weather whims and wishes

[19//Moach]

greetings, fellow life forms

 

 

quickly to the point, I'd like to observe a couple of small points where the depiction of clouds and rain could perhaps use a bit of improvement

 

 

the clouds - from afar and outside they look pretty great, some of the best depictions of weather I've ever seen on a flight sim - yet, there is room for improvement when flying inside them

 

 

those "puffs" that fly past your cockpit at great speed are a bit too "round" and too sharply defined - this makes it evident that they are artificial particles and not parts of the greater cloud itself

 

being a game programmer with a keen interest in aviation, I've placed all my attention on those things any time I've been on an airplane - the look and feel of going through a cloud has yet to be fully conveyed in any simulator title out there...

 

this one comes closer than most -- my central suggestion would be this:  rework the texture of those cloudlet particles so they are less "puffy" and more "whispy" instead - also, lower the overall alpha channel values so the cloudlets are somewhat more faint, enough so that you'd lose fine track of where one starts and ends...

 

then the particles themselves could be enlarged (about 1.5x) so they overlap others nearby more often, thus looking like one continuous stream of the same cloud, rather than a series of discrete "cotton balls" as it currently appears

 

 

---

 

then rain - the far rain effect is brilliant - the faint streaks of distant downpour looks like something you'd see moments before deciding it was not a good idea to be airborne on that particular day - congrats, on that part of the effect...

 

alas, the nearby droplets (the ones that appear 3d) are more or less completely opposite in how decently they portray rain as seen from a speeding aircraft...

 

and note the word "speeding" - for they look good enough until right about a few seconds after you gun the throttle and start down the airstrip -- at a speed of just about 50km/h - a drop of rain should look closer to horizontal than vertical

 

this is because the terminal velocity of rain is actually really slow

 

the ingame droplets however, continue to appear impossibly vertical for an observer shoving himself and his machine past them at a speed five times what you'd get pulled over for on a highway

 

 

remember also, there is no such thing as an actually raindrop-shaped drop of water... water simply does not behave that way and that stereotypical shape that we all know is really just an illusion caused by the eye just barely catching it as it drops - all water droplets are rounded to an elliptical-ish blob - which has a minimal curvature imposed by surface tension, thus making the sharp end of a raindrop physically impossible

 

but anyways, rain does LOOK elongated, so it's just right that it be depicted that way

 

thus, as soon as you are flying any faster than 18m/s - the vertical component of a raindrop's relative speed to you will be less than the horizontal - it would then appear to be "falling sideways"

 

ingame, this can be reproduced by rotating the drop mesh (which appears to be 3d) by an angle determined by the arcsine of the relative velocity vector  - assuming a raindrop velocity component of 18 m/s (plus wind across the horizontal) relative to the airplane's trajectory and also, that the 3d mesh is starting from a sideways unrotated state - this can then be readily oriented to face along the aircraft's true velocity vector and then rotated by the angle just mentioned to complete the effect

 

 

thanks for your attention

Edited August 23, 2016 by Moach