Active Sky review

[roland_lfor 253]

49 minutes ago, techman said:

Its 8883. 

Then you should try B8888 as it supposed to solve this issue (which I report myself to HiFi)

[Cpt_Piett 4,872]

1 hour ago, turbomax said:

clouds at 23:30 still awful cauliflower/volcanic ashes, but that's not ASFS fault. I choose low cloud quality settings to mitigate this somewhat.

I know. I think I might have used the word atrocious. Or was it horrendous? I forget.

We really need to start a new thread where we sit down and discuss how we are going to describe and classify these monsters though. I think I’ve got a fairly good grasp on the freaky volcanic ash “clouds”, but still somewhat confused about cauliflower and popcorn. I think it’s important that we don’t mix terms here in order to avoid confusion and misunderstandings.

[turbomax 3,315]

13 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

but still somewhat confused about cauliflower

I can offer broccoli as a compromise?

p.s. ok let's stick to volcanic ashes then, the MSFS industry wide accepted term which every simmer understands by now. even the x-plainers use it with pleasure to refer to the atrocious and horrendous MSFS clouds.

Edited May 4 by turbomax

[Cpt_Piett 4,872]

6 minutes ago, turbomax said:

I can offer broccoli as a compromise?

I don’t know, it doesn’t feel quite right. I’ll have to think about it for some time.

Edited May 4 by Cpt_Piett

[Virtpilot 156]

1 hour ago, Ron Attwood said:

No. Just let it install over. Your login etc. are preserved. Easy peasy

Thank you.

[vgbaron 3,727]

2 hours ago, Virtpilot said:

Thank you.

Best case - complete uninstall including settings etc. Most efficient UNLESS HiFi indicates full uninstall is to just uninstall the app but say no to the settings etc. Cleans out old stuff but leaves your settings and login data.

[avhpilot 156]

3 hours ago, Cpt_Piett said:

We really need to start a new thread where we sit down and discuss how we are going to describe and classify these monsters though

Please let me know when you do because I'd want to participate. Those monsters brake immersion and I suppose it;s because the whites are not white enough and the blacks are too black. So it is perhaps the lighting engine that is the weakest link in this?

But what annoys me even more is the fact you will practically always see a clear deep blue sky above them: a total lack of any stratus or cirrus clouds, letalone any convincing ones. With or without ASFS

And I have no reason to believe this will be improved in FS2024, Please correct me if I am wrong

[Baber20 1,492]

Those ash clouds are my single biggest gripe with this sim. They look absolutely terrible.

[lwt1971 7,484]

55 minutes ago, Baber20 said:

Those ash clouds are my single biggest gripe with this sim. They look absolutely terrible.

About the ash look, Seb did discuss it on a previous Q&A session (see below) ... basically it's the level of processing to render the clouds i.e. to calculate light scattering, shadow casting, etc and full processing that'd show it most realistically would require too much computational power. The ashen look shows up depending on time of day and angle of sun light, and also more so with cumulus clouds. Given MS/Asobo are taking advantage of multi-threading and other performance improvements in MSFS 2024, let's see if this aspect of clouds rendering is improved.

So when the live weather is mostly only showing cumulus type clouds, the ash look will be more in our faces. Given that, even if another weather injector (via presets) like AS asks for cumulus clouds then we're going to get the same ash look because AS just uses the core sim weather engine and cloud rendering.

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/live-dev-q-a-april-27th-2022/516747

Forum question – There are complaints about clouds looking too dark at high altitude, can you adjust the clouds shading to reduce the volcanic ash look?

Seb – I can confirm, it’s been brought up a lot. In a lot of occasion, clouds look great and sometimes it’s looks like you’re flying over a volcano. I spent about 2 weeks on it, I try to change the brightness and the problem is that with dynamic lighting whenever you make something twice as bright in the sim it doesn’t twice as bright at all. In order to have the ash effect go away, I turned the clouds ten times brighter and then in so many occasions there were over exposed.

With real clouds, light goes in and it scatters around and get reflected and comes back out. There’s more energy conserved in cloud than in ash. There’s a little more occlusion and energy taken away because it’s darker. To get the formula right with our cloud system (which is fully 3D), we need to have perfect shadow casting internally of clouds but that would cost a lot of computational power. For the amount of performance, we dedicate to clouds right we get the quality we have right now and it works well in many occasion but when the system is a bit complex it just gets the lighting wrong.

As Martial said, it’s a system, if we do an overhaul of the system at some point and invest more performance into clouds, we can probably get this better but it’s more complicated than just adjusting the brightness.
 

Edited May 4 by lwt1971

[turbomax 3,315]

1 hour ago, lwt1971 said:

Seb: There’s more energy conserved in cloud than in ash.

good to know. 🤣

how about an option in ASFS to replace those ugly cumuli nimbi 😀 with your choice of: (cauliflower, broccoli, popcorn, volcanic ashes, atrocious, horrendous) something that is similar but not as ugly. 

Edited May 4 by turbomax

[MrBitstFlyer 3,901]

5 hours ago, turbomax said:

x-plainers

Please try and refrain from this silly name calling.  A great thread about the excellent ASFS doesn't need it.

[sniper31 651]

Anyone know why I keep getting the Error Fetching Simbrief Plan, make sure user ID is valid error? Of course, I have double checked my Simbrief user ID is correctly entered into AS, but this window keeps popping up every few minutes lately. I am running the 8888 Beta.

[mmcmah 448]

27 minutes ago, sniper31 said:

Anyone know why I keep getting the Error Fetching Simbrief Plan, make sure user ID is valid error? Of course, I have double checked my Simbrief user ID is correctly entered into AS, but this window keeps popping up every few minutes lately. I am running the 8888 Beta.

Are you using the numeric user ID?

[sniper31 651]

Just now, mmcmah said:

Are you using the numeric user ID?

No, should I be? 

[Bobsk8 12,919]

38 minutes ago, sniper31 said:

No, should I be? 

Pilot ID in Simbrief is 5 numbers. Should be entered in General Options. 

Edited May 4 by Bobsk8