MSFS WX - Cirrus Clouds

[Sky_Pilot071 580]

Yea I know here we go again but I'm living mostlly outside and when I look up an see some awesome Cirrus or even a contrails mix I got to think man MSFS would rule with that stuff.

I'm thinking that these cloud types are outside the current Wx parameters but how about adding  simple 2d layers to simulate what we should be seeing.  

Accuracy and 2d image display wouldn't require a major performace hit but the immersion factor would be huge.

sp

[jcomm 5,938]

ASOBO is still making changes to their weather engine, and in one of the last Q&A sessions they mentioned coordination with Meteoblue for additional fine tuning of the data they receive and process.

They will most possibly start to depict high level clouds as Ci, Cs and Cc.

At least they already process important data at the higher levels, having plausible Tropopause levels and temperatures, so, I believe it's just a question of time until we can see this high clouds more plausibly depicted.

Same applies to visibility, which is now in most cases very plausibly depicted in IMC and some marginal VFR conditions, even though they haven't even started to specifically simulate this parameters AFAIK.

Like most everything happening in MFS, being a very dynamic platform, moving in the right track, it's just a question of time.

Edited December 1, 2022 by jcomm

[Waldo Pepper 1,952]

15 minutes ago, jcomm said:

ASOBO is still making changes to their weather engine, and in one of the last Q&A sessions they mentioned coordination with Meteoblue for additional fine tuning of the data they receive and process.

They will most possibly start to depict high level clouds as Ci, Cs and Cc.

At least they already process important data at the higher levels, having plausible Tropopause levels and Temperatures, so, I believe it's just a question of time until we can see this high clouds more plausibly depicted.

While not directly related,   you may find this interesting.

Vertical Wind Analysis - SU11 https://discord.com/channels/876123356385149009/1046456516066168902

Edited December 1, 2022 by Waldo Pepper

[jcomm 5,938]

18 minutes ago, Waldo Pepper said:

While not directly related,   you may find this interesting.

Vertical Wind Analysis - SU11 https://discord.com/channels/876123356385149009/1046456516066168902

Thx, yet, I can't read it because I do not use Discord 😕

[fppilot 4,371]

38 minutes ago, jcomm said:

ASOBO is still making changes to their weather engine, and in one of the last Q&A sessions they mentioned coordination with Meteoblue for additional fine tuning of the data they receive and process.

Asobo has been partnering with Metro Blue since before day 1 of MSFS and it just has not gotten there.  In regard to his concern it seems to have not gotten anywhere for realistic/representative cloud textures.  Meanwhile in the Q & A sessions and elsewhere the plea by those experienced is to open up the weather part of the SDK to 3rd parties.  And the response has consistently been "Not Planned".

Shame!  Just pure and simply Shame!

[Noel 4,501]

40 minutes ago, jcomm said:

Like most everything happening in MFS, being a very dynamic platform, moving in the right track, it's just a question of time.

This has always been the case and yet all the hand-wringing and actual belief that if it wasn't for simmers applying constant pressure they just won't figure it out and nothing would move forward.  Hogwash! 

[Sky_Pilot071 580]

Not really a question of can it be done but more of how should it be done.

sp

[DaveS 144]

in the feature discovery series on weather it is stated that there are "60 layers of real time cloud data" and "native support of all cloud types". I just want to know why they made these claims because I am just not seeing all this supposed data on full display. 

[Silicus 881]

55 minutes ago, DaveS said:

I just want to know why they made these claims because I am just not seeing all this supposed data on full display. 

It is more the issue with cloud types. They are only displaying two, three including fog, cloud types. 

There are 16 cloud types officially recognized, we have max three in the sim. 

I have been 'complaining' about this since release, others as well, since weather is such an important part of flying.

The data is there, but not the variety of cloud types. It is a very lazy implementation, they just don't seem to care....

[DModjo 119]

I think the issue might not be that the sim can't display these types, but rather they can't determine what clouds they are from the Meteo Blue connection. I've played around a fair bit with layers and clouds in the sim and you can get some really interesting patterns and shapes of clouds that you never see with the live weather option enabled. If I'm correct. all the more reason they should open it up for developers (like active sky) to aggregate that data and send the weather info to the sim.  

[jcomm 5,938]

I agree that diversity of cloud depiction, the closest possible to RW, is going to bring realism mostly from a visual PoV, but IRL it's also true that you care mostly about cumuliform vs stratiform, with two exacerbated types of eachother - nimbus.

Fog is actually a low, stratified cloud 🙂

Not saying they aren't important in aviation, and in the type of flight I do IRL they are indeed very important, both Cirrus and Altostratus can ruin an otherwise good soaring day, but for aviation in general they are of not great importance. Aircraft cross them in a second 🙂

But OFC I will be glad when I see them too in MFS 😉

Someone mentioned, and reminded me of the 60 layers of data that MFS takes from Meteoblue in order to model the atmosphere, mostly the Troposphere BUT! also the Tropopause and even part of the Stratosphere, at least that part where some civil aircraft, as well as military operate, and that is something that pleases me and makes me laugh when I read some say MFS is an arcade sim...

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by jcomm

[F737MAX 5,604]

11 hours ago, jcomm said:

it's just a question of time

True. However, we're more than 2 years post-release and this fundamental part of what aviation is all about is still incomplete.

There's a frustration that it's taking such a long time and *appears* to be low on the priority list behind new content.

[Waldo Pepper 1,952]

On 12/1/2022 at 6:23 PM, jcomm said:

Thx, yet, I can't read it because I do not use Discord 😕

 

[Noel 4,501]

On 12/2/2022 at 3:22 AM, F737MAX said:

True. However, we're more than 2 years post-release and this fundamental part of what aviation is all about is still incomplete.

There's a frustration that it's taking such a long time and *appears* to be low on the priority list behind new content.

What's odd to me is that resolution, or detail, was substantially better initially.  In fact I stated then I thought they already had cloud depiction in the ballpark and it was largely tuning that needed to happen.  I ran the sim very well w/ a lowly RTX 2070 back then and it was only thin diffuse clouds that would strongly impact the GPU where I might need to adjust from Ultra to High.  Then, for reasons I always assumed had to do w/ the limitations of Xbox, cloud depiction took a genuine turn for the worse.  That being said it's not all bad, the weather per se or what they have done w/ these exceedingly consistently low resolution clouds.  They've done an admiral job with it....but meanwhile the hardware marches on and would be fully capable of rendering not only what intial clouds looked like but improved by another 25-50% in density/complexity.  After all initially we were using PCs now 2+ years old and it ran weather very well then.  Unfortunately I lost a bunch of early screenshots but here's a choice one from my home city:

[filou 2,744]

Representation of clouds,the number of cloud layers,color, the lighting, the live weather visually are my biggest disappointments besides the rest.

MSFS 2020 is high on it compared to what we have experienced but is average across the board.

( MSFS opening load time, traffic , low resolution and color imagery , soapy driving of planes on the ground, photogrammetry color and POP , terrain LOD, representation of the road network and road traffic , ground worker behavior, ATC etc...)

It's a bit too much for me after two and a half years.

The only exceptional experience I have with MSFS is that it's butter in terms of performance and its ease of use.

I can also understand for most people the attractiveness of all this free stuff that MS regularly offers, but as far as I'm concerned, make circles in the sky above each novelty on Sunday it's really not my thing.My expectations are really not there.

It would not bother me pay a subscription to have a much better overall representation than that.

Something more mature...