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Anyone else also seeing a nightlighting regression in the latest beta build? The gorgeous night lighting of the last (two?) builds is gone with “real” lights limited to a very small circle around the user, and much lower resolution textures than we had last week in the distance?

I can't speak for the exact KSP implementation (I'm going to download it and try it out this weekend), but in general, rendering and weather simulation are separate. If you can create clouds that look this realistic, the same rendering techniques could be applied to a dynamic weather engine that drives convection, wind, and cloud evolution. The visual fidelity is independent of whether the clouds move or grow in real time — so in the case of MSFS, I think the answer should be, yes, if the weather engine allowed clouds of this fidelity to be rendered and lit accurately, then the underlying dynamic weather engine could be used to take care of the rest. I'm sure it's not trivial, but I think the principle is sound.

I think a lot of people in this thread are potentially missing what I am trying to show here... Which is the way that the clouds are rendered. The lighting and realism of the rendering of the sky looks massively more realistic than any other volumetric clouds I've seen in games. Whether or not they work dynamically or their compatibility with a live-weather injector is irrelevant. First you figure out how the physics, lighting and shaders work to render the clouds in this way, then after that you decide how to generate the clouds using your underlying dynamic/live weather injectors etc. These KSP clouds that I showed above, are a community add-on effort by a single person (who is probably the cloud rendering equivalent to the legendary, @Biology who got our MSFS2020 atmospheric lighting corrected and is behind the massive upgrade in XP12.2's weather and lighting). Take a look here to see his blog, and examples of what he has achieved. Different game engines use different ways of handling lighting and shaders etc, but, seeing as Seb, Jörg and co said in a recent livestream, that they are considering future upgrades to the weather rendering, then I'd say they should see if they can have a word with this guy, before someone else scoops him up, like Laminar did with Biology. https://www.patreon.com/posts/true-volumetric-139879553

I’ve often wondered whether people disagree about clouds in the sun so much because it’s so subjective based on where they live and the clouds they see around them all the time. I mean, this looks 100% like what I see outside my house all the time. But I know when I’m where my wife comes from the clouds there are totally different, shaped by the surrounding mountains. Either that, or some people see more of MSFS clouds than real ones to be able to judge properly anymore 😜

Move over MSFS and XP12...! These volumetric clouds (and cloud lighting) in, of all places, Kerbal Space Program, are how to render clouds convincingly:

Phew! I’ve read through the whole thread and haven’t seen anywhere the explanation that Jörg once gave in a dev stream as to why the fully modelled weather radar wasn’t considered feasible (at least early on) - it was commercial, and nothing to do with the inflexibility of MS’ contract with them. MS wanted to expand their contract with Meteoblue to deepen the radar functionality but MB were concerned that by providing the extra necessary data, even without an API, some enterprising parties might find a way to reverse engineer it to be able to extract the 3D precipitation data for their own uses, all for the price of an MSFS license instead of paying Meteoblue directly for commercial access to that data.

They’re currently testing Release Candidate 2, and expect to need an RC3 to fix some minor bugs found during beta testing of RC2. It sounds like it’s pretty close. The 2024 version will be a standalone product (ie paid upgrade for existing users as well) with apparently some new functionality. What that is though hasn’t been made public yet.

Admittedly I didn’t try 2024 for as long as you, I too have also reverted back to 2020. I’m not sure when I’ll try 2024 again. I suspect it will be when I’m forced to switch because developers (encouraged by MS) will release more must-have addons exclusively for 2024 (which is already starting to happen tbh).

That haze though in the second screenshot over the desert... 😍 I agree the resolution of the clouds looks pretty low close-up, but it as @ryanbatc said, they seem to be knocking it out of the park with each new beta update, trying to dial in these clouds. In my case, I've just reverted to 2020, with Atmos and the decent clouds (as well as RealTurb for in-cloud turbulence). Flying through clouds isn't quite as satisfying in 2020 as it is in 2024, and the effect of wind gusts etc on the flight model isn't nearly as refined, but for me personally, those downsides are outweighed by the beauty of the sky colours and cloud detail/definition all the way out to the cloud draw limit in 2020.

I really didn't mean to have this turn into an us vs. them discussion (we've got enough of those these days) by bringing this thread back to life. It was simply an acknowledgement that there's been, in my view, a very clear regression in terms of sky colour and cloud quality in 2024, and I was hoping for the input from someone who had a big impact on this community by bringing their expertise to the attention of Asobo/MSFS.

Thanks! And thanks for the video. I'll have to give this a go. The only thing that I'm hesitating about is the performance on your video. I have the same specs as you do from your signature, but that frame rate looks a bit choppy.

There's a yellow-ish sepia tone by default in FS2024 that isn't there in 2020, and the sunsets and mid-day sky colors (especially the transition on the horizon) look entirely unnatural and greenish. If you view that link I added to the MSFS forum post, you'll see very, very clearly what has happened to the clouds in the near and far distance. There are even some shots there comparing the same scene / weather between MSFS2024 and 2020. If you meant, can I explain why it happened - well, for the clouds I'm assuming performance and/or they just didn't have the time to get around to making more improvements. But the early promo videos of 2024 showed the same relative downgrade to clouds, so I think they work as intended. I've got no understanding of why the broke Biology's original sky colour/atmospheric scattering improvements.

I recently waxed lyrical about MSFS2024, having just recently upgraded to it for the first time. I'm now at the point of reverting full-time to MSFS because I just can't get over the sky colors, the downgrade to the clouds and, most importantly the not-infrequent and seemingly random crashes that I'm experiencing. I also was really disappointed to see that simFX likely isn't coming to MSFS2024 at all. I don't need all of the effects, but the basic contrails that it provided were such a big improvement over what we had in 2020, and obviously infinitely better than the zero contrails we get in 2024. I used XPlane 11 back in the day for a year or two before MSFS2020 was released. I never bought into 12, but I'm starting to think I should give it a go. If I could merge MSFS's ground and graphical fidelity with XPlane's sky, cameras and flight modeling I'd be a happy camper... How hard can that be?! 😁

Oh wow! And that explains why the XP atmosphere just got such an impressive upgrade... The MSFS team missed a trick there, not hiring him in to their team instead.

It's a long time since @Biology was present on this forum, but I'd really appreciate their take on lighting in MSFS2024, given the impact they had on inspiring MS/Asobo to modify MSFS2020's atmospheric colouring/light scattering at short notice. Having been using 2024 for the last couple of weeks, I'd argue that the atmospheric lighting in 2024 has taken a step backwards (or perhaps more fairly sideways) from what we had in 2020. Apparently not sticking to the improvements outlined in the studies he highlighted, resulting in a less realistic and definitely less varied depiction of the sky. Separately there's the whole question regarding clouds in 2024 and the LOD issues of distant clouds that have resulted in an overall less realistic depiction of the sky, while simultaneously adding some variety that we didn't have before. I think it's all been brought into focus a lot more lately with the release of the latest XP betas where they seem to have nailed the overall lighting and cloudscapes at the expense of a cloud definition, where MSFS still clearly wins (at close proximity to clouds anyway). On the cloud LOD issue, there's currently a bug report on the official forums in need of some support, so that those of us who agree with my viewpoint (and who feel strongly enough about it!) can try and get MS's attention once they move past the bug fixing stage of MSFS2024 and start prioritizing new changes. https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/clouds-are-very-poor-quality-in-the-distance/709022