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