The new weather system is definitely an improvement from FSX.

The screens look great.

I'm not sure those are "volumetric" clouds.
The bad screenshot quality makes it hard to tell, but it seems to me that they have replaced the flat cirrus layer by a stratus layer, which means this fog is just a big set of 2D clouds like it was before, but more detailled (better cloud density).
But again, on those screenshots, it's hard to tell.

hyperpep111 wrote on Sep 14^th, 2011 at 10:28am:

Not defined shadows, but, in my opinion, the terrain does look darker or shaded in areas below cloud cover.
I see this in shots 9.
Hard to say.
It looks like that for the hills to the right side of the frame, not so much for the distant mountains on the left.

But cloud rendering in the distance is adjustable in FSX.  For performance sake you can control how far off you want them to draw. I have always assumed that the clouds further away were rendered differently anyway. I wonder if they can render shadows for the closer high detail stuff, but not the distance stuff.

This is  of course, pure speculation on my part. Thinking out loud, so to speak.

In any case, clouds never have defined, hard edges shadows on the ground anyway. If it did, it would not look right.

Overall I am still impressed.
The terrain looks good.





...even if it is Hawaii.

I went back and looked again today.
That city-scape looks really good.
The red clouds had distracted me the first time.

The detail of the buildings are good. I am presuming that they have any scenery options in the software maxed.

I also like the Mauna Kea Observatory shot. I am gonna fire up FSX later, and do a flyby, just to compare.

Quote:


.... & therein lies the beauty of MSFS so far  ..... If something isn 't included anyone, with a tutorial or 2, can simply add it.

With 'Flight' I would be VERY surprised (pleasantly shocked would be a better description) if it was open to free and community created addons.

BrandonF wrote on Sep 16^th, 2011 at 6:28pm:

Well, unless my sense of direction is completely off, then the observatory is not in the default scenery for FSX.

So.. Flight is already an improvement!
lol

No biggy.  I am sure if they included everything, I would need a 5 TB Harddrive.

Okay, so when you guys were discussing the types of clouds and the weather, were you looking at the 9 big screen shots on the main page, or the other smaller screen shots they posted on the news page?

BrandonF wrote on Sep 21^st, 2011 at 5:07pm:


Thanks Allot Brandon . Micro$oft owes you a completely free version of "flight". You're Making me want that game badly . Hope It has 3d trees though, Make a great sightseeng experience

just upgraded to gtx 550 ti sli and quadcore 2.66 ghtz looking good with fsx.