3 hours ago, craigeaglefire said:

Why isn’t Asobo hiring all you geniuses whom seem to know better than them?
 

& you don’t have the gig anyway 🙂

There's armchair experts everywhere, on every forum for every game. In this instance though there are facts;

- the clouds pixelation was made far worse in SU5.

- the METAR integration of SU7 was and in some cases still is a complete mess.

- they completely ruined thunderstorms.

- there's still a severe lack of cloud variation.

- they struggle with depicting actual live weather, whether that be a servers fault or fault of the code who knows.

In this case the evidence is clear, Asobo screwed up and have not got the live weather anywhere near what it was like pre-SU7 and that is a widely regarded opinion (see the multiple threads on the official forum). Some think MSFS2024 will magically make everything great again, but I, for one, am keeping my live weather expectations at rock bottom so as not to be disappointed on release day.

Edited August 20, 20232 yr by MarcG

6 hours ago, MarcG said:

the clouds pixelation was made far worse in SU5

The "pixelation" that you refer to is a side effect of the resolution of 3D pixels.  You get what you call "pixelation" because the voxel grid is too course.  3D units per cubic volume is too low to get around that now.  When MSFS first released I sensed they weren't that far off from having something that could, with some modest additional resolution, start to be able to create distinct cloud morphologies. Then as you mention this got worse after SU5.  Right now I'm at FL350 and here's what is out the window:

Everyone's favorite weather guru Damian explained the performance cost for increasing resolution in voxel-based rendering is brutally harsh and in effect said it just was going to be hard to get around that.  Now we hear there is bigtime performance headroom coming in v2024, and this I hope gives them the arena to be able to advance rendering detail to a level we no longer see "pixelation"  "voxelation" as it were.

Edited August 20, 20232 yr by Noel

16 minutes ago, Noel said:

The "pixelation" that you refer to is a side effect of the resolution of 3D pixels.  You get what you call "pixelation" because the voxel grid is too course.  3D units per cubic volume is too low to get around that now.  When MSFS first released I sensed they weren't that far off from having something that could, with some modest additional resolution, start to be able to create distinct cloud morphologies. Then as you mention this got worse after SU5.  Right now I'm at FL350 and here's what is out the window:

Everyone's favorite weather guru Damian explained the performance cost for increasing resolution in voxel-based rendering is brutally harsh and in effect said it just was going to be hard to get around that.  Now we hear there is bigtime performance headroom coming in v2024, and this I hope gives them the arena to be able to advance rendering detail to a level we no longer see "pixelation"  "voxelation" as it were.

Whatever is called is irrelevant to me, the fact remains the clouds up close look far worse than they did pre-SU5. They did marginally improve thereafter it but nowhere near as good as it used to be, it's also far more evident when using VR which could explain why it's one of the very first graphically backwards aspects I noticed in that God forsaken update.

Just now, MarcG said:

Whatever is called is irrelevant to me, the fact remains the clouds up close look far worse than they did pre-SU5. They did marginally improve thereafter it but nowhere near as good as it used to be, it's also far more evident when using VR which could explain why it's one of the very first graphically backwards aspects I noticed in that God forsaken update.

I have to think we won't see anything substantial until 2024 in terms of improving things and as said I think they will very much leapfrog what MSFS 2020 was at release in terms of cloud depiction--why bother when they hopefully will indeed have the headroom to do the leapfrogging.  They will sell far more copies of 2024 if they leave 2020 where it is today.  But I agree fully clouds up close look dreadful very often.  I found this shot from very early on, quite nice:

 

for what it's worth - it is depicting the fire smoke covering eastern Washington and Oregon beautifully.  Actually quite uncanny.

Ok guys, on the back of the success we had with our campaign to get Asobos attention concerning atmospheric lighting, I'm reviving this thread to push for this issue with cloud opacity as well. I have already posted this bug report in a number of FB groups (some pending mod approval) and I'm hoping you guys could vote and spread the word too.

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/live-weather-clouds-density-opacity-always-zero/544158

 

Is it just me or was the weather recently improved a lot? at least for me there is really nothing to complain about...

 

 

Funny enough, the issue is still very apparent in the shots you provided

The first big thing to change in this simulation is the clouds, live weather representation and light environment and sky color. Even with a lot of visual imagination and with all due respect, your clouds in your photos are ugly.

Everything is an unbalanced mix of blue and gray that looks cartoonish. On which distant planet have you already encountered this atmosphere?

My God

As the OP of this topic, I'm happy that @Krakin wants to bring it back to life. But I also wanted to add something similar to what DAD said:

1 hour ago, DAD said:

Is it just me or was the weather recently improved a lot? at least for me there is really nothing to complain about...

In the last few weeks I've been flying around the US North East a lot (where the weather has been pretty shocking) and I also noticed that the cloud density seems much improved. Flying in Europe yesterday I also got the same feeling (in fact, I think that the cloud depiction in Europe tends to be much better generally than in the US anyway - not sure if this is because Meteoblue weather models are more detailed/accurate in Europe?).

