Why NO coloration of clouds in P3D/FSX?

[Noel 4,501]

I've wondered about this for going on a good decade now.   There has to be a technical reason as to why this is a glaringly absent feature in how clouds appears in the sim and I'm just curious what it is.   I try to plan flights at dawn/dusk to enjoy the wonderful colors and street lighting but it's always odd that despite having a lovely sky w/ an array of hues in the background compatible w/ dawn/dusk, but those hues never influence the lighting on clouds per se--they are always only in black and white.   Here's a rather extreme example from the real world to illustrate that which you will never see in the sim:

 

[GSalden 4,657]

Perhaps somewhere in the future it will ever look like this.

With my PTA preset this is the best I could do :

Later at dusk the sky gets the same red/orange look..

[GEKtheReaper 364]

This is possible today if you would use REX5 EF.......

[GSalden 4,657]

2 minutes ago, GEKtheReaper said:

This is possible today if you would use REX5 EF.......

It is not possible yet with the current V4.5

LM would need to overhaul the Shaders and add new features to make that possible ..

Edited May 8, 2019 by GSalden

[anden145 2,285]

LM would need to overhaul the cloud and weather and lighting engine, for it to be truly possible.

Currently clouds aren't objects, which are susceptible to light and shadow. I can only hope, that someday LM would completely change the clouds, so that they are (some kind of) objects, which are 3D and casts true shadows - not just on the ground but on each other as well.

The lighting engine would also need some changes. The sun is some kind of ambient light source. The movement is correct, but why can you see the sun through fog or hazy weather? It has always bugged me. The dynamic lighting feature in P3D is a nice step in the right direction - but it would need to be extended or somehow overhauled. 

This is just my opinion, of course. 🙂

[Noel 4,501]

Well, to me it's glaring deficit worth addressing, at least for folks like me who love good eye candy!  I'd even upgrade my GPU for this feature!

It's a bit counterintuitive to me as to why because they're not 'objects' per se they can't have color assigned to the pixels that represent clouds.  If they're black and white now, why can't those same pixels be assigned color values according to some algorithm?  I have to think it's just not on the radar, or perhaps what is being said here is that it might be too complex & expensive to tackle secondary to the current way clouds are rendered.

Edited May 8, 2019 by Noel

[GEKtheReaper 364]

1 hour ago, GSalden said:

It is not possible yet with the current V4.5

I don't get it...you just showed a sim picture with red/orange clouds. I already flew at dawn with EF and got from yellowish to orange clouds within the same flight. Am I missing something here?

[GSalden 4,657]

See the difference between the picture and my screenshot.

Blue, red and orange mix depending on the sunbeams.

I really hope this will be reality for us somewhere in the future ...

Edited May 8, 2019 by GSalden

[GEKtheReaper 364]

2 hours ago, GSalden said:

Blue, red and orange mix depending on the sunbeams.

Ok now I understand what you mean.

I didn't think we were talking in such detail about the coloring because the OP was talking about clouds beeing "in black and white" only.

 

4 hours ago, Noel said:

clouds per se--they are always only in black and white.

And this black and white (or greyscale) clouds are things of the past which can be changed with shader programs, thus my intervention 😉

Edited May 8, 2019 by GEKtheReaper

[Sethos 4,336]

Maybe LM will pick up the torch from FSW and try their hand with those volumetric clouds. They looked absolutely stunning under some circumstances but still needed some more love. Lots of potential there.

 

 

Edited May 8, 2019 by Sethos1988

[Noel 4,501]

13 minutes ago, Sethos1988 said:

Maybe LM will pick up the torch from FSW and try their hand with those volumetric clouds. They looked absolutely stunning under some circumstances but still needed some more love. Lots of potential there.

 

 

There you go--that's what we're after ;o)

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

Those FSW videos never looked like that for me. TrueSky looks great in other video games but DTG had "dumbed down" the settings to preserve performance for a wide range of users. 

[kand 205]

TrueSky... off topic (apologies) its the same story with the water in p3d. LM have disabled a lot of the rendering features in Triton and instead kept the sim rendering in place (Triton is just the ocean wave model in P3d). When you look at this video  https://sundog-soft.com/features/ocean-and-water-rendering-with-triton/ you will understand what I mean especially at 0:48 seconds

I think there is a good chance we will see TrueSky in future versions of P3d, but it will probably break a lot of the 3rd party stuff

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

I don't think that's really off topic. People keep clamoring for changes to both P3d and XP but the reality is that the hardware needed to support 3D clouds and ultra-realistic ( I was going to say immersive😉) water would be so high end as to eliminate most users from enjoying the benefits of the new features. Think about Speedtrees. When they were first introduced in P3d, they were a major performance killer. Now, the hardware has caught up and newer high end systems can run ST. But that change didn't happen overnight.

These two flightsims are not closed sandbox video games devoid of any 3rd party add-ons. Adding new features (VR 3D clouds, ray tracing, better water rendering, etc.) usually requires high end hardware, which most users can't afford. 

[vgbaron 3,627]

1 hour ago, jabloomf1230 said:

People keep clamoring for changes to both P3d and XP but the reality is that the hardware needed to support 3D clouds and ultra-realistic ( I was going to say immersive😉) water would be so high end as to eliminate most users from enjoying the benefits of the new features.

Boy, that's it in a nutshell Jay. The technology is there to do some of that beautiful stuff but at what cost to performance?. It is unfair to compare P3D to some  game titles because the scope of  the flightsim world as opposed to the very small video game world just cannot handle the overhead with current hardware.

Vic