I don’t know exactly when it happened, but it was probably two patches ago when War Thunder changed it’s lighting effects that Gaijin also changed the predominant weather patterns on the maps.
Currently if you join a sim lobby there is a pretty good likelihood that your lobby will be overcast with a low cloud layer at around 500m, and then a break, and then another layer much higher up.
Some might argue that this is realistic and enhances immersion. My thought is that it just serves to confine most fights to below 500m and make fighter game play extremely frustrating…especially when coupled with rendering bugs that make planes disappear when they are directly in front of you.
Personally I play this game so that I can fight against other players and have a good time. If I wanted to practice flying under IFR…I would be playing Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Well, I find it’s not the fact THAT we have those weather conditions which is a problem, but frequency and amplitude of them: Having such terrible overcast 8 times out of 10 is not realistic - especially on desert maps.
Also, having weather conditions that would make IFR necessary in a sim with instruments not modelled to handle this, is of course something that can lead to issues.
The weather wouldn’t really be an issue if the game was completely different; like if War Thunder Sim was actually about recreating an 8 hour long bomber escort mission, using dead reckoning and terrain association to navigate, etc it would be tolerable.
But that isn’t the game that we are playing. Clouds aren’t inherently bad, but the current implementation makes the game a lot less fun to play…which is a problem for a game mode like sim where there just are not that many players.
Even when the maps are not cloudy the ambient air ends up looking like there is a forest fire nearby.
Yeah i agree, i dont mind at all having these extremely cloudy maps - just so long as they have they have roughly equal chance as every other weather setting to pop up (though in props i would like to see it more on the very rare side). And so long as all instruments & hud’s are actually working properly with radio altitude indicators in particular.
Finally i think with these poor weather conditions in game now we should have the common WT ui have an option to either add a radar alt indicator or have the standard one switch to it when within a certain distance from the ground - this would be easily done as this data is already known by the server, at least for higher ranks where basically all aircraft have radar altimiters.
Having the weather be related to the location would also help matters. Desert maps would mostly be scorchio with few clouds; Dover might be dogshit more often, but still mostly VFR. After all, if the weather was crap most ops would be cancelled - save maybe the odd low-level recce flight that could make use of heavy overcast, mist, rain etc for cover. For a whole bunch of different aircraft to operate (ie, enough for a WT game) the weather would have to be reasonable at least, so ‘reasonable’ ought to be the worst weather we encounter.
If good weather was more likely on desert maps, for example, and poor weather mostly confined to winter on the eastern front, at least players would have a good idea of likely weather conditions in any given lobby they look at.
I agree - I like the weather but I also hate it for a couple reason…
It’s not really realistic - when there’s thunderstorm (in real life) it’s a thing that moves through an area, it doesn’t have 7 cumulus nimbus clouds surrounded by mostly cloudy skies. I swear there used to be WIND effects in these large clouds (I distinctly remember being knocked around in a bomber a couple times when I entered them).
Also - that wind would be enough to rip the wings off many of these aircraft (esp WW1 and WW2 era aircraft).
furthermore, even modern air forces do not fly into weather - there’s a very real and current event happening right now in a certain disputed territory where sorties were delayed due to weather - so if it was really as bad as we seem to get the day would be called off.
Also the sun, moon and stars need to move across the sky, as long as we’re adding realism. It’s kinda weird playing a 3 hour match with the sun right at the horizon the entire time.