Low Ceiling Vanishes

[HamSammich]

Weird problem:

Using SkyMaxx Pro in low fog or overcast areas finds the low deck retreating as you climb, until it goes to the horizon and you're in CAVOK.

This is with and without the RWC. With and without the NOAA plug-in. With the ground transition settings in SMP either at max or min.It seems to be SkyMaxx's problem. I've got some screen grabs to illustrate--first with SMP, then without.

 

Now climbing

 

 

 

See.. it retreats! And, again, it's the same whether RWC or NOAA is operating.

 

Now with SMP disabled:

 

 

Then up.

 

 

Then up some more.

 

 

See?

So what can be done?

 

I'll be posting a video walking through it all, shortly, under my full name, Marshall Arbitman

 

Best,

 

Marshall

 

[sundog]

I think what you're seeing is "scud". Underneath stratus clouds, SkyMaxx Pro simulates varying visibility, because real clouds aren't perfectly flat. So, you might see the visibility increase and decrease while you are flying just below or above a solid or broken stratiform cloud layer. We do this on purpose - our commercial customers have this as a training requirement. But it's different from how X-Plane's default weather works, so some people find it confusing.

If you don't like this effect, try switching your overcast representation in SMP to "dense particles" and you might be happier.

[HamSammich]

Frank,

Are you sure this is desired? I can assure you from the weather conditions, it's not scud. The metar was fog, low visibility, 100 foot ceiling. Therefore climbing off the runway IRL would mean climbing into hard IMC, not climbing into ever-clearing visibility and VMC. You would lose site of the ground, not steadily gain it. I'm sure the feature you speak of is in fact a good one, but that's really not in play here. Climbing into an overcast should mean climbing into an overcast--not having it vanish beneath you.

Can you please investigate further?

Best,

 

Marshall

[sundog]

Visibility is variable as you enter the cloud. As you get deeper into the cloud, it'll become more opaque - but not necessarily on a steady basis. At least, that's what I see here - I manually set an overcast layer at 100 feet and it seemed to work as intended as I flew through it.

If you think you're seeing something different, we'll probably need to see your metar.rwx, log.txt, and the location you're flying from to understand what's going on in more detail. Your screenshots really look like the scud effect, though.

[HamSammich]

Frank,

Okay, will monkey around with a few parameters and see what I can reproduce for you.

Best,

 

Marshall

 

 

[poodster]

On 5/6/2016 at 2:37 PM, sundog said:

Visibility is variable as you enter the cloud. As you get deeper into the cloud, it'll become more opaque - but not necessarily on a steady basis. At least, that's what I see here - I manually set an overcast layer at 100 feet and it seemed to work as intended as I flew through it.

If you think you're seeing something different, we'll probably need to see your metar.rwx, log.txt, and the location you're flying from to understand what's going on in more detail. Your screenshots really look like the scud effect, though.

Hi Frank,

I was wondering if it's possible to have skymaxx clouds have a darker colour on the base of the clouds, and lighter colour as it goes up. 

Something like this is what I'm talking about.

 

Thanks, 

Chris

[sundog]

They actually do have the ability to do this, but we kept listening to complaints about the clouds being too dark and ended up brightening them to the point where this effect was lost. The upcoming 3.2 update will dial this back down a bit.

Just to manage expectations though, we're a long way from being able to do photo-quality representation of clouds in real time! This darkening only works at the resolution of the individual puffs that make up our clouds.

I actually have code that can do this lighting on a per-pixel basis, but it won't even run on a top of the line PC on anything but a very small area of clouds. When hardware catches up though, we'll be ready!

 

[poodster]

On 5/24/2016 at 7:32 AM, sundog said:

They actually do have the ability to do this, but we kept listening to complaints about the clouds being too dark and ended up brightening them to the point where this effect was lost. The upcoming 3.2 update will dial this back down a bit.

Just to manage expectations though, we're a long way from being able to do photo-quality representation of clouds in real time! This darkening only works at the resolution of the individual puffs that make up our clouds.

