I wish LM would solve this... cloud shadows!

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

I would hope so also, but I think that fixing this bug is like asking LM to update the P3d legacy ATC logic. I suspect LM doesn't have both the time and the expertise to fix it. Hear me out on this before you think that I'm insulting LM. The logic behind ATC is extremely complicated. It's not so much a coding issue as it is posessing the expertise on the fine details of real world ATC.

The same is true of the math behind the projection of shadows from clouds onto terrain and objects. What works when projecting the shadow of a solid wing onto the console of the user's aircraft may fall apart when projecting the sun's light through billboard cloud sprites onto undulating terrain. There's a lot of math here that disguises the simple end result. I think that LM just doesn't want to mess around with it and make things worse. Look how long it took them to fix a similar issue, "spinning clouds".

What surprises me about this bug is that Rob A. never responds in the many threads here on this topic. On the official P3d forums, I've also never seen a detailed response by any LM staff. You never know though. Maybe one day the bug will be fixed.

[pracines 823]

40 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

You guys just noticed this?

No....its a holiday weekend and flight simmers have a little more time to discuss sundry items.😊

[anden145 2,284]

58 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

You all should visit the HiFi forum and read their disheartening update regarding the state of the Active Sky for XP11 beta.

Must have missed this.
Do you have a link to that? 🙂

(Sorry, I'm lazy. I could find it myself, but - as I said - I'm lazy...)

On a personal reflection: In my opinion, there's something fundamentally wrong, with how P3D displays clouds and ligting. The very idea of these fake 3D clouds - which are actually 2D sprites, which spins, to create an illusion of volume, is just weird and wrong, IMO.

It's no wonder, that shadow clouds (how they're created is a mystery, since clouds haven't gotten any mass or volume) are faked somehow. Another immersion killer is having cockpit/VC shadows, when there's overcast or foggy weather. 

It seems like, that cloud shadows aren't created the same way, as if the clouds were actually objects with mass. I can (to a point) understand why this solution was chosen, back in the day... it's performance saving. But in a perfect world, the clouds should be displayed, the way clouds actually are - as condensed water vapor... but that would/is probably impossible... 

I was quite thrilled, when Dovetail Games implemented trueSKY into FlightSim World - but that didn't last... To be honest, it is my dearest hope, that Lockheed-Martin, at some point, would completely overhaul the weather and cloud depiction engine within P3D. 

Edited November 25, 2018 by Anders Bermann

[Matthijs 79]

25 minutes ago, Anders Bermann said:

Must have missed this.
Do you have a link to that? 🙂

...

Some more news about ASXP: http://hifisimtech.com/asxp/?fbclid=IwAR37Qx-aUYQIcFZhXh4e4kpF8LVPhNZVQFOo012JZenkFBs-g62k4_Uhy0E

It is not all bad and disappointing. 

Edited November 25, 2018 by Matthijs

[KBUR 178]

4 hours ago, Oliver Ooi said:

Oddly enough I saw some peoples say this is not annoying them at all..

LOL..yea I'm one of the freaks who is annoyed by this fault just a very little bit 🤪 .

[Guest]

5 hours ago, pracines said:

I agree Jeroen, but I wont leave P3D to XP over it; P3D's add-ons are far superior to XP's and they always will be.🙂

Agreed. I am thinking about reinstalling XP frequently (specially after seeing the TE GB screenshots) but whenever I think about all the things I will be missing I just can't be bothered.

5 hours ago, Oliver Ooi said:

Oddly enough I saw some peoples say this is not annoying them at all..

Maybe they don't use something like TrackIR: it's much more annoying when you can easily look around.

3 hours ago, Bobsk8 said:

Switching to XP would be like leaving a wife you really love because she has a freckle. 

I am sure Howard isn't thinking about switching to XP just because of this bug. 😉

[GSalden 4,655]

Is it just me or is this turning into a XP thread ... 🤨

[KBUR 178]

1 hour ago, J van E said:

6 hours ago, Oliver Ooi said:

Oddly enough I saw some peoples say this is not annoying them at all..

