Why did the weather depiction change?

[ZodiaLight 13]

On 5/6/2024 at 5:39 PM, Noel said:

Did you save any of that 'screenshot worthy'?  I was there from Day 1 after release, and no, every flight was not screen worthy then any more than now.  I think people were so gobsmacked then they've mostly just gotten used to it now so the thrill of new is gone.   Do you think this was screenshot worthy, from my flight an hour ago?  I certainly do and I think people do this:  tend to think of the past as better than it actually was....

I am still gobsmacked by past screenshots and wish each day I could fly in Live Weather skies like these again.

[abennett 177]

It is undoubtable that many aspects of the sim were visually downgraded with SU5, clouds, lighting, LOD distances etc. As soon as I ran the sim for the first time after SU5 I could see it straight away.

If there were issues with performance, people should have just turned their settings down. This would have been much more preferable than Asobo turning down the settings for everybody, including those that were happy with performance. If the performance was so bad you couldn't use it on Low settings - buy a new PC instead of complaining and spoiling it for everyone else.

 

Too many people who were new to flightsim expecting FPS values that are unrealistic and unnecessary for a flight simulator.

[Noel 4,563]

38 minutes ago, abennett said:

This would have been much more preferable than Asobo turning down the settings for everybody, including those that were happy with performance. If the performance was so bad you couldn't use it on Low settings - buy a new PC instead of complaining and spoiling it for everyone else.

 

Too many people who were new to flightsim expecting FPS values that are unrealistic and unnecessary for a flight simulator.

So you're thinking the reason Asobo turned down settings for everyone (still not sure why that would be necessary) was due to users' focus on frame rate.  I proposed this idea a long time ago here, that the obsession with high frame rates meant less resources to allocate toward weather and cloud depiction--others to follow in that thread didn't think so.  But OF COURSE it does, duh.

I've yet to hear a plausible explanation for why SLIDERS don't solve the differences between Xbox and PC.  After all that is what PC to PC users do, adjust sliders to make it work for them.  If the answer is that Xbox doesn't have sliders that does not answer why that matters at all--PCs do.  If they deliver a complete, unadjustable set of graphics (except HDR is user chooseable we learn) to Xbox, they simply set the values so they get intended performance to quality ratio.  What stops that process from making higher values in the full range of each slider or attribute possible so that people w/ twice the processing power of Xbox can access that?  Doesn't really add up this is already what we have so for Asobo to turn down settings for everybody doesn't make business sense in any way shape or form, unless you're afraid to wee off Xbox S users.

 

[scotchegg 4,242]

7 hours ago, Noel said:

I'm pointing to a fact of human behavior that we get used to newness to the point we no longer have the same reaction to the same material that originally was so impressive to us

Yes, I think we can all understand the concept, but you said you think it’s ’got to be a large part of’ the reason many of us feel the clouds were downgraded. I really don’t feel it applies here (I don’t feel the scenery is ‘meh’ simply because I’m used to it now), and the screenshots from that period should be enough to show the reduction in quality is very real, and not just nostalgia for an initial reaction to something new.

[scotchegg 4,242]

5 hours ago, ZodiaLight said:

I am still gobsmacked by past screenshots and wish each day I could fly in Live Weather skies like these again

Exactly. Don’t know how anyone can claim ‘it’s all in your mind’ when seeing what live weather used to routinely show us.

[Noel 4,563]

27 minutes ago, scotchegg said:

Exactly. Don’t know how anyone can claim ‘it’s all in your mind’ when seeing what live weather used to routinely show us.

Oh yeah that's what I said.  Did you read the whole post?  I didn't think so....

[Redge 245]

6 hours ago, ZodiaLight said:

I am still gobsmacked by past screenshots and wish each day I could fly in Live Weather skies like these again.

Every single one of these pre-SU5/7 screenshots are outstanding! We have lost so much visual fidelity!!

[scotchegg 4,242]

19 minutes ago, Noel said:

Oh yeah that's what I said.  Did you read the whole post?  I didn't think so....

Sure, I read the parts where you said 'yes, the clouds have changed and I think this is what has changed'. Which is in stark contrast to your original comment that: "Over time one gets used to it and the wow diminishes and we've now been at this almost 4 years.  That's got to be a good part of it." That's suggesting at least 'a good part of it' is simple perception issues, something I don't accept in this instance.

[lwt1971 7,457]

2 hours ago, Redge said:

Every single one of these pre-SU5/7 screenshots are outstanding! We have lost so much visual fidelity!!

I wonder if most of the differences we are spotting (and long for) in current live weather vs the earlier days of MSFS is mostly due to the METAR integration in SU7 that reduced the great variety of live weather when it was based purely on global Meteoblue data. If possible, good to see how pre-SU5 live weather looked compared to SU5 or SU6 live weather.. if such comparisons are still around, those will be the ones that show more clearly any differences in *quality* of clouds etc due to performance optimizations, without "polluting" our eyes with the post-SU7 loss of live weather *variety*
 

Edited May 8 by lwt1971

[Noel 4,563]

2 hours ago, scotchegg said:

Sure, I read the parts where you said 'yes, the clouds have changed and I think this is what has changed'. Which is in stark contrast to your original comment that: "Over time one gets used to it and the wow diminishes and we've now been at this almost 4 years.  That's got to be a good part of it." That's suggesting at least 'a good part of it' is simple perception issues, something I don't accept in this instance.