I actually have code that can do this lighting on a per-pixel basis, but it won't even run on a top of the line PC on anything but a very small area of clouds. When hardware catches up though, we'll be ready!

 

Awesome news!

Thank you for the update

[poodster]

On 5/24/2016 at 7:32 AM, sundog said:

They actually do have the ability to do this, but we kept listening to complaints about the clouds being too dark and ended up brightening them to the point where this effect was lost. The upcoming 3.2 update will dial this back down a bit.

Just to manage expectations though, we're a long way from being able to do photo-quality representation of clouds in real time! This darkening only works at the resolution of the individual puffs that make up our clouds.

I actually have code that can do this lighting on a per-pixel basis, but it won't even run on a top of the line PC on anything but a very small area of clouds. When hardware catches up though, we'll be ready!

 

Hello Frank, 

I also have another issue that I recently saw. When there is a thunder storm and the clouds reach an altitude up to 50 000 feet, the clouds only go to around 10 000 feet. As I climb higher, there is still rain, but there are no clouds. The metar says there is an overcast layer between 20 000 feet to 50 000 feet, but there are no clouds in that layer. I can also see lightning coming from clear sky but there should be a cloud there. 

Thanks, 

Chris

[sundog]

SMP takes steps to prevent solid overcast layers from intersecting with cumulonimbus clouds, because that looks unnatural. You're probably seeing the effects of that.

You might try changing your overcast representation setting in SMP to something else to get different results. The sparse and dense particle settings won't be affected by this particular behavior (but they also won't honor a crazy request for a 30,000 foot thick cloud layer in order to preserve performance!)

 

[poodster]

On 5/28/2016 at 8:59 PM, sundog said:

SMP takes steps to prevent solid overcast layers from intersecting with cumulonimbus clouds, because that looks unnatural. You're probably seeing the effects of that.

You might try changing your overcast representation setting in SMP to something else to get different results. The sparse and dense particle settings won't be affected by this particular behavior (but they also won't honor a crazy request for a 30,000 foot thick cloud layer in order to preserve performance!)

 

Thank you for the response. I understand that performance is key in this scenerio. I do have another thing that most of the community has been criticizing. 

As you can see above, there is a cell that is creating a local thunderstorm. The problem most of us have is that it doesn't represent a thunderstorm. The shape is well done. Wide-ish base, and then towering to spread out at the top, but these are out of place. The base of a thunderstorm is not supposed to be 100 feet above the ground most of the time. and the top of a thunderstorm is not supposed to be only about 8000ft. Like i said, the shape is perfect, but the placing is wrong. Is it possible for the base to start higher up and the top to be over 15000 ft. It would make flying at cruise more realisitc as we can see that we are approaching a thunderstorm and would need to divert around it. 

Thank you for taking your time, and I'm only sending a lot of these posts to help improve skymaxx.

Thanks,

Chris

Edited May 30, 2016 by poodster

[Cameron]

Thank you for the response. I understand that performance is key in this scenerio. I do have another thing that most of the community has been criticizing.

Define "most".

No offense, but I suggest you choose your words a little wiser. I can guarantee you "most" of the community has not been criticizing this. Can you link me to even 10-15 unique peoples posts regarding this?

Given our forum isn't even filled with such talk I don't agree with the assessment even a little.

I'll leave the rest to Frank. As a certified meteorologist I would say his word will be the definitive one on this.

[HamSammich]

Yes Cameron. I also see the problem.

I do see that you are working hard and the app has been steadily improving. However all you have to do is take a look at another small shop, the one that makes Active Sky.

Say what you like, their product looks a lot more like real-life. And they have the added bonus of not having a prickly and defensive guy leaning on his customers when they point out legitimate shortcomings.

One of the virtues of X-Plane and this community, is the wide and deep pool of thoughtful users and developers. Your own IXEG as an example. They listen, respond, and don't get their backs up when someone says their product needs work, here and there.

Hope you take this in the spirit it's intended.

 

Best,

 

Marshall

[Ben Russell]

[HamSammich]

Ben,

 

yes. However, my original problem remains.. climbing above a solid undercast that vanishes, leaving clear sky below.

