HiFly, Craig:I hope you read this before it probably is removed from the forum:The thread you have started about making overcast possible looks like exactly like an email conversation between developers of AS2012, long before beta testing..Unfortunately it comes from a customer, after beta testing.. How this could not be descovered in the beta is very scary. And the spokesman here has already said the usual Active Sky famous words: "that is the way FSX is made".I also hope that they fix the overcast problem,but I had hoped that they had the above conversation themselves six months ago.But maybe I should not write a post like this, maybe they'll get upset and will do nothing about the problem;)

The problem now then becomes that ASE is now doing this when it was not before. It's like AS2012 has screwed something up. Not getting complete overcast and disappearing squares with both now. Your fix will not work with real world weather which is what I exclusively use. To re-edit that many stations flying across the US would be impractical.Also, this is ONLY with stratus clouds. One may say well only fly with cumulus. Well this defeats the purpose of realistic weather depiction. I need that stratus because in real life there is much stratus.The cumulus has complete overcast and no issues with patterned disappearance.

Yes MS Flightsim serie from the beginning was only about small planes on low altitude going slow.I do not have these problems and I do not care if it is Not total OVC everywhere. Most of the time when reported OVC it is 99% OVC. I have never seen these big holes you are talking about, never. Just some minorones that you hardly see. Also I have never ever had all these other strange problems a lot seems to have. Do not understand what is going on. I just have an today old Core2 Quad but it runs in 25/30 Fps with AS2012and PMDG 737NGX in 1920 x 1080 res. 32/bit WinXP Professional. Letting the nVidia doing the AA and all that. No problems whatsoever. Everything just runs and looks perfect. No plans to go to Win7.

The problem now then becomes that ASE is now doing this when it was not before. It's like AS2012 has screwed something up. Not getting complete overcast and disappearing squares with both now. Your fix will not work with real world weather which is what I exclusively use. To re-edit that many stations flying across the US would be impractical.Also, this is ONLY with stratus clouds. One may say well only fly with cumulus. Well this defeats the purpose of realistic weather depiction. I need that stratus because in real life there is much stratus.The cumulus has complete overcast and no issues with patterned disappearance.

I agree, Marc. If your concern is just for the scenery of overcast while enroute then I think a 3-D stratus texture needs to be developed and one that is not "partial" but total coverage. The texture tiles should then be able to fit together seemlessly and provide a total DECK appearance. The problem now is that the stratus in FSX are NOT 3-D, only 2-D and have no depth nor are they FULL-coverage textures.Now my fix is for a slightly different problem. It is to have a total overcast on departure and arrival that you can actually fly thru and down to a realistic low alitude which FSX normally will not create. Flying with real world wx or ASE, as I am now using for enroute is fine. Most airline flights are VMC above the clouds but departures and arrivals need a real depiction if you want the true IMC experience and that is what my method has attempted to create. I do believe, however, that the method could be put into code as a subroutine and produce that same effect anytime overcast conditions are encountered enroute as well. That with a true Stratus texture would solve the issue for all of us.

It sound like Hifi is working on the problem with an sp1.

Play around with this; CLOUD_COVERAGE_DENSITY=8 in fsx.cfg. I saw something about it and that it should increase coverage. The default max setting is 8 but someone suggested 12 but it might kill the FPS.I tried it at 12 but on my machine FPS drop very much so I have it on 9 and it works OK. Will try 10 next flight. The only thing is that if you change something in FSX settings it will be reset to 8.Try it and come back if it worked as you want

It sound like Hifi is working on the problem with an sp1.

I hope so, Marc. But so far I have not seen any mention of it other than Damian's initial comments at the beginning of this thread which may have just been a polite placating response. But, again, they did tackle the wind-aloft issue after a year of ranting from hundreds of us. So, let's see if this issue just dies or if it is kept alive long enough for them to take it seriously.