Are clouds the best ever now? I'm impressed.

[lwt1971 7,348]

5 hours ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

Absolutely! Not everyone want realism all the time plus practicing IFR approaches needs sliders.  

I see it ideally implemented like this:

a) if user chooses live weather, then it's always full realism and nothing is disabled or toned down on purpose (in a perfect world they could give live weather options with METAR, or without it like before based solely on Meteoblue but not sure if that's possible since they can only serve up one earth + weather model on the server/cloud side)

b) if user chooses manual weather, then give the options to enable/disable/configure-via-sliders whatever possible aspect of weather including turbulence. With this, those wanting zero turbulance would be able to configure it as such. I guess the interesting question here is should a user setting of "zero turbulence" mean regardless of time of day or season or terrain MSFS does not simulate any thermals effects at all?.. I think yes?
 

[Mark1616 47]

5 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

Here is a glimpse of the clouds from two years ago …

Yes, it was all there already from the beginning . Going two years back would be a good place to start fixing the clouds and the weather in general.

[MrBitstFlyer 3,873]

22 minutes ago, lwt1971 said:

With this, those wanting zero turbulance would be able to configure it as such. I guess the interesting question here is should a user setting of "zero turbulence" mean regardless of time of day or season or terrain MSFS does not simulate any thermals effects at all?.. I think yes?

A recent thread on turbulence suggests a minus figure is also required, as zero seemed to be too much 🙂  other than that I agree with you.

[GSalden 4,656]

I have my doubts if we are ever going to see better/more cloud types. Simply because the XBox neeeds to be able to have good performance…

Hopefullly I am wrong …

I do see beside cumulus clouds also many times flat cloud layers. Aren’t those different types of clouds ?

Edited June 21, 2022 by GSalden

[CFIJose 5,485]

2 minutes ago, GSalden said:

Aren’t those different types of clouds ?

Yes.

[icewater5 181]

9 minutes ago, GSalden said:

I have my doubts if we are ever going to see better/more cloud types. Simply because the XBox neeeds to be able to have good performance…

 

' Ever' seems over the top to me. I am not a computer tech person, but i thought that with a streaming platform and cloud computing that performance errors will be seriously reduced, given time. Maybe that is part why people with modest systems are already getting acceptable performances.

Also are XBox consoles that much less than average PC,s in processing power ?

 

Edited June 21, 2022 by icewater5

[turbomax 3,285]

On 6/20/2022 at 11:10 PM, vonduck said:

From watching YouTube vidoes they seem to be not so crisp..perhaps not needed as the flight model is what matters?

not even xplane or P3D graphics level, but as you said correctly "not needed as the flight model is what matter" and a lot besides flight model: emergency procedures, crew resource management, etc.  that is the difference between home entertainment and professional flight training. graphics quality was the least of my concerns last time I sat in a B-737 simulator at Boeing/Seattle years ago with 6 degrees of freedom moving platform. I think 60 Hz graphics refresh is mandatory, and since commercial flights are normally IFR no one cares for pretty graphics anyway, unlike what we hard core serious study level captains do around here all day long: sight seeing and insisting on DLSS, ray tracing, seasons, waves, trees and what have you. 

the question is if you had to choose between MSFS on a pc or a commercial Level-D full flight 6 dof simulator with lousy graphics, which one would you choose if cost and space was no factor?

https://simpleflying.com/level-d-simulator/

Edited June 21, 2022 by turbomax

[Kilo60 660]

 

51 minutes ago, GSalden said:

I have my doubts if we are ever going to see better/more cloud types. Simply because the XBox neeeds to be able to have good performance…

Hopefullly I am wrong …

 

Yes, I don't see ABOSO wasting the time and resources for additional cloud types if the XBox can't handle the extra graphics load...

[Kilo60 660]

44 minutes ago, icewater5 said:

' Ever' seems over the top to me. I am not a computer tech person, but i thought that with a streaming platform and cloud computing that performance errors will be seriously reduced, given time. Maybe that is part why people with modest systems are already getting acceptable performances.

Also are XBox consoles that much less than average PC,s in processing power ?

 

 

It's more of a question of reasonable Frames Per Second and stutter free gameplay on XBox...

[lwt1971 7,348]

3 hours ago, GSalden said:

I have my doubts if we are ever going to see better/more cloud types. Simply because the XBox neeeds to be able to have good performance…

As the clouds variety problem is only when using live weather, and given that better/more cloud variety can be currently had with manual weather and presets, this has nothing to do with the XBox. Also useful to remember that a good many of the current MSFS user base have PCs that are less powerful than XBox.  I really don't think MS/Asobo are doing anything intentionally now to scale back or hold back functionality and visual fidelity due specifically to XBox. In the PC version visual settings can be configured by the user for all sorts of scenarios, and in the XBox version they will pre-configure/hardcode those settings to optimize for XBox-X @ 4K and XBox-S @ 1080p.

Edited June 22, 2022 by lwt1971

[CFIJose 5,485]

All I want is TCB's & more Cirrus clouds depiction for now. This is what's missing for me. I already love the cumulus variety.

[JRBarrett 3,070]

25 minutes ago, CFIJose said:

All I want is TCB's & more Cirrus clouds depiction for now. This is what's missing for me. I already love the cumulus variety.

I suspect cirrus is very difficult (if not impossible) to create using volumetric techniques, which is why we do not have them now. For this one cloud type, they might have to use “canned” textures like P3D/FSX does. 

[Noel 4,496]

1 hour ago, GSalden said:

I have my doubts if we are ever going to see better/more cloud types. Simply because the XBox neeeds to be able to have good performance…

Hopefullly I am wrong …

I do see beside cumulus clouds also many times flat cloud layers. Aren’t those different types of clouds ?

In a video Q&A not long ago with a substantial segment dedicated to clouds and weather the person presenting said they would be working on cloud morphology and their goal was to expand cloud types/morphology.  My sense now is that cloud resolution is just way too low to depict very high quality cloud types.  From a distance clouds look plausible and often quite good--up close, much less so.  I do wonder how much performance there is to work with, even w/ higher end PCs.  I can maintain 30fps by vsync in any plane anywhere anytime, but need to reduce Terrain-LOD to get into the toughest terminals/metro areas, which is a function of my CPU's limiting.  I'm hoping DX12 opens some pathways for improving cloud depiction as I have headroom in the GPU to exploit.  Right now, up cloud depiction is my biggest visual complaint. Perhaps at some point the software can detect what you're running, Xbox or PC, and load itself accordingly, making higher settings possible w/ PC.  A problem there might be not all PCs are the same, and some running MSFS are less capable than Xbox Series X.  Xbox will improve over the rest of the proposed lifespan of MSFS, adding more performance capability w/ new versions.

[timest 472]

10 hours ago, JRBarrett said:

Indeed. Rex does not “create” the clouds. MSFS does not use pre-rendered textures for clouds as is done in FSX/P3D. The clouds are created dynamically by the sim’s rendering engine. Rex is only telling that rendering engine to put specific clouds in specific places, with specific parameters (height, thickeness, type). Same for visibility (as set by Rex). 

Rex demonstrates that the natives MSFS cloud rendering engine is certainly capable of creating more detail and variety of cloudscapes than we typically see in Live Weather. The question is why LW does not seem able to make use of that?

Hi Jim,

Weather Force not only 'sets' parameters, but more importantly it controls the morphing of the weather parameters such as height, base, thickness, cloud coverage, cloud density, precipitation, storm intensity, visibility, wind speed/frequency, temps, pressure, as well as snow coverage.

[HiFlyer 9,358]

I'll just leave this here, in case anyone is interested...