This is not a support question, but just out of curiosity to see if this bugs anyone else. What I am referring to is the way the atmosphere is set up in P3D, and in FSX. What I mean by that is how compact and close everything seems to be when flying at altitude. For instance, I fly corporate jets in my sim so I usually camp out between FL380, and FL430. But whenever I’m up there, it seems as though I’m at 10,000ft. I don’t have that feeling of being that high. The clouds are way too close it seems. Off in the distance if I pan around I can see the bottom of the cumulus build ups which is nearly impossible in real life if you’re flying that high up. I wish P3D would break off of the old FSX and build a “new atmosphere” if you will. Anyone else agrees? 

What's your Zoom Level settings for the current views you use to "see" the outside environment?  Most experienced real world pilots will say they use about 0.60 - 0.70 Zoom in the sim.  

Note that you can zoom the outside view separately from something like the Virtual Cockpit Panel View.  When sitting in the Virtual Cockpit, you zoom the outside view using the "+" or "-" keys.  You use the Eyepoint View(s) keyboard combinations (there are 6 of them) to "zoom" the cockpit panel when using the Virtual Cockpit.  Combine those two different methods to get an outside zoom that looks OK along with the proper "distance" from a Virtual Cockpit instrument panel.

In a Spot View, if you have a 1.00 zoom setting, yes...the ground is normally going to appear closer to you than it would in the real world at high altitude.  And so will ground scenery that is farther away from you in farther away LOD rings from the airplane.  That farther away LOD scenery will be using lower resolution scenery displays, which can also result in the "blurry texture" posts about scenery farther away from the aircraft when using too high zoom levels.

Edited July 4, 20187 yr by FalconAF

17 minutes ago, FalconAF said:

What's your Zoom Level settings for the current views you use to "see" the outside environment?  Most experienced real world pilots will say they use about 0.60 - 0.70 Zoom in the sim.  

Note that you can zoom the outside view separately from something like the Virtual Cockpit Panel View.  When sitting in the Virtual Cockpit, you zoom the outside view using the "+" or "-" keys.  You use the Eyepoint View(s) keyboard combinations (there are 6 of them) to "zoom" the cockpit panel when using the Virtual Cockpit.  Combine those two different methods to get an outside zoom that looks OK along with the proper "distance" from a Virtual Cockpit instrument panel.

In a Spot View, if you have a 1.00 zoom setting, yes...the ground is normally going to appear closer to you than it would in the real world at high altitude.  And so will ground scenery that is farther away from you in farther away LOD rings from the airplane.  That farther away LOD scenery will be using lower resolution scenery displays, which can also result in the "blurry texture" posts about scenery farther away from the aircraft when using too high zoom levels.

Oh yeah I know all about that stuff with zooming but no matter what zoom you are in, the flight levels just don’t look like they do in real life to me. Like I mentioned before, it doesn’t help that in 2018, we’re still leaning on a platform that really dates back to FS2004. I would like to see some improvements made in the way the skies are projected. 

4 hours ago, Deltaair1212 said:

This is not a support question, but just out of curiosity to see if this bugs anyone else. What I am referring to is the way the atmosphere is set up in P3D, and in FSX. What I mean by that is how compact and close everything seems to be when flying at altitude. For instance, I fly corporate jets in my sim so I usually camp out between FL380, and FL430. But whenever I’m up there, it seems as though I’m at 10,000ft. I don’t have that feeling of being that high. The clouds are way too close it seems. Off in the distance if I pan around I can see the bottom of the cumulus build ups which is nearly impossible in real life if you’re flying that high up. I wish P3D would break off of the old FSX and build a “new atmosphere” if you will. Anyone else agrees? 

Totally agree. The cloud scaling is something that really needs addressing because it really kills the immersion for me.

zooms at 0.6/.7? Even with widescreen aspect ratio?

Totally agree with OP and this is something that have become a bit of a pet peeve for me. I've been flying X-plane exclusively for a couple of month now (due to severe lack of time) and have just recently returned to P3D when I upgraded to 4.3 and that feeling of being really close to the ground despite being at 40k feet is really quite annoying.

 

I utilize rex SF and AS16, and I have my cloud draw distance set up in AS16 to 150nm’s. But nothing seems to really work. I’m going to try to open a “support” ticket with Lockheed to see if they can shed some light to this topic. Who knows, maybe someone on the team realizes this too and is possibly working on a fix for v5 🤷🏽‍♂️ Lol. 

Frankly I never noticed this until I started flying in XP11 a while ago. The proportions and distances of the world in XP11 appear different... and more realistic somehow. I find it hard to say exactly what causes it. It's as if the perspective is setup more appropriately in XP11, as well as the relative distances seeming more accurate, as the OP mentions. I wish LM could address this, though I wouldn't be surprised if this would require a large-scale overhaul of the simulation. Perhaps with the "new rendering engine" LM mentioned in passing for v5?

How did this turn into another XPlane advertisement? Back on topic, I've found that the settings in Active Sky are very important in getting realistic views from altitude.  Also, as one that started flying decades ago, I can maintain that sometimes the real world view from altitude is very clear especially over West Texas, but generally there is a difference in visibility below the "haze layer" that might be 5000 ft to 20000 ft depending on weather and time of year.  I've seen plenty of views with ASP4 that amaze me with the realism but on the other and they still don't know how to create a realistic cumulonimbus.  One thing that helps is to slightly limit maximum upper visibility, while I have had many occasions where I've seen a CB towering above the horizon over 100 nm away, it seems to help the simulator if that maximum is slightly lowered.

5 minutes ago, downscc said:

How did this turn into another XPlane advertisement? Back on topic, I've found that the settings in Active Sky are very important in getting realistic views from altitude.  Also, as one that started flying decades ago, I can maintain that sometimes the real world view from altitude is very clear especially over West Texas, but generally there is a difference in visibility below the "haze layer" that might be 5000 ft to 20000 ft depending on weather and time of year.  I've seen plenty of views with ASP4 that amaze me with the realism but on the other and they still don't know how to create a realistic cumulonimbus.  One thing that helps is to slightly limit maximum upper visibility, while I have had many occasions where I've seen a CB towering above the horizon over 100 nm away, it seems to help the simulator if that maximum is slightly lowered.

Hardly an “advertisement”. Just because we all agree XP11 has an advantage over this issue doesn’t mean we’re advertising anything. We would just like to see improvement on how the sims perspective is projected lateral wise. And no amount of third party settings will fix this issue because it is deep within the core of the sim. The only people that can fix it is the sims developers but it would take reworking the whole sim. Just saying “oh I have these really neat AS settings” won’t actually fix the problem. That would be like putting a band aide on a skull fracture. It won’t get fixed unless you do some major repairs.