
Yeah that is exactly what I mean by lobbying, create a wish list thread with votes so people can tell Asobo they want something different.
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Exactly, it is way too slow. Saw a great example of lightning in the latest Mafia game (definitive edition) where the lightning was more like a few stroboscope bursts (like in the disco) and didn’t wash out the entire screen.
Farther out lightning should also have way less effect than close by lightning. A very nearby strike might wash out the entire screen, but only for a split of a second. Very far away lightning should only be visible in or below the clouds (as lightning bolts) lighting up the clouds like in the video you shared.
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It is actually really hard to make that effect in the video. Intracloud lightning illumination using a non-point light source and scattering. They definitely could try to approximate it better, but that’s a pretty complex scene to get right without coming off cartoony.
The sim lightning looks like a positive cloud-to-ground stroke. Whether they intended that or not, I’m not sure. On positive strikes, the lightning channel is often smooth, thick, doesn’t flicker or branch, and and can last for well over a second before slowly decaying in a beaded breakup. This kind of lightning is relatively infrequent compared to other types, however, so I agree they should be defaulting to negatively charged lightning with lots of flickering return strokes and branching bolts.
IRL example:
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I think you should link Asobo to your YouTube channel so that we can have a perfect weather simulator.
Seriously though bugs aside we have something much better than in any other sim. It will be interesting to see what developers like REX can do with the new engine.
And don’t forget, even the engine is going to be evolving. So much more to come.
Its nice as it is for the moment 
I think just making it faster would improve it a lot
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I remember back in the day when we were happy to have crooked diagonal lines for planes…
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Some of us are very nit picky when it comes to the weather just as some are the same with other parts of the sim. It’s very easy to get bogged down in fine detail and not enjoy the bigger experience.
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I flew near the grand Canyon near 1G4 with storm setting and sunset , the way the lighting lit up the valleys and contrasted against
![Screenshot (40)|690x431] the red clouds was really awesome… looks better in game than in screenshots.
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Thanks for that info. I guess I never realized that and after further looking into I see that 90-95% of lightning strikes are of negative so seems odd that would choose to model a type which is so less frequent.
Just like with the always lava-red sunsets, they probably opted for stunning screenshots over realism for the lightning. At some point I hope they’ll tune it down and change to more realism, just like they recently did with the water reflections.
It’s just always a balance, real life isn’t always as stunning as marketing wants the sim to look like 
And adding variation means that each variation needs to be (re-)tested. So you carefully select what you add to the sim, even if it sounds easy initially.
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I noticed. that every flash drops FPS
