12 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

Makes me want to weep. Same place, same time.  MSFS used to be able to display the second image.

MSFS

REX

The clouds in the tornado shot in the 2024 trailer look nice, if inaccurate for a storm cell.

1 hour ago, MarcG said:

It's just a shame that they continually need the public to shout at them before the realise "what's wrong"

That's your fantasy, that they "continually need the public to shout".  My sense is Asobo knows full well what people want OF COURSE and who the heck says they need to do everything according to a public's prioritization scheme, a public woefully word not allowed about the entire process of where they are and where they plan to go?  The folks you continually deride brought you the most compelling flight sim you've ever seen and that is why they have the user base they do.  Do you think it's a simple matter to stream all of this to thousands to millions of users, 24/7, something the other flight sims never have to think about?  All for a lousy $119 US?   Go fill your cup up it's 80% empty nearly always.

9 minutes ago, Noel said:

That's your fantasy, that they "continually need the public to shout".  My sense is Asobo knows full well what people want OF COURSE and who the heck says they need to do everything according to a public's prioritization scheme, a public woefully word not allowed about the entire process of where they are and where they plan to go?  The folks you continually deride brought you the most compelling flight sim you've ever seen and that is why they have the user base they do.  Do you think it's a simple matter to stream all of this to thousands to millions of users, 24/7, something the other flight sims never have to think about?  All for a lousy $119 US?   Go fill your cup up it's 80% empty nearly always.

Ok Jorg.

43 minutes ago, Noel said:

That's your fantasy, that they "continually need the public to shout".  My sense is Asobo knows full well what people want OF COURSE and who the heck says they need to do everything according to a public's prioritization scheme, a public woefully word not allowed about the entire process of where they are and where they plan to go?  The folks you continually deride brought you the most compelling flight sim you've ever seen and that is why they have the user base they do.  Do you think it's a simple matter to stream all of this to thousands to millions of users, 24/7, something the other flight sims never have to think about?  All for a lousy $119 US?   Go fill your cup up it's 80% empty nearly always.

Mind that sand in your ears

I've completely lost the will to tinker with my sim so MSFS is pretty vanilla.  I still get WOW moments from the clouds so what is the big deal?

sp

1 hour ago, Sky_Pilot071 said:

I've completely lost the will to tinker with my sim so MSFS is pretty vanilla.  I still get WOW moments from the clouds so what is the big deal?

sp

The wow moments in the sky are still there, sure. Maybe 3 out of 10 flights for me now versus 8 out of 10 pre-whatever SU was actually responsible.

22 hours ago, scotchegg said:

The wow moments in the sky are still there, sure. Maybe 3 out of 10 flights for me now versus 8 out of 10 pre-whatever SU was actually responsible.

Quality over quantity.  😏

sp

Thanks for the insights and ideas everyone.

On 5/6/2024 at 6:10 PM, scotchegg said:

The wow moments in the sky are still there, sure. Maybe 3 out of 10 flights for me now versus 8 out of 10 pre-whatever SU was actually responsible.

The initial wow moments came from the fact this was new to all of us and we were all duly blown away in large part.  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 being said I do have a lot of wow moments from nearly all flights, but that is in part because my hardware upgrade has afforded a better experience visually in particular.

I propose that we have 1 WOW cloud moment every 15 minutes an 1 super WOW moment every hour.

C'mon ASOBO you can do it.

I'm kidding of course because cloud depiction is subjective.

sp

Edited May 8, 20242 yr by Sky_Pilot071

1 hour ago, Noel said:

The initial wow moments came from the fact this was new to all of us and we were all duly blown away in large part.  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 being said I do have a lot of wow moments from nearly all flights, but that is in part because my hardware upgrade has afforded a better experience visually in particular.

Are you suggesting the clouds actually haven’t changed that much? 

6 hours ago, Noel said:

The initial wow moments came from the fact this was new to all of us and we were all duly blown away in large part.  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 being said I do have a lot of wow moments from nearly all flights, but that is in part because my hardware upgrade has afforded a better experience visually in particular.

I’m glad that you’re happy with the live weather depiction, but no — the changes in cloud depiction/lighting, beginning with SU5 and then SU7 were real and quite dramatic. It’s not just that we got used to the wow factor. It was immediately obvious to many of us as a “step backward” at the time as well.

That said, something I’ve seen every time this discussion comes up here is that what’s “immediately obvious” to some is very clearly not so obvious to others. 🙂 Much like the whole “can the human eye see frame rates above 24 fps” discussion. However, in both these cases there’s a correct answer — whether or not you still like the MSFS clouds, they were prettier, more varied, and more performance-sapping prior to SU5.

James 

9 hours ago, scotchegg said:

Are you suggesting the clouds actually haven’t changed that much? 

Not in the slightest--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.  To expand on that even without SU5/7 changes we would have become used to what we see over all of this time, years.  I've been hyper vocal about cloud depiction and weather since very early on.  Take note of how many people here responded that cloud depiction was already 'good enough',. 'better than ever before' yada yada:

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/641142-msasobo-i-so-hope-you-dedicate-the-lions-share-of-the/?do=findComment&comment=5052724

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:

Instead of more like this:

Here's a shot from pre SU5/6:  better density but still a ways to go:

Very hard on performance and that is one of the challenges of volumetric cloud depiction with our current level of technologies, hard and soft, and apparently density took a hit to accommodate Xbox and PotatoPC processing capabilities.  I think this is likely also the reason why we may in fact be stuck at some level with Xbox's influence on this:  no can make a slider to increase voxel density in large part because if that were possible w/ this approach to volumetric clouds they could perhaps just increase density with a slider for those with the hardware to process it.  If it were possible I don't see any business downside to doing that.  This also is another reason I haven't gone with ActiveSky--unfortunately Damian has no control over this basic element so even with 'weather' that looks better it will still suffer greatly from this limitation:  low resolution cloud depiction.  That, and I want to see what MS/A comes up with in 2024 for clouds and weather depiction only they have the ability to impact this area.

Edited May 8, 20242 yr by Noel

With their significantly upgraded graphics engine for MSFS2024, and with all the advances in machine learning, we might be seeing much better cloud tech in the upcoming sim.