I wanna wrap myself in these clouds when I go to bed tonight. trueSKY clouds are nothing short of amazing and it's what I've been waiting for to come to any of our sims for a long time. I can only emphasize how much of an understatement the initial trailer of the sim was. I was disappointed back then but playing with the new atmospherics myself is dropping mouth-watering results. Can't wait to see what Active Sky will be able to do with trueSKY.

This is vanilla P3D v5. Sliders all the way to the right with a few exceptions for shadow settings. VRAM was rather stable at 4.1 to 4.3 GB, no matter how many clouds. FPS stayed around 80 for the most part with slight outliers up and down of around 10.

I varied the amount of clouds layers and at some point piled 6 layers on top of one another, so I don't know where the rumor came from that trueSKY restricts the number of clouds layers to 2.

Edited May 3, 20206 yr by threegreen

WOW ...I Agree,Spectacular!! 

Im going to have to call a spade a spade here.  Those look awful imo.

Some great shots there!

1 hour ago, Mack84 said:

Im going to have to call a spade a spade here.  Those look awful imo.

I don't think they all look awful, the overcast sky with green field more or less in the middle of the selection of pictures looks fairly convincing, but I have to agree that some of them don't look very good at all.

An obvious issue with the first picture, and to varying extent with the others, is the fact that the ground doesn't look at all like it belongs with a sky with that much orange, yellow and red light bouncing around owing to atmospheric scattering. In such a situation, the ground is not going to be getting the full electromagnetic spectrum of visible light waves, so it shouldn't look like it is lit up like it would be when the sun is up high above the horizon, so it ends up looking a bit like an clumsy Photoshop job.

Do a Google search with the term 'sunset aerial shot' and you'll see what I mean from the pics which show up. The ground is in most cases either considerably darker, or is lit with a very apparent sunlit tones, since it too is picking up the bounced red, orange and yellow wavelengths.

There is no doubt that TruSky can look good in the right circumstances, and the way it simulates clouds and atmospheric action is quite evidently more sophisticated than what has gone before, but there is obviously still some way to go before it gets all the visuals right and especially the lighting conditions on the ground.

Uh... it's called TrueSKY... not TrueGROUND.  While the lighting on the ground may be questionable... we're actually talking about the SKY... not the GROUND.

This is the biggest reason why I am keeping P3Dv5, even though I originally planned only to support MSFS going forward...

It may be lipstick on a pig, but it is a very good looking one.

4th from the bottom is rather convincing (maybe too much bloom?). I flew a couple of hours yesterday from the local airfield and encountered similar cloud scape.

You can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you will never please all of the people all of the time! Has never rung truer than within the flightsim community.🤪

Sky by itself may look decent if you disregard the ground, but overall the lighting in these shots seems rather off. To my eyes this seems inferior to what could be done and has been done on other sims. 

Edited May 4, 20206 yr by MagentaChild

Is it just me or is there just one type of cloud which looks the same everywhere?

6 hours ago, WarpD said:

Uh... it's called TrueSKY... not TrueGROUND.  While the lighting on the ground may be questionable... we're actually talking about the SKY... not the GROUND.

Yes, I'm aware of that obviously, but unless one is prepared to accept the fallacious notion that light levels and tones caused by atmospheric conditions have absolutely no bearing on what our planet looks like as you fly around it, then it is hardly a true sky either, is it?

 

13 hours ago, Mack84 said:

I'm going to have to call a spade a spade here.  Those look awful imo.

While I agree with you we have to remember that it's called TrueSKY so that's what it must look like in real life. Otherwise it they wouldn't have called TrueSKY would they? Common sense.

I really don't think some of you appreciate what you've been given in V5. This cloud and atmospheric condition implementation is far better than any that came before in FS9/FSX/ESP/P3D sims. I don't think Xplane or Aerofly FS2 ever got close to this out of the box, perhaps with addons. The only comparison really is MSFS2020 which will probably be better, but you are getting a taste here already.

I'd be quite interested to hear which sims do it better, as IMHO with a couple of thousand hours of flying in the cockpit under my belt, it is immersive as all heck compared to bitmap and sprite clouds from yesteryear. And anyone expecting immediate perfection from a heavily modified 15 year old engine needs to adjust their expectations.

2 hours ago, FlyingBubbles said:

Is it just me or is there just one type of cloud which looks the same everywhere?

The banding on the sky isn’t convincing either.