What is true sky ?

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

1 hour ago, markk70 said:

Is this still the case? Are smooth weather transitions possible with p3D v5.1 and active sky?

Yes, unfortunately it's still the case. I have a copy of the Simul SDK and have played around with it enough to realize that adding geographic regions (like for example, polygons around every METAR station) is a performance killer.  Even with this enhanced level of detail, there would still be interpolation needed along the user's flightplan. In P3d 5.1, those transitions are better using the lAS beta, but they are still not perfect.

LM hasn't really revised the P3D5 PDK to allow more trueSky functionality, but they have added text configuration files, which allow users and third party developers to modify cloud and sky conditions.

Lastly, HiFi has been awfully quiet as of late on their official forum and I'm not sure how to interpret that silence. Either they are busy working with LM to improve AS for P3d5 or they have become preoccupied with testing AS for MSFS.

[GSalden 4,657]

FSGRW was the first weather program supporting TrueSky.

I am hoping for an update as there is always  too much haze at low altitude. Even with max Visibility set to 300. I informed the developer about it.

AS does a better job at that, but if you are using multiple other programs that are making use of Simconnect than the AS weather updates might lead to CTD’s when using TrueSky. For me it is hit or miss.. From all CTD’s I sent multiple log files to HiFiSimTech.

Imho first LM needs to improve TryeSky and make it more stable. Sometimes you see these fast clouds moving which causes extra load on your system.

 

 

[OzWhitey 3,353]

I've actually started doing some flights with Truesky off (in contrast to my comment on the last page from 6 months ago, where I said I used it on every flight), as I'm finding the string Rayleigh scattering makes too much of the world look like the same blue blur. Whilst this is fairly realistic, I'd love to have a way to turn the effect down a bit. Has anyone succeeded in doing this? (I know it's supposedly not possible, by flightsimmers have always been good at making non-official hacks work!)

[davenicoll 104]

I have Enhanced graphics enabled suggesting as is Truesky...

 

Do I need to run Active Sky to see the benefits as I can't remember the last time I saw a cloud in Prepar3d v5.1 even on fair weather..

 

Dave

 

 

 

 

Edited April 2, 2021 by davenicoll

[markk70 26]

12 hours ago, jabloomf1230 said:

Yes, unfortunately it's still the case. I have a copy of the Simul SDK and have played around with it enough to realize that adding geographic regions (like for example, polygons around every METAR station) is a performance killer.  Even with this enhanced level of detail, there would still be interpolation needed along the user's flightplan. In P3d 5.1, those transitions are better using the lAS beta, but they are still not perfect.

LM hasn't really revised the P3D5 PDK to allow more trueSky functionality, but they have added text configuration files, which allow users and third party developers to modify cloud and sky conditions.

Lastly, HiFi has been awfully quiet as of late on their official forum and I'm not sure how to interpret that silence. Either they are busy working with LM to improve AS for P3d5 or they have become preoccupied with testing AS for MSFS.

Thanks for the reply!

I guess i will wait a bit until things  improve.

There is of course also the performance improvement over v4.5, but i'm not sure this is worth it with my ageing  hardware  (i7 4790 | GTX1080 8GB | 32GB RAM).

[GSalden 4,657]

At this moment the current weather engines do not support TrueSky completely. Sometimes weather is off, you see chasing clouds and updating weather puts a heavy load on the pc.

From all flights I do 2 out of 5 show issues when weather gets updated by ASP3D. This is not the fault of the program but the interaction between weather program and EA .

FSGRW shows too much haze so that one also is not completely accurate.

 

[Sabre57 46]

I like TrueSky by since ASP5 doesn't work properly with it I usually don't use it.  I prefer to have a better real world weather conditions depiction than not.  If ASP gets adjusted then TrueSky will get turned back on.

[neilhewitt 494]

2 hours ago, GSalden said:

FSGRW shows too much haze so that one also is not completely accurate.

Also, I could be wrong, but I don't think FSGRW does any tweaking of the cloud volumetrics like ASP3D does? Or have I missed an update? I was getting the grid effect in full force.

Edited April 2, 2021 by neilhewitt

[IanHarrison 522]

On 8/22/2020 at 8:55 PM, OzWhitey said:

 glad that we're leaving the era of 2D sprites behind!

I have heard this often but what does it refer to?

I use AS with Rex clouds and nothing looks 2D to me, especially when I fly through a cloud.

