Atmosphere and clouds; something that affects the experience of every flight simmer very much although they might not admit it. For years, we had to cope with how the default clouds and atmosphere looks. Soon, various plugins began to arrive, unfortunately being only a temporary solution to our problems.
Many developers attempted to bring the legendary “volumetric clouds” to X-Plane 11, though unsuccessfully. The first somewhat successful attempt was by the xEnviro team. However, to date users are reporting FPS issues, not to mention the heftier price tag.
BiologicalNanobot, a community developer responsible for a number of visual enhancements for the platform, has last year released his first payware product which promised to change the situation – Enhanced Skyscapes. The release was met with substantial success. A notable amount of community members refers to it as the best cloud addon for X-Plane 11.
Default cloud textures and atmosphere
Let’s be fair, X-Plane 11 has some decent cloud textures from default. Many flight simmers have been using them since their beginnings and do not mind lacking some resolution or detail. What is significant, however, is how they behave.
When it comes to atmosphere, it’s a whole different story from the clouds. The majority of flight simmers do not give much attention to the tone of their sky colours as long as they look decent.
So, WHAT is enhanced skyscapes?
Priced at a price of 15$, or about 14€ when converted, Enhanced Skyscapes is the first addon to offer fully volumetric clouds in addition to other atmospheric improvements.
To give you a better idea first, the default clouds behaviour is that they go aside when the aircraft is about to go through them. Having volumetric clouds offers the user to actually fly through them and experience the full immersion. This fact hence explains the reason why the release was so anticipated.
BilogicalNanobot additionally made use of his previous development experience, and also reworked the overall atmospheric and shader visuals. Enhanced Skyscapse thus does also improve those; offering much sharper shadows and more realistic lighting in various conditions.
The utility is compatible with a majority of weather injection addons like Active Sky XP, and users should not notice any significant FPS drops.
You can purchase the utility solely through the Threshold Store for $15 by clicking here.
If you want to learn more about the Enhanced Skyscapes release, you can read our other article on the topic by clicking here.
The featured image is from wmKK67#1401 on Discord
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