7 minutes ago, JRBarrett said:

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.

 

“Those are user submitted screenshots, some from the 2020 alpha and some from the live sim.”

16 minutes ago, scotchegg said:

“Those are user submitted screenshots, some from the 2020 alpha and some from the live sim.”

I’m not sure why the header of the article says “June 2019”, because the alpha did not start until late in 2019. Prior to that time, only Asobo/Microsoft employees had access to MSFS.

None of the photos were from the alpha, or they would have had the user name embedded at multiple locations in the screen capture. That was a limitation of the alpha that wasn’t removed until the sim was released in August 2020.

One thing the sim definitely could do prior to SU7 (and does not do anymore) was depict “real” cumulonimbus as shown in the 4th photo. I saw something similar when departing KABQ. An isolated and very realistic cumulonimbus cell over the Jemez mountains north of the city. That would have been in early 2021.

16 hours ago, prolixindec said:

What I don't understand is why the change was implemented.

Nothing mysterious about it. It was done so the sim would run in the Xbox environment.

More specifically, a lot was sacrificed in order to shoehorn it into the Xbox S.

It wasn’t just cloud depiction. The whole colour palette of the sky was changed as was the TLOD.

A great shame really. 

18 minutes ago, DD_Arthur said:

Nothing mysterious about it. It was done so the sim would run in the Xbox environment.

More specifically, a lot was sacrificed in order to shoehorn it into the Xbox S.

It wasn’t just cloud depiction. The whole colour palette of the sky was changed as was the TLOD.

A great shame really. 

And yet, w/o doing this to make the sim more accessible to Xbox users, we wouldn't have ANY  MSFS.  It's pays one to not forget why this was done.  And most importantly:  it demonstrates Asobo knows full well HOW to create better clouds.  Hardware capabilities continue to improve and for our sakes I hope we don't have to wait until 2028 when next gen Xbox arrives to see some major improvement in cloud depiction.  Because of the Xbox factor I'm not super hopeful as 2028 is a ways off.  But, only Asobo knows at this point what they might get away with and it's possible sliders can be used for those who can management more processing demand.  Could be the multithreading enhancements will give them a little more room to play with.

Edited May 6, 20242 yr by Noel

10 minutes ago, Noel said:

And yet, w/o doing this to make the sim more accessible to Xbox users, we wouldn't have ANY  MSFS. 

I know and I agree Noel. It still doesn’t change the fact that overnight the sim was reduced in several important aspects to enable Asobo to shoehorn the sim into the Xbox S.

Something fundamental was done to the LOD at this time that no amount of sliders has been able to rectify.

2 minutes ago, DD_Arthur said:

I know and I agree Noel. It still doesn’t change the fact that overnight the sim was reduced in several important aspects to enable Asobo to shoehorn the sim into the Xbox S.

Something fundamental was done to the LOD at this time that no amount of sliders has been able to rectify.

Ok so they miscalculated where to put the sim at release no surprises there for a project of this scope so I forgive them for that.  Just keep remembering w/o that shoehorn we would nto have this sim, period.  Plus, and this is critical:  it's not like the sim was visually borked to the point it's not still visually fabulous, because it clearly is at least for me.  Right now I'm seeing detail I never saw previously, due in part to the new RTX4090 and setting Render Scale at 150--it's never looked this good even at release, save the cloud density.  As for LOD issues, I don't appreciate that because as I say it's visually sharper and more detailed than ever for me but that is in part hardware related, but at least the capability to access that hardware was present in MSFS.  In fact as I taxi past a SWA 738 on the way to KDEN's Rwy17R it looks like I'm looking out a window at a real plane, seriously.  Just fabulous and absolutely as smooth as silk including all of the live AI traffic landing, taxiing and taking off.

I think a reasonable thing to hope for is Asobo does include more range for those with the hardware to get there in the 2024 release because that is in the realm of possibility for certain though remains to be seen how much they will.  I posted a while back I hope they allocate a lot of the major improvement in multithreading to cloud depiction as able, and it was remarkable how many here dissed that on the basis that it was already so good we didn't need more.  Hard to please everyone isn't it...

