Marten who with FlightSimStudio AG officialy introduced gliders to MSFS near the end (01:25:20) of your official Gliders Overview twich stream Twitch provided very important for us, glider pilots, statement:
I’d like to tell a bit more not about thermals currently implemented, but about thermal future
if that is fine with you, because right now what you see in the sim is um…,
a lot people said it’s there too many thermals, it’s too easy and they are unrealistic…
And that is true! And that is by design.
Right now at least, because we… During the developement we had two thermal versions:
an easy model and something like a realis… real model or realistic model
and during testing uhm, a lot of people said it is too hard for us to find termals
and they do not understand it.
And so, in the first version we decided to ship like the easy model,
however we have the other … or we have an optimized code ready already…
we had that before and uhm, this is probably… will ship that in the next update.
Bacause we see the attention to gliders which is awesome!
And we see people doing a lot of our introduction tutorials or missions.
So they step up in terms of knowledge, thats great so yeah,
we will something new, it will be even better than before
And so… Whatever concern you may have right now in terms of thermals
we will definately fix it or actually already have it…
[rest become untelliglible due to microphone malfunction]
I and many other people applaud for this Marten’s statement as it conveys the general feeling about SU11 thermal model and we had hopes that significant changes will be made in SU12. Sadly as of SU12Beta changes seem to be more like delicate tweaks to existing engine that don’t even fix weather/thermal items as stated in SU12beta release notes (items 43, 40, 45). During beta period we tried to suggest simple tweaks to salvage what is possible about thermal weather in SU12Beta in current model, but in long run more significant changes may be necessary to have really realistic thermal weather - for example current engine seem to treat Cu clouds visualization in separation from the thermals - it feels very artificial and incorrect - thermals miss clouds, thermals hit clouds from the side, thermals go above clouds, cloud shapes don’t match thermal flow, strong thermals happen in blue sky areas between clouds. Current state rather misrepresents gliding than helps to learn and enjoy it.
Realistic model should treat ground heat and atmosphere state - dry/wet lapse rate (as observed on skew-t diagrams) as input for thermals generation, that in turn when reaching dew point should generate clouds - with the shape as dictated by thermal updraft flow and wind, not the other way around as it seems it happens now - clouds seem to be generated by an a static cloud map texture and “ground” thermals are mostly unrelated to clouds - this will never acheive realistic results.
So we’d like to know are there any plans for further significant improvements to weather model - this not only affects glider pilots - many power plane pilots also talk about lack of no turbulence in clouds and general lack of dangerous weather - so for many people this is the most important aspect needing improvement.