Maybe they don't use something like TrackIR: it's much more annoying when you can easily look around.

LOL Nr.2 😀 !  I consider myself a Hardcore TrackIR User (have even made a customized Track Hat on my own). 

It is wat it is: it just annoys me almost nothing, and others too probably.  People are different in their sensitivness!

I grew up in a windy, mountanious area in the heart of Europe and such a cloud shadow/light behaviour, discribed like above, is not that unrealistic as someone might think, especially on late summer/early autumn (on ground AND on mountain peaks):

"In one moment you are covered in dark shadows, almost no light, and within in a few seconds your body is brightened with full sun light, because cloud shadows disappeared in a sudden.

But yes, of course it would be nice if Lockheed will fix it to get the behaviour of cloud shadows more realistic in sim.

Edited November 25, 2018 by KBUR
English is NOT my mother tongue.

[pracines 823]

10 minutes ago, GSalden said:

Is it just me or is this turning into a XP thread ... 🤨

When discussing features/failures of either sim, the mentioning of another sim is inevitable, and to be expected. This is reason 63,286 why I would rather have only 1 simulator with all of the best features of all sims from all time.

Competition elsewhere is fine, but in this community competition does not serve that great a purpose, especially because of how quick differences of taste or opinion turn into a war. Though we need and should stick together, we are so divided.  

[G-RFRY 1,707]

You never know this may come in v5 at some cost to performance then just sit back and listen to the moaning, we want every thing in but be able to run it at 60fps good luck with that. 

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

26 minutes ago, rjfry said:

You never know this may come in v5 at some cost to performance then just sit back and listen to the moaning, we want every thing in but be able to run it at 60fps good luck with that. 

It is also possible that LM did this on purpose to improve performance. I've noticed that distant object textures (like those of tall city buildings for example) tend to unload if one looks away from the object. If one then quickly turns back to look at the object, the object is black until the texture reloads. The way that the cloud shadows are rendered may be an unintended consequence of a similar approach.

My personal experience of coding non-flightsim simulation models is that it's more likely an unintentional math error in the way that the shadows are calculated. That sentence is easy to write, but the solution may be very complex. What may be happening is the equivalent of what's termed in algebraic lingo as a singular point:

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SingularPoint.html

In simple terms, it's a point where the equation has nasty behavior (like explained in the above link). When panning with TrackIR, one sees that the cloud shadows look great but then at some distinct viewing angle they disappear completely. Turn one's head back to the original angle and the shadows reappear. Yep, that's nasty behavior alright.

[roarkr 104]

Quote

To be honest, it is my dearest hope, that Lockheed-Martin, at some point, would completely overhaul the weather and cloud depiction engine within P3D.

It is not only weather and cloud engines that need to be overhauled. It is the complete system and rendering engines. 

P3Dv4 is still a 2006 game with some small improvements. All major things like rendering, multi-thread, ATC, AI. NAV data etc etc are not improved.

Edited November 25, 2018 by roarkr

[Mace 1,902]

13 minutes ago, roarkr said:

It is not only weather and cloud engines that need to be overhauled. It is the complete system and rendering engines. 

P3Dv4 is still a 2006 game with some small improvements. All major things like rendering, multi-thread, ATC, AI. NAV data etc etc are not improved.

What?  Multi-thread is quite improved from 2006.  And so is a lot of the rest of it -- shaders, DirectX, autogen.

[pracines 823]

2 hours ago, rjfry said:

You never know this may come in v5 at some cost to performance then just sit back and listen to the moaning

True in some cases, but in most cases the silent moan is actually a new PC purchase or at least an upgrade. Most of us know that more advanced features requires more PC power.

[Rocky_53 1,566]

On 11/25/2018 at 1:19 PM, Oliver Ooi said:

Oddly enough I saw some peoples say this is not annoying them at all..

 

Edited November 26, 2018 by Rockliffe