v0.6.1

Fixes the EFB app's sliders on narrow tablets and a Windows freeze while installing, plus installer and METAR fixes. Install over any earlier version: your tunables.ini and presets are kept.

EFB app

• Sliders on narrow tablets (#21): each slider collapsed to a lone thumb at the far right, which couldn't be dragged. Sliders now show in full at every tablet size.
• If you tried to drag one, check your settings: a drag could send the setting to its lowest or highest value, even though the thumb didn't move. Reset this tab restores a tab's defaults, but it also clears your other changes on that tab.
• Buttons at the bottom of each tab and on the Presets tab no longer run together.

Installer

• A hard Windows freeze while patching shaders (#18): patching on several CPU cores at once, new in 0.6.0, froze one user's PC. The installer is back to one shader at a time, as in 0.5.1, at below normal priority, so it takes several minutes. Install AtmosphereMod.cmd --workers 4 uses more cores if you want it faster; if those processes stop, it carries on one at a time instead of hanging.
• PowerShell not on the PATH (#20): the installer finds PowerShell by its full path, so it no longer stops when PowerShell's folder isn't on the PATH. With no PowerShell at all, it uses the release's own compiler. A ' in a path no longer fails the signature check.
• ReShade's standard build (#15): this build skips add-ons, so the EFB app keeps waiting and there's no weather. The installer now recognises it, explains this, and asks before going on, no by default.
• AddonPath in ReShade.ini (#15): when it's set, as another mod's setup may do, it's the only folder ReShade looks in. The add-on now goes there too, and the uninstaller removes it from there. Other add-ons stay.

METAR anchoring

• Stations settle: near 9 or more stations, the mod could keep swapping the same stations every couple of minutes for as long as you stayed in the area. For two minutes, a freed slot now goes only to a station nearer than the one that left, so every swap brings the set closer, and it settles once you stop moving. Stations still change as you fly, and in a holding pattern a few distant ones keep changing, less often than before.

Known issues

• With the mod on, one user saw much less thunderstorm cloud at an airport reporting thunderstorms. This is being investigated.
• Inside a dense cloud, a wing's edge against the fogged background can flicker by a pixel or two (MSFS draws its clouds at a reduced resolution). Visibility inside clouds at 0 avoids it.
• Most of the mod's cost is in the clouds: it's highest looking across wide cloud layers, and small in light cloud. Ctrl+Shift+F9 switches back to the sim's own at once, to compare.

v0.6.0

Presets for your settings in the EFB app, fly-through clouds, the once-a-second stutter fixed, and installer fixes.

Presets

The EFB app has a fifth tab, Presets: it saves all your settings (every value in tunables.ini, also the ones the app doesn't show) under a name, and loads them again.

• The active preset is shown at the top. Once you change a setting it says (unsaved changes), and Save changes writes them into that preset.
• Your settings are never lost by loading: while they aren't saved in a preset, Load asks first (a second tap discards them). Replacing or deleting a preset also takes a second tap.
• Default is the mod's own settings, renewed at every install. It can be loaded but not changed.
• Import from a file opens a Windows file window in front of the sim (Downloads at first): pick a preset someone shared, and it's added to the list under its file's name, never over one of yours. In VR, the window is on your desktop monitor.
• A preset without some settings (one from an older version, say) names them when you load it, and asks whether to fill them in with the mod's defaults or with your current values. They're added to the preset, so it asks only once.
• Presets are .ini files in %LOCALAPPDATA%\AtmosphereMod\presets, in the same format as tunables.ini. Installing a new version adds its new settings to your presets, as to tunables.ini.

