True Sky, the new clouds in FSW

[Daube]

Hi guys,

As some of you may know, the newest update for FSW brings in a new technology for drawing the clouds in the sim: True Sky.
I have tested this a few minutes ago and I have to say this: I don't like FSW. But True SKy is the best thing I've ever seen when it comes to clouds in a sim. It puts ALL of the current products (REX etc...) to shame. Simple as that.
And I didnt't think I would ever say anything like that about FSW..

Here is a summary of what happened.
I updated the sim via Steam then launched it. The initial loading took forever, the loading of the small popup about "...shaders..." was not going forward... but finally it came to an end.
I set a flight by daytime in fair weather and took off.
The clouds were strange, kind of ugly. I don't know if it was because of my hardware, or settings, or because it was the first launch, no idea. The clouds looked blurry and moving like the smoke of the liquid nitrogen...
From the top, it looked like that. Don't be afraid and read the rest.

So, cloud is blurry, shape is strange, colors have banding... but then again... that shape ! Can you see how complex it is ? The clouds are FINALLY real 3D shapes, not a pile of 2D faces turning around you!

Then, I restarted the sim. That restart was fast, unlike the first one. This time, I selected the theme "major thunderstorm" at dusk, then when I got in the cockpit I trigger the slew mode and jumped directly to 10.000 feet. And boy what I saw there was simply amazing. Clouds finally lookeds like clouds. Shapes were so complex, sometimes very smooth. The lighting was just perfect. Look at that:

 

[Daube]

The important things to notice is that the clouds now cast shadows on themselves. So a big isolated cumulonimbus is going to cast a big shadow on the nearby lower clouds. I don't know how "complex" this shadows are but the global rendering of an overcast sky seen from above has nothing in common with what we can currently see in FSX, P3D or XPlane.
Also the rendering of the light around the clouds is beautiful, for example when a cloud is hidding the sun...

I'm not really a big fan of FSW, not enough planes, performance is so-so etc... but I really want that True Sky technology to be ported to P3Dv4 as soon as possible !!

 

[Daube]

And that's the theme "Fogged in" seen from above:

 

[Naismith]

Yes the last update made mine, not quite but almost, a slideshow and the loading time was ridiculous. Specs below so I'm guessing my NV660 doesn't have the grunt any more. So end of the line for me re DTG unless they do something clever.

 

[stansdds]

Yes the last update made mine, not quite but almost, a slideshow and the loading time was ridiculous. Specs below so I'm guessing my NV660 doesn't have the grunt any more. So end of the line for me re DTG unless they do something clever.

The Nvidia 660Ti video card is definitely a bottleneck.

 

[Montie]

Finally we got rid of the 2D clouds, I might get FSW just for this.

 

[Montie]

TrueSky is a real game changer, it is really and amazing addition to a flightsim.

 

[Montie]

The snow effect is more realistic than ever and the night sky looks like a night sky.

 

[theohall]

Update 9 fixed washed out runways

When they rolled out TrueSky, runways often had a "washed out" appearance sometimes making them almost impossible to see.

That has been fixed with Update 9. No more washed out runways along with that awesome TrueSky!

 

[Daube]

I gave it a try today, launched two flights, one with Fair Weather theme, and another one with the snowy theme (can't remember the name anymore).

The snowy theme impressed me quite a lot. That new snow effect is almost perfect, really. Somehow I was almost expecting to see the snow accumulating on the ground or on the wings at some point ! The best part is probably the movement of the snow flakes during slow taxi: it's consistent. These flakes do not move according to the plane, they move just as they should, like real physics, independently from anything else (excepted wind, perhaps ? I didn't check...). Real good point for FSW. The rain and snow in FSX and P3D are now unwatchable, really...

The Fair Weather flight was more to check the adjustments they did to the clouds with the newest update. While they haven't eliminated the clouds "movements" yet (the clearly stated in the update that they are still working on this), it seems to me the clouds do not suffer from the "banding" effect that was so much visible in my first screenshot, so there is definitely some improvement. The lighting is as good as in previous release. If they manage to fix the movements and to make the clouds a bit more "sharp" sometimes (from close), then the weather depiction in FSW is really going to be nearly perfect. In fact, I would really like to see the effects of a real weather engine (like Active Sky or such) with TrueSKY clouds, it must be spectacular !

On a side note, I wish Dovetail would allow us to alter the flight conditions in-flight like in FSX or P3D (to change time or weather...).
I wish we had additional planes too...

 

[theohall]

On a side note, I wish Dovetail would allow us to alter the flight conditions in-flight like in FSX or P3D (to change time or weather...).
I wish we had additional planes too...

The 3rd party add-on FS Flight Control allows this and does work with FSW. Only know about that due to someone else using it.

 

[Daube]

For info, the current version of FlightSimWorld now allows you to choose "Dynamic Weather" as a new weather theme in free flight.
This theme is based on real world data, but not real-time at the moment. It's some kind of snapshot of real world data, in order to produce a wider variety of weathers over a certain area.
I reinstalled FSW just to give it a try, but failed to find a place which has actual clouds

Also, I had forgotten how close the FSW graphic engine is from FSX... with the same problems, especially for the TERRIBLE antialiasing... It seems that just like FSX, FSW will only get decent AA if you force the sparsegrid supersampling AA from NVidia Inspector. Bad luck, I hope they get this sorted soon. Also, I got a magnificient 10 FPS on a rainy day over default scenery. FSW does nothing and displays the scenery in quite a terrible way actually, so I really hope Dovetail will sort out the performance problems soon, because FSW really has no excuse to run so terribly at the moment. Default planes, default sceneries, autogen displayed 2 kms around only and you can't get past 30 FPS on a clear day ? LOL !

 

[Daube]

Anyways, I mainly wanted to check the sky improvements. The first iterations of TrueSky, several months ago, were already promising.
I set a heavy storm theme and climbed with the SLEW mode above 10.000, and was quite pleased by the results. It's still far from perfect, but I have to admit they finally got the sky and clouds colors spot-on !
The trueSKY cloud shapes are still a bit erratic but not that bad at all, and even quite impressive in some aspects. I'm pretty sure we haven't seen even 20% of the potential of that technology yet...