SMP 4 Clouds not visible outside Visual distance set in weather

[meatbomber]

Hello. 

 

I have SMP4 with the latest update. We are using it on our simulator not with real weather as we are doing training scenarios so i need to set the weather through X-planes weather menu. 

I`m finding the follwing: 

X-Planes Visual distance setting is used until cloudbase, above the cloudbase visibility is unlimited BUT all clouds outside the visual distance specified disappear regardless of how large the visible cloud radius is set up in the SMP 4 settings. 

so below cloud base it looks very well, as soon as climbing above the lowest cloud base the cloud cover gets seemingly sparse as the clouds outside saya 10NM radius disappear but the visibility is much greater.

any work around this ? any way to fix it in a future update ?

[sundog]

That's not quite how it works. It's complicated - bear with me.

The visibility distance we use for the clouds does increase with altitude. We just read whatever cloud visibility distance X-Plane computes for itself, and honor that distance. As a test, I just set up a scene here (in XP11 pb10) with the visibility slider at 5 nm and a couple of cloud layers above it. On the runway, clouds were drawn out to 9km (which is 5 nm.) But as I climbed above the clouds, the cloud visibility limit increased to around 98km, and this was continuing to increase as I gained altitude. It's not "unlimited," but we're just honoring X-Plane's internal calculations of how far clouds should be seen based on where you are relative to the clouds and haze.

Increasing the visibility slider does seem to extend this range, even when you're above the clouds. So it seems X-Plane is modeling some of the fog and haze below the cloud layer extending above it to some extent. I don't think this is necessarily unrealistic.

There are some other effects you might be seeing, as well. When you are inside a cloud layer, we restrict the cloud draw range in order to preserve performance as you pass through the clouds. If you haven't yet cleared the tops of the tallest clouds of the layer, some of that may still be in effect. So you may just need to climb a bit higher to reveal all of the clouds.

SMP will also pull in the cloud visibility distance automatically if your performance starts to become unacceptable. If you're consistently dropping below 20 FPS, then that too may be limiting the clouds you see.

That all said - in XP10 we used to increase the cloud visibility given to us by X-Plane by 50% just so you'd see more clouds. We removed that for XP11, since XP11's fog and haze seemed more aggressive at first and we wanted the cloud visibility to better match the rest of the scene. But I think I will increase it a tad for the SMP 4.1 release.

 

[meatbomber]

ah theirein lies the rub, we have a broken cloud layer set that`s from 100ft MSL s basically groud level to about 5000ftMSL and we had been operating inside that layer,  maybe i`ll get better resutls witth multiple layers, i`ll make you a pic what we have on the screen tho as visibility is way too much for teh given weather conditions. I´ve got 9000Flight hours so i think i can speak with authority with how it should look like from the real cockpit  The haze that some many people gripe about in XP 11 i find extremely realistic and it`s sometign i`m missing in XP10...