Fly-through clouds

• Visibility inside clouds (Clouds tab): MSFS's clouds are so thin inside that you see for hundreds of metres in them. Around your aircraft the mod gives liquid clouds a real cloud's density, so the wingtips fade into the cloud. Clouds seen from farther away keep their look. 10 m by default; 0 is the sim's own.
• Structure inside clouds: patches of denser and thinner cloud that you fly through, each shaded by the cloud toward the sun. 10 % by default.
• Turn off other in-cloud effects: add-ons that simulate flying through clouds, such as TriTriSim GFX's wing fade effect or CloudSurf (flightsim.to), will most likely conflict with the mod's denser clouds. Turn them off; to keep theirs instead, Visibility inside clouds at 0 turns Fly-through clouds off.

Performance

• The once-a-second stutter is gone (#11): the thunderstorm code ran every time MSFS rebuilt its weather, for the whole weather map. It now runs only where a storm cell is near, with the same result on screen.
• Better performance in cloudy views: the colour tint on distant clouds is cheaper to draw.

EFB app

• Laid out for all tablet sizes and orientations, with larger text; on narrow tablets each setting's name goes above its slider.
• Only the current airport's METAR is shown, at the top. The mod's version is shown at the bottom.

Installer

• A linked EFB package (a symbolic link or junction in the Community folder, as add-on linkers make) no longer stops the installer: only the link is removed, the folder it points to stays (#8, #10).
• The Community folder now comes from the settings of the sim the mod is installed into, so a leftover MS Store install no longer takes the EFB app elsewhere (#14).
• Install AtmosphereMod.cmd says to unzip the whole zip first when it can't find the installer next to it (#12).

Changed defaults

• Solid clouds is now 0.5 by default (was 2).
• Your settings stay as they are: the installer keeps your tunables.ini, so an existing install keeps its Solid clouds value. To get the new defaults, load Default on the Presets tab (save your own settings as a preset first), or move the slider. The new settings (Visibility and Structure inside clouds) are added with their defaults.

Known issues

• Fewer thunderstorm clouds in some places (#16): with the mod on, one user saw much less convective cloud at an airport reporting thunderstorms (WMKK, TSRA). This is being investigated.
• Flickering aircraft outline inside dense cloud: a wing's edge against the fogged background can flicker by a pixel or two. MSFS draws its clouds at a reduced resolution and rebuilds the full picture over several frames, which doesn't match the anti-aliased edge exactly; the dense fog makes it visible. Visibility inside clouds at 0 (the sim's own) avoids it.
• Performance in cloud-heavy views: most of the mod's cost is in the clouds, in every step the sim's cloud renderer takes through a cloud. It's highest looking across wide cloud layers, and small in light cloud (#13). Ctrl+Shift+F9 switches back to the sim's own at once, to compare.

Installing

1. Install ReShade 6.8 or newer, the build with full add-on support, for MSFS 2024, and start the sim once with it. With OptiShade, its own ReShade takes this place.
2. Close the sim, download AtmosphereMod-0.6.0.zip below, unzip it anywhere (not into the Community folder) and double-click Install AtmosphereMod.cmd. Updating: run it over your existing install; your settings and presets are kept.
3. Start the sim.

See the README for details, the settings and the known limitations.

Use at your own risk. AtmosphereMod has been developed and tested on a single PC. On other hardware or drivers it may not work, may show graphical errors, may crash the sim or may cost performance. Ctrl+Shift+F9 switches back to stock at once, and the uninstaller removes everything it installed.

SHA-256 of AtmosphereMod-0.6.0.zip: ed2f73fa0bac11b75c96f6f539c5d046bcf85b2b9105cab88df5b423995e7f4f

v0.5.1

The installer now works with OptiShade's ReShade. Nothing else has changed since 0.5.0: if 0.5.0 installed fine for you, you don't need this update.

