You're looking too hard.

It's a time compressed piece of footage, further compressed for you tube.
If there was a stutter in realtime it would last seconds.

That is not really Jason's fault lol. We kind of manufactured false hype by running a gag contest about his vague hints lol. No one won the prize though so we might have to have a mk.II version for the next time Jason gives vague hints

That means you have to give away two airplanes next time!

I truly hope I'm wrong on the stutter, but I don't think I'm looking too hard.
Time will tell, and I'll gladly eat crow (now is there an emoticon for that? )

Hello,
this is really a nice effect, can't remember to have seen this before ! Thanks -
And i hope it does not have too much effect on the rig performance, since Win 7 i am on the edge with my just-bought dual-core. Or i switch back to XP ...
Can we hide in clouds, i mean that the AI or another live piot online does not see us (or we him) ?

Thanks and greetings,
Catfish

Foremost Great Job to all who worked on the effect! At first I was a little disappointed at what it actually turned out to be. I guess I was thinking something more war-like or more glitzy. After I watched the video I was vary impressed. I then played the sim and gosh darn it the clouds and their lack of shadows really stood out. Never noticed it before! It is a subtle effect but I've noticed in my life when people are trying to create an immersive effect little things can go a long way. For example at the California Adventure theme park here in sunny Southern California in their hang gliding sim ride they spray orange scent when you are flying over orange groves. Subtle but it does something to make the experience more real. This seems to be in that same category.

I am almost certain you'll see no stutter.
As I said just because the video compressed footage of time compressed action has a small stutter does not mean the realtime effect will. If there was a realtime stutter, it would have been lost during in game time compression. What you are seeing is a you tube artifact.

That's because it's a beta.

...or more likely, it was a stutter in the buffering while capturing the video from the track file.

Generally speaking, I suspect as far as the end user goes - the clouds will be exactly the clouds we have now - except they will eventually be on the other side of the map at the end of the mission. How much more CPU cycles it takes (to what we have now) would depend on what the weather is set to I suppose...

From 15 years of PC sim and general gaming experience you just can't judge in game performance from a video that someone else has taken. There's just too many variables involved.

Word.

Not really, it is going to use just as many cycles updating the clouds on a windless day than it would on a gale force day. Unless they program the check frequency to be linked with the wind speed variable but that would be buggy as hell.

I've been flying with the new clouds and shadows all weekend, you won't notice a thing and I don't see any performance drop on my system. It's a subtle effect, but they are there.

Jason

Sweet!

Yeah but Jason don't you have a super computer? Let us know how it runs on the average pc please.

By the way I love the sim and all the goodies even if I can't use them all. Great work and keep them coming.

Hopefully this (and other mooted graphic upgrades/perfomance killers) will be an effect we can toggle?

I don't see anyone in beta complaining about any performance drop and we have a wide range of systems. I don't think the improvements that are coming are going to be a big problem. If you can run ROF well enough now I'm pretty darn sure you will still be able to.

And I have a couple different computers and they both run it pretty well.

We just started testing the pre-alpha of 1.016 so I say this with a caveat, but we are always mindful of performance.

Jason

Jason, thanks for clearing up some of the performance rumors! I am looking forward to this update more than any other so far.

Still too early for eating crow, but I have my tomato sauce and favourite steak knife at the ready!

Cheers Jason, very nice to know that the-powers-that-be read our threads.

Wow. Simply wow!