I think it's still the case that the low-level, "thin" cloud layers (those only a couple of thousand feet thick) lack enough density compared to the early days, but I've yet to verify that in the sim.

I've actually been investigating another weather-engine related issue in the past week, that I intend to log as a bug in the official forms, regarding the cloud draw distance. At launch it was said that cloud draw distance was 600km (taking clouds over the horizon at almost all altitudes). But I see now that depending on your aircraft's location, the draw distance is massively less than this (I think it's based on latitude and perhaps their geodetic modelling). So in New England, for example, cloud draw distance is only 140km from your aircraft, and down in Florida it was 185km - I've still not investigated this as fully as I'd like. While testing I've seen differing behaviour when using live weather vs. weather themes. Sometimes the weather themes have massively greater draw distance than live weather, but when testing the same location again later, they both have the same (smaller) draw distance. This implies there may be a bug here.

But this issue means that if you're flying in clear air towards a weather system, the distant clouds will continuously load in ahead of you, with a clear horizon beneath them. At launch, this issue was solved, and was one of the great advances of this sim compared others, because the clouds would appear to go over the horizon giving a much more immersive experience.

Anyway, I'm going to look into it some more and will create a bug report in the coming days. While testing this, I'll also see if I can find whether the cloud density issue is resolved for thin low level cloud layers as well.

@RedgeThe problem definitely still persists. Just yesterday, the sim had the correct cloud placement compared to what was happening IRL but the lighting was way off because the sun was able to shine right through it. Only the thickest clouds block out the stars at night too. You load the sim up at night thinking the skies are clear because of how transparent they are.

6 hours ago, Krakin said:

on the back of the success we had with our campaign to get Asobos attention concerning atmospheric lighting, I'm reviving this thread to push for this issue with cloud opacity as well.

I appreciate your efforts - and have voted for the "Cloud density always zero" and other weather related threads a long time ago - and want to share some thoughts:

I tried to put a question for the last Q&A about what to expect for Live Weather in FS2024 with regards to the community feedback so far, but they stuck with their "let's not let the customers disturb our narrative"-approach of 10 internally preselected "questions". In that post I pointed out the discrepancies in Jorg Neumann's communication regarding Weather related issues in the current sim that I had already highlighted in this thread.

Obviously they do not intend to follow up on his promises from the past, therefore I am pretty sure we won't see any major changes to Live Weather in FS2020 anymore. And they won't talk about what to expect from FS2024 either before next spring.

Being very critical with the path the simulation of the Atmosphere took in the current sim and seeing the lack of interest the community takes in these matters (this thread:3.6k views, Captain Scam is back: 6.4k views) that made me very pessimistic at first, but then I came up with the following idea: Maybe the current atmospheric simulation has too many limitations to implement the numerous demands from the community. E.G. I am pretty sure that one of the difficulties to implement a proper Weather Radar is a lack of information that can be retrieved from Live Weather in-game. And obviously it seems nigh impossible for them to come up with other than cumuliform cloudtypes.

They have confirmed a rewrite of the Atmosphere simulation in the last Q&A, although with regards to the request for enhanced sky colors. But it lets me think that this rewrite might include a different approach for Live Weather as well, as the implementation of "uncanned" tornadoes (the only information we have to date) imho only makes sense if they are based on real time data that are injected without much delay. Doing the same for rain/snow/hail would go a long way for a proper WXRadar. There are however no clues as to how the visual quality will turn out, should there be a major rewrite of the Atmosphere simulation in the first place.

1 hour ago, Tom_L said:

Maybe the current atmospheric simulation has too many limitations to implement the numerous demands from the community.

To get to the quality of cloud rendering we'd all love there needs to be performance headroom within which to be able to make substantial improvements in.  We're told this is coming in 2024 along w/ the confirmed rewrite of the weather and atmospheric simulation.  2020 isn't going to see substantial performance headroom so beyond amping up "density", presumably that means "opacity' which could help a bit, not until we see the headroom in 2024 that we will start to have the potential to see serious improvement in cloud rendering with hopefully some potential for improved and distinct cloud morphologies.  Rather than spend much more dev time for 2020 I'd much rather seem them truly advance weather/cloud depiction for the 2024 release--I want there to be no question when 2024 releases there will be no point in sticking w/ 2020.

 

6 hours ago, filou said:

The first big thing to change in this simulation is the clouds...

Absolutely.  I think they're essentially done with this for 2020--in other words, don't waste your time hoping/wishing for any kind of real improvement it's not going to happen until their architecture rewrite affords them the performance headroom to go there, and that will not happen until the 2024 release.  Without a very obvious improvement in atmosphere depiction the impetus for me to upgrade to 2024 will be modest at best.  

3 hours ago, Noel said:

Absolutely.  I think they're essentially done with this for 2020--in other words, don't waste your time hoping/wishing for any kind of real improvement it's not going to happen until their architecture rewrite affords them the performance headroom to go there, and that will not happen until the 2024 release.  Without a very obvious improvement in atmosphere depiction the impetus for me to upgrade to 2024 will be modest at best.  

 

The clouds can be better, but no other sim has better clouds than this one.