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v0.5.0

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@tomwhoca tomwhoca released this 30 Oct 13:36
· 43 commits to main since this release
v0.5.0
db17e9a

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

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