7 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

the lighter stuff is not really captured nor does the window rain effect get it either - you do not see or it has not been produced variation in beading and droplets dependant on the water droplet size - what do I mean -drizzle is different from rain the drops are smaller. I really do not see that replicated

That's an interesting observation which I never thought of, indeed it would be nice to have different droplets size depending on rain intensity, if it's not too hard to code. Would probably be a first for flight sims?

11 hours ago, Murmur said:

That's an interesting observation which I never thought of, indeed it would be nice to have different droplets size depending on rain intensity, if it's not too hard to code. Would probably be a first for flight sims?

But can we get rid of the Star Trek Rain effect? Never seen that flying in real life or driving in my car. 

On 7/15/2025 at 12:21 PM, Falconjet112 said:

I am concerned with all this discussion regarding haze that it will be the catalyst for LR to regress into that depicted by MS2024...clear almost unlimited visibility!

Far be it from me to get controversial, but I wanted to understand why people keep saying that MSFS has "unlimited visibility."
Here on the forum, we have a user (Filou) who is famous for his photography, and he often posts FS2020 shots in which the haze is not only present, but also extremely realistic.
Click here.

Furthermore, YouTube offers a huge amount of visual information about in-flight haze, allowing us to roughly but concretely determine whether XP and MSFS's representation of haze is accurate or not.
I've seen videos of airliners at high altitude where the visibility is remarkable, so much so that it resembles FS2020 more than XP12.
And these cases of high visibility are far from rare, as is often rumored.
Just to give an example, I often watch videos by "Razgriz Flight & Spotting," a YouTuber who travels the world on commercial airplanes.
These videos are very representative of how the atmosphere behaves in the real world because they show different types of flights, to different destinations, in different weather conditions, both at low and very high altitudes.

From what I read on the forum, it almost seems that above 2,000 or 3,000 meters, the atmosphere must always transform into fog and mist, otherwise it's not realistic.
Then I go watch videos by "Razgriz Flight & Spotting," for example this one (minute 1:16:21) ......

....... and you can see a representation of a cloudy atmosphere, but the visibility is remarkable; you can see for miles and miles, the terrain appears clean and transparent, and the air isn't clouded by haze like XP does.
Paradoxically, that video is more similar to Filou's representation of FS2020, in which (paradoxically) FS2020 is criticized for not having haze, yet it actually represents it with the right clarity and quantity. 🤔

This isn't to say that XP's representation of haze is completely wrong! 🖐️
Absolutely not.
I'm just saying:
1- It's not true that FS2020 has unlimited visibility; look at Filou's photos and you'll see confirmation.
2- XP's representation of haze is (sometimes) worse than FS2020's. I've seen tons of real-world videos and can confirm that XP (sometimes) generates too much haze, when the air should be cleaner.
3- Sometimes the real-world "Razgriz Flight & Spotting" videos resemble XP's representation.
Other times, they resemble FS2020's representation.
So both simulators represent reality well, there is no clear winner, in my opinion it is 50% and 50%. 👍

One day, when people wake up to themselves, and realise,  " its never going to be real,,", not enough data, will always be a guess. And depending on the person you speak to, the time of day, the amount of alchohol you had, number if coffes you drunk, and hot chilies you munched on, it might be close, but than again it may not. people are asking/demanding what is impossible. Its really good now. Why can people just enjoy it and just report the occasional sillies. As some have pointed out, some if what people call silly clouds can happen in the real world. So enjoy it, lest the day comes that you canno longer fly and all the complaining is wasted. Even 2 pilots cant agree on what is right.

9 hours ago, efis007 said:

Far be it from me to get controversial, but I wanted to understand why people keep saying that MSFS has "unlimited visibility."

I think MSFS has visibility that is nearly always many miles, so I think that is why the term 'unlimited' has stuck.

 

9 hours ago, efis007 said:

So both simulators represent reality well, there is no clear winner, in my opinion it is 50% and 50%. 👍

I agree, XP12 often overdoes the haze and MSFS often under does it ☺️

 

17 minutes ago, mjrhealth said:

people are asking/demanding what is impossible.

Asking yes, but I'm not sure demanding is the right way to put it.  The haze issue is real in XP12, so it is not unreasonable to discuss it among fellow simmers.  As I understand it, there is an issue when the max visibility  reported in a metar is 10 miles.  We can see the atmospheric algorithms are doing a great job because where the air is dry visibility does increase substantially in countries like the western USA.  However, in the UK the visibility is appears to never increase over the ten miles reported in the metar - and that is often much lower than reality.

No doubt a complex issue to improve on.

26 minutes ago, mjrhealth said:

Why can people just enjoy it and just report the occasional sillies.

Permanently low visibility over ones country is not an 'occasional silly', it is an issue worthy of discussion.

 

29 minutes ago, mjrhealth said:

As some have pointed out, some if what people call silly clouds can happen in the real world. So enjoy it,

I think those of us using XP12 are enjoying the weather immensely. Occasionally there are some very silly clouds in XP12 that are worthy of reporting to Laminar, and I'm sure they must appreciate the reports.  Doing so doesn't take away from the great enjoyment we get from the product.

Did anyone do the experiment I mentioned in my previous post? I still need some input to verify if the rendering part is correct or not.

Quote

However I want to be 100% sure that this is the case, so I'm asking for some feedback. Ignore the live weather, just set the clear weather preset, and then adjust the visibility slider to a specific visibility you know how it looks. Does it look accurate to real life when you do so? If not, I'd really appreciate some feedback especially with visual evidence.

Referring to this. In short, I want to verify that the manually set visibility indeed looks correct.

Edited July 17, 2025Jul 17 by Maya2