 

 

[Ben Russell]

It's funny how every day light weight meaningless chit chat about the weather with people is actually one of the deepest subjects you can start talking about... how far down the rabbit hole do we want to go?

[HamSammich]

Laughing now. How soon before someone quotes Mark Twain?

[poodster]

23 minutes ago, Cameron said:

Define "most".

No offense, but I suggest you choose your words a little wiser. I can guarantee you "most" of the community has not been criticizing this. Can you link me to even 10-15 unique peoples posts regarding this?

Given our forum isn't even filled with such talk I don't agree with the assessment even a little.

I'll leave the rest to Frank. As a certified meteorologist I would say his word will be the definitive one on this.

I guess you're right, I should choose my words better. I'll explain it better then. From what I've seen on facebook, to people who I've talked to in person, and on the forum, people do have a problem with this. 

Now, I could be way wrong about how many people find an issue with this haha.

But to make x-plane 10 more realistic, a mature  cumulonimbus cloud that has an active thunderstorm brewing underneath it,  should rise to an altitude of over 15 000ft at least. (And based on the cloud shape in skymaxx, it does look like you are representing a mature cumulonimbus cloud) 

[sundog]

It really comes down to tradeoffs between visual quality and performance. These particular cloud types are especially demanding on today's GPU's. Remember our clouds are truly 3D and volumetric, so you can't really compare them to the flatter representations other sims use for these clouds.

You're right that these clouds don't really get quite that close to the ground in nature (usually); the intent is to approximate the "virga" you see underneath a heavy thunderstorm which does reach the ground and obscures visibility beneath the cloud. The cloud size, although not as huge as I'd like in a perfect world, is still realistic - they range from 5000 to 7000 meters tall when created by RWC (16,000 - 22,000 feet.)

A big challenge for us is that there are many different kinds of cumulonimbus clouds that can be in a wide range of development, and METAR data doesn't really give us any insight into which one is "correct" for a given location. Our thunderstorms may look great to someone in Florida who sees fully-developed monsters every day, but not so much to someone in Europe where the conditions are different.

Anyhow I agree it's something we can keep iterating on and making better in future versions, especially as video cards keep getting faster over time.

[sundog]

7 hours ago, HamSammich said:

Ben,

 

yes. However, my original problem remains.. climbing above a solid undercast that vanishes, leaving clear sky below.

 

 

Did you try my initial advice of changing the overcast representation to dense or sparse particles?

[HamSammich]

Yessir, I did.Ended up with no undercast to speak of at all.

Will keep monkeying with it. However, the same METAR, in Active Sky, produced the desired effect, including foothill peaks poking out of it. So whatever algorithmic choices they made for such situations (or at least for THAT situation) worked and SkyMaxx's did not. And I know because this was happening outside my own window at the time. I don't still have the situation or the video. However, I will find something similar, as soon as I can, and send the video and the log-file to you.

Best,

Marshall

[sundog]

What I'll need is the METAR.rwx file and the location you were at.

[HamSammich]

I'll look for something similar and send it when it arises.

 

best,

 

marshall

[Cameron]

21 hours ago, HamSammich said:

Say what you like, their product looks a lot more like real-life. And they have the added bonus of not having a prickly and defensive guy leaning on his customers when they point out legitimate shortcomings.

What are you even talking about here? I commented on one specific thing. "Most" of our customers do not complain about this. That was an invalid statement made by @poodster and he acknowledged that. No one has their back up at all, and Frank exemplified that fully in his response.

Fine to say you have a problem with something. Fine if it's valid. Shortcomings are to be expected in any product, and it's how things are made better. But, don't go posting around that this shortcoming is something "most" customers complain about; it's surely not...not even close!

[HamSammich]

Uhhh. You're doing it now. 'nuff said on my end. I'll leave it to others to look at some of your past replies, and other threads, and judge for themselves. Maybe it's my sensibilities that need calibration. But in my experience, it's not how you think you act that matters, it's how others see it.

Best,

 

marshall