4 hours ago, ryanbatc said:

This one looks real...like I've flown this area irl (in a vision jet haha) and it looked like this I swear

Certainly, good looking and very plausible clouds do come out of this current implementation.  But there are many scenarios, especially very close to the plane, where it looks really blurry, low density and there are none that have the kind of density RW clouds can have.  I'm hoping we can move towards that as well as what we have now.  In HiFi ActiveSky days w/ REX cloud textures one could chose "high def" clouds to get that crisp edge definition that is completely lacking now.  Of course that approach to cloud depiction was totally different and much easier to process than volumetric clouds.

12 hours ago, ryanbatc said:

I just want opaque clouds.  Even thin stratus layers are totally non see through irl.  In the sim you never really hit cloud bases...just areas of reduced visibility.  I can look out the window and look down and almost always see the ground in MSFS even though I'm in the middle of a cloud layer.  There's gotta be a way to code something "if user in cloud layer, render visibility 0" or something!

Sure, once in a while there are truly thin wispy low clouds, but most of them you cannot see through.  I want to go into the clouds and not be able to see down until I come out of the bases.

I am glad more people are finally noticing this and agree with me 🙂 Since SU4/Su5 timeframe I've written posts here, on the MSFS forums, opened numerous tickets, shared screenshots, you name it. The clouds basically suck and are just repetitive semi-transparent sprites. And the clouds got even worse when they tried to implement METAR into the live weather.

The sad thing is, IMO the clouds were great at release of MSFS, until the stupid changes they made around SU4 or SU5 - and the clouds have been borked since. They looked fabulous on release; yes the live weather matches up much better now, but the clouds are not even volumetric anymore and are just see-through puffs of wispy blobs and are always cumulus puffs everywhere. We used to be able to get higher level opaque and thin cloud layers (true overcast, broken, scattered too), fronts, thunderstorms, towering cumulus, stratus, and so on. They might sometimes still look "pretty" good from far away - but the closer you get to them, the worse they are (they melt away like cotton candy and are very transparent 95% of the time). I'm not talking about the pixelation, this is all about the excessive transparency once approaching a cloud, or going up through or down into the cloud deck - if there is one..

If a person ever gets to actually go "into" the clouds in MSFS live weather, you can look one way maybe up, down left or right and almost always see outside of the cloud (ground, sky etc). It is like there is a shade of gray that is transparent because flying over city areas at night you can see all the ground lights - then pause and change the time of day to daylight and all the sudden you see that there is a layer of "overcast" there!

And when you get to an area where thunderstorms should be, you usually see the high anvil type part of the storm (a high layer of transparent puff), but there's like nothing below it, almost like the system is just not generating the storm cloud and rain shafts under it, like it should. This has also been broken since SU4/SU5'ish.

11 hours ago, KERNEL32 said:

 

If a person ever gets to actually go "into" the clouds in MSFS live weather, you can look one way maybe up, down left or right and almost always see outside of the cloud (ground, sky etc). It is like there is a shade of gray that is transparent because flying over city areas at night you can see all the ground lights - then pause and change the time of day to daylight and all the sudden you see that there is a layer of "overcast" there!

 

This is true... and I failed to post this pic after I added those 3 above.  Once you get near the cloud.... as you said, one can usually see through it... which is where the amazing looking clouds then break the "immersion"

I can still see this road almost all the way through it - I think what happens.... is a majority of msfs simmers have never been in small plane where you can fly near clouds often enough to really see what they look like.  Some of the thinnest clouds I've flown through are still truly 100% opaque.  Unlike MSFS where every thin cloud is nearly 100% transparent.  I'm guessing this is a limitation of the voxel method.  They can't make a cloud dense enough to truly be opaque.  I'm not saying that their aren't opaque clouds in the sim, because I just flew over a layer yesterday that I couldn't see through from above.  But once I got into the layer....  yes.... I could see through the clouds to the terrain below.

cloudsside by Ryan Butterworth, on Flickr

Here's some real clouds I from a few years back... it was a very thin layer... a couple hundred ft thick at most.  You can see through the thinnest wisps but the actual clouds with structure were totally opaque.  I'm including this video too.  You can see as we climb next to the bases, but once abeam them you can't see through them.

thinclouds by Ryan Butterworth, on Flickr

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/o5nqt969oc1sts6du8ajn/thincloudsvideo.mp4?rlkey=6lxkjgi0ohm9gyqbdl1qymduj&dl=0

Edited January 13, 20242 yr by ryanbatc