Yes when you take lines out of context you miss the whole message.  Are you saying there would be no or little difference in initial reactions by an 30 yr enthusiast who had never seen volumetric clouds out to the horizon in a flight sim, by that same person 4 years later if those clouds had not changed with a Sim Update?  If that's a YES for you then I don't accept that it defies our nature to adapt to reality and typically to then see faults and aim for higher standards.  When MSFS first released I commented here that they were already in the ball park and mainly needed to increase resolution to help support more distinct cloud depiction especially up close and to begin to get sharp edges on those puffy cumulous.   But yes, had initial cloud depiction not changed I would in no way be as impressed today as I was those first several months post initial release.  It was in part the newness of the entire platform that amped up the wow factor then.  

 

Edited May 9 by Noel

[JRBarrett 3,128]

1 hour ago, lwt1971 said:

I wonder if most of the differences we are spotting (and long for) in current live weather vs the earlier days of MSFS is mostly due to the METAR integration in SU7 that reduced the great variety of live weather when it was based purely on global Meteoblue data. If possible, good to see how pre-SU5 live weather looked compared to SU5 or SU6 live weather.. if such comparisons are still around, those will be the ones that show more clearly any differences in *quality* of clouds etc due to performance optimizations, without "polluting" our eyes with the post-SU7 loss of live weather *variety*
 

AFAIK, they are no longer using METAR to set clouds in the sim. They replaced it by using realtime satellite imagery to supplement the model predictions for cloud placement. Airport temperature, wind speed and direction, surface pressure and surface visibility still come from the METAR. Around SU7 they greatly reduced the complexity of the clouds in the sim presumably for performance reasons which (along with METAR clouds) made the cloud depictions very poor in many cases. 

Since moving away from METAR clouds and adopting a satellite “assist” in recent SUs, the cloud depiction is generally better, but not as good as it once was. ASFS and REX show the sim is capable of much more cloud variety when the weather is set manually.

[Noel 4,563]

13 hours ago, Noel said:

I've stated over and over the real villain here is low density voxel resolution--I'm pretty sure that is the change we all noticed from initial launch, and that is what would need to change to accommodate Xbox's limited VRAM because of the performance impact:  clouds got blurrier, fuzzier, and so forth.  Very difficult to make distinct forms out of mush, which is why I contend making various cloud morphologies is exceedingly challenging with the current technology.  That is in part the reason we see clouds that look more like this--from a distance not bad at all often, but up close, blurry city:

 

[UAL4life 242]

On 5/5/2024 at 3:55 PM, 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.

This is the correct answer. It was a 1, 2 punch!

[scotchegg 4,242]

10 hours ago, Noel said:

Are you saying there would be no or little difference in initial reactions by an 30 yr enthusiast who had never seen volumetric clouds out to the horizon in a flight sim, by that same person 4 years later if those clouds had not changed with a Sim Update?

Yes. I am categorically saying that the quality and variety of skies we originally had was such that they would continue to offer the same or similar enjoyment four years later. For me, the skies were even more of a revelation than the scenery (which Orbx had already given us a good idea of), and my enjoyment of the scenery is pretty much unchanged now.

I guarantee you that for many of us, your assertion that natural and increasing ennui with the familiar is a good part of our frustrations is plain wrong. Our frustrations are totally based on the very real, obvious, and significant downgrade of the skies that we had at the beginning, and in no way what you’re describing,

[Tom_L 558]

11 hours ago, lwt1971 said:

I wonder if most of the differences we are spotting (and long for) in current live weather vs the earlier days of MSFS is mostly due to the METAR integration in SU7 that reduced the great variety of live weather when it was based purely on global Meteoblue data. If possible, good to see how pre-SU5 live weather looked compared to SU5 or SU6 live weather.

That's an interesting thought. So I skimmed through my files and came up with these screenshots.

Release-version:

After SU5, before SU7:

The diversity generally seems to still be there, as such skies (layers especially) disappeared completely after SU7 until around SU11. I didn't find the same convincing layered overcast though, but it was a relatively short period and I didn't fly that often due to the banding issue that SU5 introduced, so I'm not sure if that had already gone. What I remember (and found in more screenshots from that period) is that my overall impression was that of a more simplified and harsh, contrasty look of the sky. That's why I was surprised to find the shot at the bottom right, which I would have assigned to the release version if I didn't know better.

Then I also searched for screenshots from the release version that resemble skies that can probably be seen with todays Live weather, and came up with these:

So not everything that glitters was gold. But it remains to be noted that although apparently not perfect as well, the release version was at least capable of showing skies like in the first tableau.