FinalLightNL

tho i don't think we'll see real time path traced clouds in any game in the next 10 years at least. https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2021-03_interactive-path-tracing-and-reconstruction-sparse-volumes you'd need way to make samples per pixel to render to denoise them properly. but doesn't mean we can't make them look great even without RT/PT, it just requires a bit more innovative techniques that tricks the users mind.

I assume this is mainly due how light interacts in a screen space, this can be solved with raytracing or path tracing. But in my understanding we won't get that, we are still limited to raymarching which is a fancier screen space technique. But even irl clouds look better looking towards the sun haha, don't worry you are not alone in liking it that way 😂 I honestly hope we can make enough of a change to fill the needs of each of us in areas we think the sim is lacking atmospheric wise. I do not think Atmos is the solution to all, there are many things it can't fix. But it's a start 😁 And it'll please me till FS2024 drops in roughly 2 months. And maybe even improve on some FS2024 areas if they support the new sim.

Simplified yes i understand what you mean, but it is definitely not a matter of color/contrast/saturation change, there is much more involved with this in computer graphics. This addon will make changes to the atmosphere and how it interacts with the clouds and environment. Just like a flashlight in a pitch dark room will make the room differently compared to 10 flashlights pointing in each direction or with heavier intensities as a super simplified example. if you want to learn some more about volumetric rendering, you can check this paper : https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1223894/FULLTEXT01.pdf I am with 10000000% certainty that everyone at Asobo/X-Plane/P3D working on graphics/engine has read this paper. Volumetric clouds in FS2020 were in fact quite white in the alpha builds and pre-xbox builds, unless u were in a storm condition which had grey shifting clouds which is normal. Like this : So Asobo clearly changed something in the meantime, which i assume is they adjusted the parameters of ambient light absorption on clouds or it's scattering strength. Getting rid of the ash clouds is fully possible without having to resort to raytracing or raymarching with computationally expensive rays. I'll put on my tinfoil here and frankly say that Asobo clearly didn't see this as a priority to spend the effort onto at the given time as they were working on multiple projects and FS2024 and other areas of the sim. You can't tell me these are the same parameters as what we have now. These are all shots i took myself at basically ultra settings, i've been with MSFS since day 1 :

totally fair point to make, tho most clouds look like that in msfs unfortunately since a certain sim update. i THINK these values are changeable (if they did this the way i think they will). so see it like a input box for a value or a slider, you can slider around values to get it to a point that looks natural to you. if that is the case, i would be quite content with it, instead of a on off switch.

They shared another shot which is quite interesting. Still want to see this with my own eyes while tweaking with it myself.

likely yes, at least in my case i had to re-find all the values i saved for my tables.

I have never used P3D before, i jumped straight from FS2004 to FSX and then XP11 and now MSFS (even tho i own XP12 i don't really use it). But it seems like PTA can do many things taking a quick glance at it. I don't think it will be as detailed but might do similar things yes. it's more like this app as a comparison https://simadditions.com/visualxp/ if i understand their product right. there is still too little info on Atmos honestly. Hope timest/reed etc will share more info in the coming days or just straight up release it and we'll figure it out haha.

Seems like people are misunderstanding what this addon does. Had to create an account to explain this a little bit. If any of you are familiar with X-Plane 12, there is an addon called VisualXP which does something very similar. There are many hidden values within the sim it's memory that can be altered, i've been experimenting with such things for the last couple months myself with a tool called Cheat Engine. Searching for specific float numbers in addresses and change them one by one to see if anything happens on my screen and save the values that do. here is for example a manual weather preset with stock vanilla lighting And here is me changing a memory value that increases the strength of the sunlight by 5 from it's default 1 value. There no reshade or nvidia filters involved here. we can take it a notch further and adjust the atmosphere tint by multiplying the ozone absorption levels. There are MANY hidden values within the sim it's memory that can do wonderful changes to the sim which don't need any SDK work, Asobo doesn't like this but heck :P What Atmos does is something pretty similar but way more advanced. The guys over at REX found the values for what we call Rayleigh Scattering in atmospheric papers. These determine how the atmosphere scatters sunlight, particularly the blue light that makes the sky appear blue. By adjusting these coefficients, the addon makes the sky's color more natural and dynamic, changing realistically with the time of day. you can read on that here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering Asobo's atmosphere is based on Bruneton's paper which u can find here : http://www.klayge.org/material/4_0/Atmospheric/Precomputed%20Atmospheric%20Scattering.pdf But in FS2024 they are switching to a better model by Sebastian Hillaire which u can find here : https://sebh.github.io/publications/egsr2020.pdf What REX also seems to have found is some other values that affect how clouds behave with light and the environment aka ground etc. We seem to have little info so far, but i wanted to get this whole misunderstand out of the way. The changes you saw in SU14 is pretty similar to this addon will alter. Biology aka Maya submitted a post on the asobo forums that got a lot of traction and eventually got added into the sim. https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/replace-the-atmosphere-parameters-with-more-accurate-ones-from-arpc/607603 Which then also turned into a Application that many people used called ARPC to change the ozone absorption coefficiencies. But the scattering, ozone height/width parameters among many were unchanged, so the change was nice but not optimal. After seeing the announcement of this Addon it got me quite excited. I've been geeking about computer graphics atmosphere ever since i saw it's effects couple years ago and did some sandbox simulations of it in Unreal Engine 5 etc. I then proceeded to read upon some volumetric papers etc which i still barely understand 😂 But yeah TLDR: definitely not just a color filter or reshade/nvidia filter. The guys at REX could've explained this a bit better imo I agree on that.