OptiShade compatibility

• OptiShade brings its own ReShade (ReShade64.dll, loaded by OptiShade's own dxgi.dll or winmm.dll). The installer only looked for dxgi.dll, so it stopped with "ReShade isn't installed". It now accepts ReShade64.dll too (#5, thanks to AndyistGD).
• Reported working by one user with OptiShade 0.21.4 Stable (its ReShade 6.8.0.73), an RTX 5070 Ti and the MS Store version: the add-on loaded, the EFB app showed the METARs, Ctrl+Shift+F9 switched the mod, and OptiShade's own effects kept working. It hasn't been tested here, since OptiShade has no release available to download at the moment. OptiShade 1.0 will be tested once it's out. If you use OptiShade, please report how it goes on the issues page.
• Keep only one ReShade. The installer warns when it finds ReShade's own dxgi.dll and a ReShade64.dll, as ReShade may then load twice.
• The installer's summary now shows how ReShade is loaded.
• OptiShade's image effects are a filter over the finished picture, so they also recolour the haze and sky the mod draws.

Also in the README

• Troubleshooting: what to check for "There were errors loading some add-ons" and for "Waiting for AtmosphereMod" in the EFB app, and what to include in a report.
• Thunderstorm screenshots near Manaus.

Known issues

• Faint rings in dense haze from cruise: above a dense haze layer, faint rings can show in the haze around the point below you. They come from the sim's own haze calculation over terrain, which our denser haze makes visible. A fix is being investigated.
• Grainy cloud edges: far clouds can look grainy at their edges, especially zoomed in. This is the sim's own rendering (it shows with the mod off too), a little more visible with solid clouds.

Installing

1. Install ReShade 6.8 or newer, the build with full add-on support, for MSFS 2024, and start the sim once with it. With OptiShade, its own ReShade takes this place (see above).
2. Close the sim, download AtmosphereMod-0.5.1.zip below, unzip it anywhere (not into the Community folder) and double-click Install AtmosphereMod.cmd.
3. Start the sim.

See the README for details, the settings and the known limitations.

Use at your own risk. AtmosphereMod has been developed and tested on a single PC. On other hardware or drivers it may not work, may show graphical errors, may crash the sim or may cost performance. Ctrl+Shift+F9 switches back to stock at once, and the uninstaller removes everything it installed.

SHA-256 of AtmosphereMod-0.5.1.zip: 0d46acf43a8b363c1eb31f6054b443c8176f8c6053614c183478ba44b42bd7ac

v0.5.0

Haze from all the METAR stations around you, dust and smoke haze in colour, and cloud decks shaped by type. If you have 0.4.0 or earlier, install over it: your tunables.ini is kept and gets the new setting, and the installer updates the EFB app in your Community folder.

New: haze from the METAR stations around you (experimental)

• Until now the nearest METAR set the haze for the whole view. Flying past several stations, everything changed from one report to the next whenever the nearest station changed, and distant terrain got the local report's haze.
• Now each part of the view gets the haze of the stations nearest to it, weighted by distance. The mod keeps up to eight stations: the nearest, the ones ahead, beside and behind you, and the ones you've passed. A hazy valley ahead looks hazier than the clear coast behind you, and flying from one station's area to the next, the haze changes gradually.
• Smooth changes: a station's new report fades in over five minutes.
• Better use of the reports:
  • A report hours older than the others (a station that stopped reporting) is ignored.
  • A station whose METAR gives no visibility doesn't count for the haze.
  • "10 km or more" (9999, CAVOK) next to a station reporting less is taken as just over 10 km.
• Setting: T15 in tunables.ini: 1 (the default) for all the stations around, 0 for the nearest METAR alone, as before.

Fixed: dust and smoke haze looked grey

• Dense haze keeps its colour now: dust looks beige, smoke ochre-brown, and dry haze a neutral grey-white. Clear air and thin haze look as before.
• The cause: most of a dense haze's light has been scattered many times inside it. The sim works that light out at too coarse a height spacing near the ground, which mixed the bluish light above a haze layer into it.
• Dense haze is also a little darker near the horizon, because dust and smoke absorb light.

Clouds

• Cloud decks shaped by type:
  • Altocumulus breaks up into smaller, finer cloudlets, and stratocumulus into rows.
  • The sim's own stratiform layers become flat-topped decks, as the METAR-described ones do. Altocumulus no longer looks like small cumulus, nor altostratus like dunes.
• Deck tops: lumpy rather than cut off flat at one altitude.

