I've read in many places that weather depiction changed (for the worse, according to many) several iterations of MSFS ago, maybe around update #5 from the studio. This was before my time so I didn't experience the change myself, but I've seen lots of pictures from that era. What I don't understand is why the change was implemented. What's the best guess? Did it optimize the code or make the sim run faster? Or does MSFS consider the current state to actually be an upgrade compared to what was present before? Or did it fix some other kind of bug?

25 minutes ago, prolixindec said:

I've read in many places that weather depiction changed (for the worse, according to many) several iterations of MSFS ago, maybe around update #5 from the studio. This was before my time so I didn't experience the change myself, but I've seen lots of pictures from that era. What I don't understand is why the change was implemented. What's the best guess? Did it optimize the code or make the sim run faster? Or does MSFS consider the current state to actually be an upgrade compared to what was present before? Or did it fix some other kind of bug?

I didn't see it then either, but I recall hearing that it was to make it better for Xbox.

That’s a discussion big enough to fill a whole book. 
 

My short version is that MSFS has a very good global weather model that was not able to be precise enough at the airports. 
changes where made to make the weather at airports match the ATIS and therefore break out of the global weather. 

1 hour ago, mmcmah said:

I didn't see it then either, but I recall hearing that it was to make it better for Xbox.

It had nothing to do with Xbox. It was the introduction of METAR that messed it up

25 minutes ago, Tuskin38 said:

It had nothing to do with Xbox. It was the introduction of METAR that messed it up

Incorrect. SU5 was not the metar update, SU7 was. SU5 was to help with performance on xbox and other lower performance systems. Clouds looked significantly better before SU5. Many, many people have documented this and share the same opinion.

2 hours ago, prolixindec said:

I've read in many places that weather depiction changed (for the worse, according to many) several iterations of MSFS ago

METAR and Xbox.

Edited May 5, 20242 yr by KERNEL32

23 minutes ago, KERNEL32 said:

METAR and Xbox.

...and lower spec PCs.

https://youtu.be/Rv-lwO3mOv4?feature=shared&t=342

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CKVhyOZaUcU (first 10 seconds)

 

Edited May 5, 20242 yr by F737MAX

40 minutes ago, kiwikat said:

Incorrect. SU5 was not the metar update, SU7 was. SU5 was to help with performance on xbox and other lower performance systems. Clouds looked significantly better before SU5. Many, many people have documented this and share the same opinion.

I think the main difference outside of trying to blend METAR with overall weather, and it's significant, is the voxel resolution was significantly better early on--not massively so because the performance impacts are large which is perhaps what Asobo did to cope with Xbox's limits in that regard.  In many ways overall weather is better now but clouds themselves are less dense as it were, verging on blurry when close up.   When MSFS first released I thought it was decent enough already to where it just needed a wee bit more of that voxel density to really begin to make something that can start to mimic RW clouds, emphasis on 'start'.  Maybe we'll see some improvement coming from better multithreading in 2024 but that is CPU-oriented and I'm not sure how that will impact cloud rendering using voxel-based clouds which seem like they ought to impact the GPU far more.  Here's a shot from pre SU5:

 

Oh man, it’s so sad, what they did to the clouds. We went from truly varied and realistic skies, where every flight felt unique, to the least varied, repetitive skies of the peer sims (XP / DCS). And they just refuse to talk about it in any depth. 
 

Just a small taste of what they took from us:🥲

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/4-years-in-and-pretty-much-zero-improvements-to-clouds/637016/299

Edited May 6, 20242 yr by scotchegg

1 hour ago, scotchegg said:

Oh man, it’s so sad, what they did to the clouds. We went from truly varied and realistic skies, where every flight felt unique, to the least varied, repetitive skies of the peer sims (XP / DCS). And they just refuse to talk about it in any depth. 
 

Just a small taste of what they took from us:🥲

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/4-years-in-and-pretty-much-zero-improvements-to-clouds/637016/299

100% agree

Mike 

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/su5-graphics-quality/

Just one (of many) discussions on the graphical quality regression of SU5 (mainly clouds), as above SU7 was the overall weather & VR fiasco whereby there was no public beta test and clearly no internal testing for that update.

I am tired of correcting this at this point but SU5 did not bring the regression. SU5 brought with it a color banding bug that got fixed before SU7 dropped. SU7 had those horror show ball shaped clouds then when they fixed it, but we got the overly transparent clouds we have now. Clouds have never been a big resourse hog and Asobo have confirmed this.

To the OP's question: Performance and a bodged METAR integration are the reasons for the generic weather display we have in the sim now.

As already aptly stated, SU5 brought systemic and massive changes to cloud rendering and lighting. What tires me are the recurring arguments that SU 5 did not represent a major step backwards for PC users. People who believe that the massive performance gains on PC, which are admittedly real, were achieved without quality losses cannot be argued with. In contrast, the banding issue introduced together with SU5 was a simple mistake in one of the color tables changing a value from 10 to 8 bit and was solved with SU7. It took some time and effort to get it to the attention of devs - ask me how I know.
But with the same SU7 it turned out that this was a very minor nuisance compared to what was touted as an "improvement" of live weather through Metar integration and could only be described as bottomless impudence and was destined to be that way roughly until SU12, when their incidentally made fixes finally brought it back to reasonable, yet lacking the immersion from before SU5. I accept that the majority of users seem to be mostly happy with today's live weather, but that doesn't change the fact that the weather display is the one area of the simulator that has seen the most significant regression since release.

May 2021.

5 hours ago, scotchegg said:

Oh man, it’s so sad, what they did to the clouds. We went from truly varied and realistic skies, where every flight felt unique, to the least varied, repetitive skies of the peer sims (XP / DCS). And they just refuse to talk about it in any depth. 
 

Just a small taste of what they took from us:🥲

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/4-years-in-and-pretty-much-zero-improvements-to-clouds/637016/299

Those screenshots were from 2019 before the sim even entered alpha - before any users had a chance to actually use the sim on their own computers. They were promotional shots, and I’m pretty sure that some (or all) of them were “enhanced” with photoshop.

I’ve been using MSFS since tech alpha 4, and though I agree that the cloud depictions before SU7 were generally better than we have now, (more like what ASFS now delivers), I have never seen clouds in MSFS look as “real” as many of those screen shots - especially the last one in the series.

People tend to see the past through rose colored glasses.