With the latest patch it seems live weather is going to produce lighting regardless of actual weather. This is the first time I’ve got a good look at the lightning is the sim. My question is why is it so hard to make lightning look good? Every sim seems to always struggle with this creating some slowly fading on and off bright white light with a rather generic looking lighting bolt that washes out the whole screen. Is there some reason why lightning is never modeled well? Here is a video of what I feel lightning should look more like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT3FHgVdlsg

Personally I think it has to do with 1) How lightning looks and feels in real life 2) Just how bright and blinding it is 4) Each strike is entirely unique in its look

This is just my opinion in general but no animation or artwork has accurately portrayed lightning I think the overall light effect, the roar of thunder, and the blinding flash of light makes it very difficult.  We have photos of how it should look but they are all stepped down to a point so you can actually see it and the best paintings we have of it tend to mirror what we see in photographs but photographs are not what we see.  If you think about how you see lightning in real life its usually squinting at it if you see it at all and its very quick and then you feel the crack of thunder behind it.

 

I just think its very hard to accurately re-create that. 🌩️

Edited October 1, 20205 yr by pjs37

I can't answer the question, but I think the lightning inside the clouds is actually done fairly well. The fork lightning is a bit more hit and miss (like the real thing!😁). But I'd still say it's pretty impressive to be flying through a lightning storm in this sim. having said that, I look forward to it being fixed so we don't have lightning storms in a near cloudless, sunny sky again!

The lightning i have seen so far in the game looks terrible, doesnt look like any ligtning i have seen irl.

The TrueSky SDK used in P3d5 has excellent control over its lightning parameters and the results look fairly realistic in other applications, especially when compared to what is extent in MSFS. Let's hope that LM can implement the trueSky SDK fully at some point. I assume that whatever Asobo used also can be improved and the present lightning modeling has been limited because of performance considerations.