[GSalden 4,657]

43 minutes ago, neilhewitt said:

Also, I could be wrong, but I don't think FSGRW does any tweaking of the cloud volumetrics like ASP3D does? Or have I missed an update? I was getting the grid effect in full force.

FSGRW does not touch the VolumetricClouds.cfg.

With ASP3D you can choose to let it control the VolumetricClouds.cfg or not.

[neilhewitt 494]

26 minutes ago, IanHarrison said:

I have heard this often but what does it refer to?

I use AS with Rex clouds and nothing looks 2D to me, especially when I fly through a cloud.

Clouds (pre-EA) look 3D but they aren't really. They're actually 2D images composited into the view which have to change according to your changing attitude and position. Hence the often repeated talk about 'rotating clouds', because sometimes you can spot them in the act, as it were. Can't say I've ever noticed it. In EA with TrueSky, as with MSFS, clouds are volumetric, that is they are 3D objects consisting of generated 'noise' (for want of a better word) which are rendered into the scene like other 3D objects. So they stay consistent as you change position and attitude, although of course under TrueSky the clouds are always 'evolving' to some extent and changing shape, as real world clouds do.

In theory this is all fantastic, but it turns out that the computational power required to create and display volumetric clouds is fairly extreme, hence why despite having top-end CPUs and GPUs people are getting relatively fuzzy clouds with pixelated edges. Hopefully LM will improve this over time but flight sims just have more clouds in view than, say, racing games or 3rd party shooters which TS is also used for. So it hits the system harder and you can't get as much detail. MSFS seems to my uneducated eye to have more detailed, less fuzzy cloud, so I'm sure better can be done even without 7GHz CPUs and GPUs with 128GB of VRAM 🙂.

Edited April 2, 2021 by neilhewitt
Missed the quote.

[neilhewitt 494]

Just now, GSalden said:

FSGRW does not touch the VolumetricClouds.cfg.

So presumably you use your own cfg tweaks when you run FSGRW.

[OzWhitey 3,353]

25 minutes ago, IanHarrison said:

I have heard this often but what does it refer to?

I use AS with Rex clouds and nothing looks 2D to me, especially when I fly through a cloud.

Standard p3d clouds, AS and REX all use 2D cloud images that rotate to give the illusion of 3D. Sometimes the illusions works well, but if you use a VR headset the rotation is both obvious and immersion-breaking.

Also - I said that 8 months ago, lol. 🙂

 

[OzWhitey 3,353]

3 minutes ago, neilhewitt said:

Clouds (pre-EA) look 3D but they aren't really. They're actually 2D images composited into the view which have to change according to your changing attitude and position. Hence the often repeated talk about 'rotating clouds', because sometimes you can spot them in the act, as it were. Can't say I've ever noticed it. In EA with TrueSky, as with MSFS, clouds are volumetric, that is they are 3D objects consisting of generated 'noise' (for want of a better word) which are rendered into the scene like other 3D objects. So they stay consistent as you change position and attitude, although of course under TrueSky the clouds are always 'evolving' to some extent and changing shape, as real world clouds do.

In theory this is all fantastic, but it turns out that the computational power required to create and display volumetric clouds is fairly extreme, hence why despite having top-end CPUs and GPUs people are getting relatively fuzzy clouds with pixelated edges. Hopefully LM will improve this over time but flight sims just have more clouds in view than, say, racing games or 3rd party shooters which TS is also used for. So it hits the system harder and you can't get as much detail. MSFS seems to my uneducated eye to have more detailed, less fuzzy cloud, so I'm sure better can be done even without 7GHz CPUs and GPUs with 128GB of VRAM 🙂.

MSFS cloud performance is terrible. If you use the standard VR settings, MS achieves semi-acceptable performance by turning the clouds in to white potato-like objects.

P3D clouds perform a lot better for the same degree of complexity. The downsides are the lack of variety, minimal cirrus layer rendering (you can make the sim do this, but the appearance is mediocre) and the artefacts that are sometimes present when you look down at a cloud layer from a higher altitude.

[GSalden 4,657]

16 minutes ago, neilhewitt said:

So presumably you use your own cfg tweaks when you run FSGRW.

With FSGRW I use my custom cfg file but I haven’t used FSGRW since January. The haze on the ground and low altitude are spoiling everything.

But a pause/CTD because of a weather update from ASP3D isn’t fun either

Keep in mind that I use a lot of software and almost all are using simconnect so that might have to help getting AS CTD’s faster ...

ASP3D is not to blame. They are trying their best. The way EA has been implemented into V5 is...