Known issues

• Faint rings in dense haze from cruise: above a dense haze layer, faint rings can show in the haze around the point below you. They come from the sim's own haze calculation over terrain, which our denser haze makes visible. A fix is being investigated.
• Grainy cloud edges: far clouds can look grainy at their edges, especially zoomed in. This is the sim's own rendering (it shows with the mod off too), a little more visible with solid clouds.

Installing

1. Install ReShade 6.8 or newer, the build with full add-on support, for MSFS 2024, and start the sim once with it.
2. Close the sim, download AtmosphereMod-0.5.0.zip below, unzip it anywhere (not into the Community folder) and double-click Install AtmosphereMod.cmd.
3. Start the sim.

See the README for details, the settings and the known limitations.

Use at your own risk. AtmosphereMod has been developed and tested on a single PC. On other hardware or drivers it may not work, may show graphical errors, may crash the sim or may cost performance. Ctrl+Shift+F9 switches back to stock at once, and the uninstaller removes everything it installed.

SHA-256 of AtmosphereMod-0.5.0.zip: e3e5014086f2f3804e3c7a7ad15791ab603768bb129d82c9c31cca405662959f

v0.4.0

Experimental thunderstorms, sky colours fitted to the full spectrum, and an explanation for every setting. If you have 0.3.0 or earlier, install over it: your tunables.ini is kept and gets the new settings, and the installer updates the EFB app in your Community folder.

New: thunderstorms (experimental, off by default)

• MSFS's live weather has no thunderstorm clouds. Its heaviest rain falls from the same flat-topped deck as the drier cloud around it. With "Thunderstorms (experimental)" on, the mod grows cumulonimbus where the weather shows a storm.
• Only where the weather shows one: near a METAR station that reports thunder (TS, VCTS) or a CB or TCU layer, or under very heavy rain in the sim's weather. Elsewhere there are none.
• Shape: towers from the cloud base up toward the tropopause, leaning with the wind, with an overshooting top, flanking turrets, a wall cloud and an anvil of thin ice spreading downwind, frayed by the sim's own cirrus.
• Five types: single cells, sheared storms, multicells, supercells and storms embedded in a cloud deck, chosen by the wind, how strongly the reports show a storm, and the cell's size. Supercells need reported thunder, strong wind and a big cell, so they are rare.
• A life cycle: each storm lives 45–80 minutes. It grows from towering cumulus, matures and dissipates, and the next one forms elsewhere. Most are small; the biggest are the rarest.
• Lit like real towers: MSFS darkens a cloud by everything above it, which would leave a tall tower grey at any sun angle; the mod gives the towers' sides the sky light they would get in the open.
• Visual only: the aircraft doesn't feel them, there is no lightning of their own, and the weather radar shows the sim's own rain. Live weather only.
• Settings: in the EFB app's Clouds tab, "Thunderstorms (experimental)". In tunables.ini: C32.

New: sky colours fitted to the full spectrum

• "Real-world sky colours" now uses values fitted so that the sim's three-colour sky matches the same sky computed across the whole spectrum. It is closer to real at every haze amount, most of all at low sun and dusk: a blue sky overhead at sunset instead of a pink-purple one, and the right orange of a low sun.
• Ozone by season and latitude: the amount of ozone, which keeps the sky overhead blue at dusk, follows the season and your latitude. T14 in tunables.ini can fix it instead.

Clouds

• Stratus fractus: a few scattered clouds below about 500–750 m above the ground are drawn like stratus, the ragged scraps of a low deck, not as cumulus.
• No more white puffs in clear air: faint traces in MSFS's cloud noise that the solid clouds turned into small white puffs are gone.
• No fine stripes on far clouds when a thin mid-level layer lies over low cloud, seen from altitude.
• No repeating pattern in cloud decks: MSFS's cloud surface detail repeated every 8 km, which looked tiled from cruise.

