Shadows seen through clouds, no horizon rendering and fog issues

[Sethos]

So I made a quick impressions thread over on Reddit's Flight Sim sub. Cameron suggest I brought up these issues here.

My first issue is; it doesn't seem to be able to render to-the-horizon? I've been using badbadweather.com to find some nice METARs to test with. Especially the thunderstorm section has been of interest. However, ever single METAR I've tested, I have yet to see the clouds actually reaching the horizon. I'm still only seeing a circle; https://gfycat.com/DismalLividDeinonychus

Then I realised, the cloud coverage slider wasn't actually the range of the clouds but rather the density?

 

Default settings; https://gfycat.com/LargeBackDodobird

Max settings; https://gfycat.com/MistyOrneryGoral

Still circle rendering in both instances. Question is; how it's supposed to work or an issue on my end?

Second issue; Seeing quite a few ground shadows through my clouds. It's not always there but it happens often enough for me to notice it; https://abload.de/img/1s4ulu.jpg -- It's also visible in the "Default settings" GFY above, on the initial picture.

Third issue; Fog still seems to magically disappear / re-appear as you de- and ascend. It obviously should fade away as you get above it but the ground obviously shouldn't be visible underneath? I assume it has to actually connect to the clouds above or something like that, so there's no "magical" layer in between. https://gfycat.com/JollyPhonyHeifer

Running X-Plane 11 beta 2 with a lot of scenery but plugin and addon wise, it's very barebone, here's my log; https://www.dropbox.com/s/m40lztpb4c0fvi0/Log.txt?dl=0 -- Also running latest RWC with default settings, grabbing X-Plane 11's real weather settings.

Hope to get some clarification, maybe some of it is tied to X-Plane 11, perhaps even something on my end. Cloud models look great and I'm seeing a lot of potential, above mentioned problem aside

 

[Cameron]

Thanks for posting this, @Sethos! I'm sure @sundog will check this out as soon as he gets a moment this morning.  

[sundog]

The draw area setting does adjust the cloud draw distance, not the density. You may be seeing the clouds getting cut off due to visibility effects. Often if you climb higher, X-Plane will indicate higher visibility to us as you gain altitude, and we'll draw clouds further. If you have SMP set to draw clouds 100km out but X-Plane tells us there is only 50km of visibility, we only draw to 50km.

Bear in mind SMP has no impact on X-Plane's fog and haze; we only draw clouds. 

I don't think those are necessarily shadows, but perhaps artifacts from the clouds intersecting the ground. Try increasing the cloud/terrain blending setting.

[Sethos]

2 hours ago, sundog said:

The draw area setting does adjust the cloud draw distance, not the density. You may be seeing the clouds getting cut off due to visibility effects. Often if you climb higher, X-Plane will indicate higher visibility to us as you gain altitude, and we'll draw clouds further. If you have SMP set to draw clouds 100km out but X-Plane tells us there is only 50km of visibility, we only draw to 50km.

Bear in mind SMP has no impact on X-Plane's fog and haze; we only draw clouds. 

I don't think those are necessarily shadows, but perhaps artifacts from the clouds intersecting the ground. Try increasing the cloud/terrain blending setting.

Might be a stupid question but couldn't you somehow force-render the clouds then, beyond the reported visibility range, to close that gap then? At least make it an extended option?

And I'll mess around with the blending option.

[sundog]

We could, but then the clouds wouldn't blend properly with the distant haze. It wouldn't look natural to see clouds rendered out against mountains that are completely obscured.