In ‘What’s new in 12.4.4’, Marco states:

"Visibility with Altitude

Finally, a change you’ll notice on nearly every flight into marginal weather. Visibility previously faded from the ground-reported value to clear-air visibility over a fixed 5,000 to 15,000 ft ramp. It now uses a physically derived altitude band, estimated from the temperature and dewpoint spread, cloud layers, latitude and season.

The practical effect: fog, mist and haze now stay in a realistically shallow surface layer, instead of hazing your view all the way up to cruise altitude. Departing into a foggy morning and breaking out into genuinely clear air is one of the more satisfying things in real flying, and it now works properly here."

Does this render Autohaze redundant? FWIW, I kept Autohaze on the system and the beta didn't seem to affect anything; but it's early days.

Edited Friday at 03:18 AM2 days by Brian Mackie
Minor addition

Hey Brian, all well in your simland?

All going well here with the setup and loving XPlane more and more...

Just wondering, do you think its worth the endevour to run the BETA thats been released? If you are running it, any issues so to speak?

This is probably one of the most interesting news for 12.4.4 ...

Not that other features aren't great, but thgis one in particular used to be a true show stopper for me, visually, and I ususlly wasn't that dependent on visual aspects ....

On 9/11/2026 at 12:44 AM, Brian Mackie said:

Does this render Autohaze redundant?

I'm going on holiday today for a couple of weeks, so i can't look at this right now. When I released AutoHaze I remember reading Laminar weren't interested in it.

i smell a rat...

Rat? Where? How? Improved capability sure, but the notion that LR dug through the lua plugin and copied it is rather amusing and baseless. There are plenty of public data sources out there and as I recall, the plugin is going to a web source that provides the visibility value directly. LR is deriving it from a range of other atmospheric data.

Plus, given that autohaze is ai-generated there's zero ability to claim "authorship" in the first place.

1 hour ago, blingthinger said:

Rat? Where? How? Improved capability sure, but the notion that LR dug through the lua plugin and copied it is rather amusing and baseless. There are plenty of public data sources out there and as I recall, the plugin is going to a web source that provides the visibility value directly. LR is deriving it from a range of other atmospheric data.

Plus, given that autohaze is ai-generated there's zero ability to claim "authorship" in the first place.

Interesting notion youve arrived at there. Not quite sure where you got that from. 😉

From the text you quoted at the start. Did you not read it? And the plugin is well known to be ai coded. Where in this timeline are you so wildly confused?

29 minutes ago, blingthinger said:

From the text you quoted at the start. Did you not read it? And the plugin is well known to be ai coded. Where in this timeline are you so wildly confused?

I think you're reading rather more into “i smell a rat...” than I actually put there. I didn't say LR copied AutoHaze, nor did I suggest that anywhere in the text. You seem to have supplied that part of the argument yourself. Now unruffle your tail feathers and relax....

1 minute ago, Davehibes said:

reading rather more into “i smell a rat...”

Oh by all means: elaborate on what you meant here then. I'm all ears. You may very well be the first time I've ever heard someone use "rat" as a compliment.

I think you have exhausted this. You have decided what I meant and are now asking me to defend a position I never expressed. I'm not going to keep participating in that particular exercise. Feel free to have the last word. I'm done with it.

35 minutes ago, Davehibes said:

I'm done with it.

You made a statement that is 99.9% slanderous but really didn't mean it that way? That's fine that you can't admit error, so I'll add in another option for you: you're expressing solidarity for a creator? Just with the wrong word.

Note here that LR also knocked out another plugin creator with this release (snow coverage). Not only "knocked out" but called them out in the blog post. Literally saying "do not use that plugin anymore". But I have yet to see your logic behind "rat" and you refuse to even attempt to cough any up.

There was no targeting here with the atmospheric visibility. It's 2 fewer plugins that folks have to worry about. That's not a problem for anyone unless.... the plugins did/do it better. Certainly still room for discussion there.

Enough carping, please? This is getting off-topic. FWIW, I have tried XP 4.4.4 with and without Autohaze, and IMHO, Autohaze is superior. So it's staying put on my rig.