How the future -or present- of weather representation should look like: 
I wonder if we will be able to see this in flight simulation or is more for "enclose" environments.
When is Unigine coming to FS 2?
Ow ah, this Unigine got nothing to do with Flight Simulating.
But it's beautiful, I hope te clouds of the future look like this too.
Dree
I think we've seen this video in this forum before... Its better than what we currently have in Aerofly but for me it wouldn't be good enough still.
Sure some effects are made really well, the ground illumination, cloud shadows, sun beams, back lighting of the clouds, drawing distance and the last scene with the cloud cover all look very nice and we certainly need these in Aerofly.
But I really really dislike the structure of the clouds, their high transparency and the simulated formation. Those are all physically incorrect if you look at real world time-lapses for example. The clouds there are way too transparent, in Aerofly I want to see very opaque clouds with very sharp edges and only some fragments that are transparent. If we write a weather engine it should really look convincing not like any other game is doing clouds. I've been close to real world clouds thousands of times, most simulated clouds just don't look realistic...
I don't know why so many people are happy with so flar and washed out clouds like you see them in all the flight sims today. I've seen a lot of videos of people using additional software for FSX/P3D and I own some of them myself but they rarely convice me. Most of the time it looks odd, only in very very bad weather it looks ok since I can't see very far and everything is the same gray color anyway. But on a sunny day I've yet come across a single cumulus cloud in any desktop flight sim that I found promising enough that I would fly to it in a glider.
Look at this cloud as one of the better examples. It's still not HD enough I'd say but the overall lighting is spot on.
There are more videos on youtube just like the one above, all from the same channel.
What I'm demanding is probably very difficult to achieve in a real time engine. BUT I've found one simulator (Xtreme Soaring 3D FREE) on mobile that actually has really nice clouds and I tried it for some time and was positivly surprised. The clouds are pictures on billboards I think but for some reason they are incredible up close and they feature all of the things that I'm missing in other simulators. Their lighting is perfect (since it's a photo), their cloud base is soft and has a upward curving edge, the tops are completely sharp and very dense (none transparent I think).
Now if we had those clouds in actual 3D that can also cover the entire landscape including cloud shadows, sun beams, low visibility directly underneath layered with other clouds up higher, that would be increadible.
Regards,
Jan
This is a short video demonstrating real-time cloud rendering technology based on pre-computed scattering. The demo with its full source code can be downloaded from https://github.com/GameTechDev/Clouds..
I've actually downloaded and played around with this from time to time over the years.
