Clouds Drifting away

[Honey bee :3]

Just why when i fly into the clouds, the cloud textures are drifting away instead of going through???

[Stake From JateFarm]

Sadly most clouds are not volumetric but 2D. They rotate to face you as you move about.

[Honey bee :3]

but why like that? You could fly through the picture or no?

[Stake From JateFarm]

Originally posted by Chop1543:

but why like that? You could fly through the picture or no?

Well yes but only if you fly through the exact center of the 2D image. If you could fly through the clouds without them rotating, you would see them disappear the second you pass through them. Neither is very realistic tbh.

[Honey bee :3]

So FSX has better clouds than Xplane

[Stake From JateFarm]

From what I can tell they use the same technology.

[Honey bee :3]

Hmm as i played FSX so the clouds are 3d there

[Prezidentas]

The clouds rotate because they are sprites (it's just how sprites work). Volumetric clouds got introduced in FS2004 (FS9) so yes, FSX does have better clouds.

[old tail dragger]

I agree Microsoft clouds are better but they are also a frame killer, I could never run any higher than medium.

[Stake From JateFarm]

Originally posted by Red Star Gopnik:

The clouds rotate because they are sprites (it's just how sprites work). Volumetric clouds got introduced in FS2004 (FS9) so yes, FSX does have better clouds.

Can you link me a video? The ones of FSX I saw use sprites as XP11 does.

[Virtual]

Originally posted by Stake From Jate Farm:

Originally posted by Red Star Gopnik:

The clouds rotate because they are sprites (it's just how sprites work). Volumetric clouds got introduced in FS2004 (FS9) so yes, FSX does have better clouds.

Can you link me a video? The ones of FSX I saw use sprites as XP11 does.

Here's a good article of how clouds worked in FS2004. Believe it or not, it's sprites.
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130434/let_there_be_clouds_fast_.php

The only volumemtric clouds I've seen is xEnviro and TrueSky in FlightSimWorld.

[Tony_UK]

The clouds in IL2 1946 are the best.

[Stringbean]

Originally posted by Virtual:

The only volumemtric clouds I've seen is xEnviro and TrueSky in FlightSimWorld.

xEnviro now has volumetric clouds???

[Stake From JateFarm]

Originally posted by stringbean6:

Originally posted by Virtual:

The only volumemtric clouds I've seen is xEnviro and TrueSky in FlightSimWorld.

xEnviro now has volumetric clouds???

Indeed. I'm not familiar with its history but the result of xEnviro now is incredible.

[Honey bee :3]

Yeah FPS killer lol, That's why i will use ASXP

[Paradoxagi]

Everything aside from xEnviro uses 2D sprites for the clouds rendering, including FSX/P3D. The difference is that the XP native clouds are always facing the camera so they rotate if you're coming closer. This usually is barely noticable as long as you don't tweak the clouds, tweaking for performance and/or visuals usually decreases the number of sprites and the rotation becomes more noticable.

The following (payware) addons currently stop rotating the clouds:

SkyMaxx Pro
UltraWeatherXP
xEnviro

If performance is a concern: At the time of this writing SMP (v.4.8.2) is the fastest one of those three, closely followed by UltraWeather XP (v2.5.x) and xEnviro (v 1.11) currently is a real resource hog.