EFB app

• Every setting explains itself: hover over a setting's name to see what it does.

Known issues

• Far clouds can look grainy at their edges, especially zoomed in. This is MSFS's own rendering (it shows with the mod off too), a little more visible with solid clouds.
• As in 0.3.0: dust and smoke haze look grey rather than yellow-brown. The amount of haze follows the METAR; the colour will be fixed in a later version.

Installing

1. Install ReShade 6.8 or newer, the build with full add-on support, for MSFS 2024, and start the sim once with it.
2. Close the sim, download AtmosphereMod-0.4.0.zip below, unzip it anywhere (not into the Community folder) and double-click Install AtmosphereMod.cmd.
3. Start the sim.

See the README for details, the settings and the known limitations.

Use at your own risk. AtmosphereMod has been developed and tested on a single PC. On other hardware or drivers it may not work, may show graphical errors, may crash the sim or may cost performance. Ctrl+Shift+F9 switches back to stock at once, and the uninstaller removes everything it installed.

SHA-256 of AtmosphereMod-0.4.0.zip: 7e00ab142511428a933aa6ec48b69a0c94f17f463cb0cff20ab8d7a971d8f0d7

v0.3.0

Cloud types: softer stratiform decks, crisp cumulus. If you have 0.2.0 or 0.1.x, install over it: your tunables.ini is kept and gets the new settings, and the installer updates the EFB app in your Community folder.

New: cloud types

• Not every cloud is a cumulus. Real stratocumulus, stratus, altocumulus and altostratus hold less water than cumulus, spread more evenly and have softer edges. Until now the mod made every cloud as solid as a cumulus, so thin decks looked like fields of cotton balls.
• How the type is chosen: MSFS's weather has no cloud types, so the mod infers them from each layer's height, depth and cover, including the layers it takes from the METARs. Thin broken or overcast decks become stratiform; scattered low clouds and deep clouds stay cumulus; cirrus keeps its own look.
• What changes: each stratiform type gets its own share of the "Solid clouds" thickness and the sim's soft edges. Stratus and stratocumulus decks stay grey and solid from below, as real ones are; altocumulus, and altostratus even more, also get a softer base, so a thin altostratus is a veil the sun can shine through. Cumulus keep the full thickness and get crisp edges.
• Settings: in the EFB app's Clouds tab, "Cloud types" (0 % draws every cloud like cumulus, as before), and under "More" each type's thickness (60, 50, 40 and 30 % by default). In tunables.ini: C23–C27.
• Live weather only: weather presets and third-party weather engines such as Active Sky keep drawing every cloud like cumulus.

Also

• New comparison screenshots on the GitHub page, each with the METAR the sim used.
• Known issue, as in 0.2.0: dust and smoke haze look grey rather than yellow-brown. The amount of haze follows the METAR; the colour will be fixed in a later version.

Installing

1. Install ReShade 6.8 or newer, the build with full add-on support, for MSFS 2024, and start the sim once with it.
2. Close the sim, download AtmosphereMod-0.3.0.zip below, unzip it anywhere (not into the Community folder) and double-click Install AtmosphereMod.cmd.
3. Start the sim.

See the README for details, the settings and the known limitations.

Use at your own risk. AtmosphereMod has been developed and tested on a single PC. On other hardware or drivers it may not work, may show graphical errors, may crash the sim or may cost performance. Ctrl+Shift+F9 switches back to stock at once, and the uninstaller removes everything it installed.

SHA-256 of AtmosphereMod-0.3.0.zip: 9987503a800c946a0fc4739bc1eead95d72039ca5bc7d7ec8dae67bd9bccc8f8

v0.2.0

Settings on the EFB tablet, and three fixes. If you have 0.1.x, install over it: your tunables.ini is kept, and the installer updates the EFB app in your Community folder.

