trueSKY is Amazing (16 Pictures)

[Chock 17,769]

13 minutes ago, Prpn said:

I really don't think some of you appreciate what you've been given in V5.

I'd be quite interested to hear which sims do it better

One which was doing it better with TruSky, was Flight Sim World. Unfortunately not many people got behind it,  (nobody can accuse me of that one though, I even bought add-on aeroplanes for it from Just Flight, which also got behind it along with Orbx and Carenado) so unfortunately Dovetail never got to the point of optimising FSW, nor tweaking it to make it a bit more believable. Even in spite of that and the fact that it really dragged your CPU down owing to the lack of optimisation from it being in beta and never making it out of that state, the potential it displayed with the cloud movement via TruSky was indicative that they may very well have been onto something.

Likewise I'll be behind Lockheed Martin with their efforts to use TruSky as I definitely think it has the same potential as Dovetail had demonstrated. But despite my support for these efforts, even LM admit it is not where it ideally should be at the moment as evidenced by their labelling of it as a beta feature. Not forgetting the fact that Simul, the developers of TruSky, is a company local to me here in the UK since they are only about 35 miles up the road from me. So I'll unashamedly fly the flag for them on that score.

But all this doesn't mean that I'll automatically praise it in its beta condition any more than I did so with Dovetail when they were asking for constructive criticism. The fact is it doesn't look that great at the moment. As I say, I can see beyond that and see the potential it has, but there's a way to go yet before it looks how I think it should.

[Pugilist2 878]

The clouds look better overall to me, but things such as the coloring and shapes of the clouds still need to be fine tuned.

[threexgreen 3,135]

I'm wondering what kind of comparison people are actually using when judging trueSKY and the older atmospheric system with 2D textures. I assume it's that most compare sim to sim, but that way I think you'll end up mostly comparing what 2D textures do better and what trueSKY does better, but you won't necessarily pay too much attention to what the real world out there actually looks like. There are things that 2D textures like REX still do better than trueSKY, but if I look at what the real world atmosphere looks like, whether that'd be from a cockpit, airplane window, looking up at the sky from the ground or even looking at (unedited) photographs, I honestly see no way at all in which the old atmospheric system with 2D textures would be more realistic or natural, even bearing in the mind the current shortcomings of trueSKY in P3D.

Another thing is what these clouds bring to the sim beyond visuals. The fact that they are volumetric is something 2D textures will never be able to deliver (obviously). I haven't tried much on a 2D screen so far, but in VR for instance you'll actually get spatially disoriented if you look at the outside through the window too much when flying through a body of thick clouds, whereas 2D textures don't even begin to deliver an effect like that. Along with that these clouds also produce much more of a sense that what you're flying in with your aircraft (the atmosphere in general) is a 3D body rather than a 2D projection on a screen (not talking about VR here). That becomes clear when you fly near them or dive into clouds and then out. It's actually a volumetric body. What 2D textures do is nothing other than look nice, which has its value but nothing beyond that.

So while it's clear that trueSKY with P3D needs to be developed a lot more still, if you compare the two systems not to each other but individually and objectively (separated from any preexisting notion of what a simulator cloud system should be) to the real world atmosphere and real world flying, trueSKY is worlds more realistic and natural.

Given that it's still in development, I think we're in for a real treat now already and for others that probably comes later down the road. In any case though, there's a lot more to trueSKY than one may see just by looking at it once and dismissing it immediately.

Edited May 4, 2020 by threegreen

[ErichB 3,638]

The clouds themselves look brilliant.  20 x better than 2D sprites.  What does not look convincing in (some) pictures is the shader colouration of some of the lighting scenes.  Over-saturated in some cases, but most of the pics look great.   It will get better over time.

[Joseph29 225]

32 minutes ago, ErichB said:

The clouds themselves look brilliant.  20 x better than 2D sprites.  It will get better over time.

I really like the trueSky clouds. But I do hope they improve the performance. With my computer it is hit and miss. I go to a default airport with no AI and run trueSky without any problems. I add AI and scenery to the mix and my computer gets the VRAM crash. (I can run the regular clouds with scenery and AI no problem)

[Novation 534]

The carpet doesn't match the curtains 😁 It looks good at times, and bad at other, as these screens show, where the lighting and colouration of the sky have little, or no, bearing on the terrain. Hopefully it's possible to marry the two for better results. Cloud shadows would help, but they seems impossibly subtle, or non existent, so that really needs a fix.

Still, not a bad effort for a default atmospheric environment, but lots of work needed, especially if they want to get anywhere near close to MSFS.

Edited May 5, 2020 by Novation

[Joseph29 225]

6 hours ago, Novation said:

Cloud shadows would help, but they seems impossibly subtle, or non existent, so that really needs a fix.

 

Has anyone noticed that the tool tip for the Shadow Draw Distance (for the clouds) say "Adjusts the distance of shadows. Higher settings may reduce quality and performance".

 

Perhaps people have that option on the high setting thinking high will be better?

[Prpn 366]

On 5/5/2020 at 9:34 PM, Novation said:

 Cloud shadows would help, but they seems impossibly subtle, or non existent, so that really needs a fix.

Cloud shadows are definitely there and not even that subtle:

I've personally had some of my most immersive cloudscapes ever now with Enhanced Atmospherics in V5. I mean, it is not perfect, but it is such a game changer when comparing real flying to this. It is leaps and bounds forward in the right direction, and it makes me more excited for FS2020 which seems to have an even better atmospherics implementation.

[threexgreen 3,135]

22 hours ago, Prpn said:

I mean, it is not perfect, but it is such a game changer when comparing real flying to this.

Exactly my point. I did a comparison of the old atmospherics with 2D addon textures and PTA to the real world atmosphere (photos, videos and own experience) and one with enhanced atmospherics compared to the real world. While the result was obvious from the start, this side-by-side comparison made it all the more clear. Bearing current flaws in mind, trueSKY still wins every day of the week.

Edited May 8, 2020 by threegreen

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

4 hours ago, threegreen said:

Bearing current flaws in mind, trueSKY still wins every day of the week.

I agree, it's not even a close race.The trueSky implementation isn't up to RDR 2 standards yet, but it's so much better than what other sims can provide, that it's worth suffering with the minor issues. One absolutely has to have an RTX card, though.

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

8 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

 One absolutely has to have an RTX card, though.

What makes you say that?

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

8 minutes ago, Bert Pieke said:

What makes you say that?

RTX cards are substantially faster at doing raytracing than GTX cards:

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

OK.. I am sure they are faster.. but if my GTX 1070 GPU is running at 30-60% utilization, does that mean that I am not getting the visuals that a 2070 user would be seeing?

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

No. The RTX series has built-in Raytracing processors. You will for the most part see the same effects with a GTX, but the performance is slower.

https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx/raytracing

 

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

48 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

No. The RTX series has built-in Raytracing processors. You will for the most part see the same effects with a GTX, but the performance is slower.

https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx/raytracing

 

So, yes..