8 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:🥲

What I mostly remember from those days was endless complaints about grey clouds, volcanic ash clouds, endless lightning, and heavy FPS issues.....

Seems like some things tend to look better in the rearview mirror.....

I quite liked the night lighting back in the day, too, but after more endless complaints, we now have what we have.

6 minutes ago, Noel said:

I think a reasonable thing to hope for is Asobo does include more range for those with the hardware to get there in the 2024 release because that is in the realm of possibility for certain though remains to be seen how much they will.  I posted a while back I hope they allocate a lot of the major improvement in multithreading to cloud depiction as able, and it was remarkable how many here dissed that on the basis that it was already so good we didn't need more.  Hard to please everyone isn't it...

Agree completely….

You can get some similar cloud shapes from pre-SU7/5 with custom weather.

 

  

1 hour ago, DD_Arthur said:

Nothing mysterious about it. It was done so the sim would run in the Xbox environment.

Not sure why, as they customize the graphics quality for each console.

A couple dev updates ago they said X-Box Series S is running on a mix of Medium-Low (or was it Medium-high?) and the Series X is on a mix of high-Ultra

Edited May 6, 20242 yr by Tuskin38

2 hours ago, JRBarrett said:

Those screenshots were from 2019 before the sim even entered alpha

Some of them have dates in the file name, and they're dated 2020

They're not from that June 2019 blog, the user posted that blog just as an example of a blog that's missing screenshots.

Edited May 6, 20242 yr by Tuskin38

1 minute ago, Tuskin38 said:

Not sure why, since they can just lower the graphics quality for each console.

Can they? Not is not technically possible, I know that is, but did they design this functionality into 2020? Is the design robust enough to adapted from an X-Box S to a high end gaming PC? My impression has been that they didn't, which is why in the end they may have needed to dial back some settings and changed the rendering parameters.  Having launched for PC only I can easily appreciate when it came time to move the title to X-Box that issues they had not anticipated would arise.

I also miss the depiction of the world pre SU5/7 but I understand why they needed to make those changes and I fully support the decision that they made -- because as Noel said the move to X-Box was undoubtedly necessary for the title to continue production and in fact I would not be surprised if 2024 was approved based on the X-Box achievement and results. We are in the 2020s no high-level studio-released game is going to be PC only, let alone high-end PC only.

2 minutes ago, Cognita said:

Can they?

read the rest of my post. I edited it while you were writing that.

Edited May 6, 20242 yr by Tuskin38

12 minutes ago, Tuskin38 said:

Not sure why, as they customize the graphics quality for each console.

This statement seems to ignore the idea cloud resolution was reduced across the entire range from Low to Ultra cloud settings.

1 hour ago, DD_Arthur said:

More specifically, a lot was sacrificed in order to shoehorn it into the Xbox S.

🤦‍♂️ ...and PCs.

I know it's fashionable on Avsim to slam all things Xbox, but the degradation was also because many PCs were struggling with MSFS.

With the advent of Frame Generation, AMD -X3D and higher Intel CPUs, and Nvidia 4000-series GPUs, people seem to have forgotten how 'Ultra' and even 'High' settings were problematic on a lot of systems.

Edited May 6, 20242 yr by F737MAX

A lot of myths are getting repeated here, unsurprisingly...

Firstly, the major change around clouds variety in live weather came with SU7 and METAR integration (something they've improved since then, but still not where live weather used to be in terms of weather variety pre SU7 when it was purely global albeit inaccurate locally vs METAR).

Secondly, the push for performance in SU5 was not just for XBox, but also due to the #1 wishlist item (and loud complaints) at that time from PC users to improve performance.. and it's also the case that a wide range of PC users have lesser hardware than XBox-X. For XBox-S and XBox-X, given that settings can be tightly controlled and locked down by MS/Asobo without needing to open up configurability as with PCs, MS/Asobo have decided on a set of hardcoded visual fidelity settings in-sim that delivers acceptable performance for XBox-S (targeting 1080p) and X-Box (targeting 4k).  As easy as it is to use XBox as the scapegoat for everything, it was the push to improve performance in general that perhaps also degraded the quality (not variety) of clouds in SU5.
 

Edited May 6, 20242 yr by lwt1971