New: settings on the EFB tablet

• The AtmosphereMod app on the EFB now shows the main settings as switches and sliders, in four tabs: Haze, Sky & light, Cloud lighting and Clouds. Changes apply at once and are saved to your tunables.ini.
• The sliders use plain units: degrees for the silver lining and the glory, % for strengths, km for distances.
• While the haze comes from the METAR, the manual haze sliders are greyed out and show the values the METAR set.
• A master switch (the same as Ctrl+Shift+F9), Reset buttons, and a Reload tunables.ini button (the same as Ctrl+Shift+F10).
• Every setting, including the ones the app doesn't show, is still in tunables.ini.

Fixes

• The mod switching itself off during a flight: with some other software running alongside the sim, the mod could switch off a few seconds into a flight, and Ctrl+Shift+F9 then had no effect. This happened when that software created and closed a graphics device of its own.
• Crash after a reload: after that, Ctrl+Shift+F10 could make the sim exit with DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG (#2).
• Clouds on the ground: automatic weather stations sometimes report a cloud layer without its base, for example FEW///CB. The METAR anchoring then put that cloud on the ground, and the haze layer became very shallow. The base is now estimated from the temperature and dew point.

Installing

1. Install ReShade 6.8 or newer, the build with full add-on support, for MSFS 2024, and start the sim once with it.
2. Close the sim, download AtmosphereMod-0.2.0.zip below, unzip it anywhere (not into the Community folder) and double-click Install AtmosphereMod.cmd.
3. Start the sim.

See the README for details, the settings and the known limitations.

Use at your own risk. AtmosphereMod has been developed and tested on a single PC. On other hardware or drivers it may not work, may show graphical errors, may crash the sim or may cost performance. Ctrl+Shift+F9 switches back to stock at once, and the uninstaller removes everything it installed.

SHA-256 of AtmosphereMod-0.2.0.zip: a402bd1a01a40aff65adf53e51d7c4a5ca90b74d239612871b56435dee009b6a

v0.1.1

Installer fixes: on German and other non-English Windows the installer crashed at once, and many users reported that it couldn't find their MSFS 2024. Nothing else has changed: if 0.1.0 installed fine for you, there is no need to update.

Changes

• Works on non-English Windows: the installer crashed right at the start with a UnicodeDecodeError and a TypeError (argument of type 'NoneType' is not a container or iterable). It also reads folder paths with accented letters correctly now, such as a user name like Jürgen.
• Finds more installations: in the Xbox app, you can choose your own folder for your games. The installer only looked in XboxGames until now. It now finds the folder you chose, and the game under any folder name in the Xbox app's and Steam's game folders.
• Asks when it can't find the sim: enter the folder with FlightSimulator2024.exe, the one where you installed ReShade. You can also drag FlightSimulator2024.exe into the installer's window.
• Asks when it can't find your Community folder: until now, it skipped the EFB app without asking, which turned off the METAR features. Press Enter to skip it, as before.
• The uninstaller asks the same way when it can't find them.
• Clearer errors: if the installer runs into something it didn't expect, it says so in one line and saves the details to installer-error.txt, which you can attach to an issue.

Installing

1. Install ReShade 6.8 or newer, the build with full add-on support, for MSFS 2024, and start the sim once with it.
2. Close the sim, download AtmosphereMod-0.1.1.zip below, unzip it anywhere (not into the Community folder) and double-click Install AtmosphereMod.cmd. Installing over 0.1.0 is fine: your tunables.ini is kept.
3. Start the sim.

See the README for details, the settings and the known limitations.

Use at your own risk. AtmosphereMod has been developed and tested on a single PC. On other hardware or drivers it may not work, may show graphical errors, may crash the sim or may cost performance. Ctrl+Shift+F9 switches back to stock at once, and the uninstaller removes everything it installed.

SHA-256 of AtmosphereMod-0.1.1.zip: faf2030108893c0f4f5d67b3691d385ca54e889a451cf86b6a62501b6c6d257b