Visibility tip

Here's a quick tip to add some realistic atmosphere to your flights, and probably increase simulator performance. This may be ancient headgear to many of my readers (if I have many readers, that is), but for those who have not spent much time creating weather, then try this out.

It's really very simple: just decrease the visibility in the custom weather setup to 30 miles or less. In the screenshot here, I have it down to 20 miles. This will create a hazy atmosphere in the distance, which I find much more realistic. This shot looks like a humid summer day in New England. Whenever I set up custom weather I always reduce the visibility distance.

This will most likely increase your performance too. I know this to be the case in FS2004, and it probably true in FSX, but since I have not tested it systematically I will stop short of stating it as a fact. The reason it should help performance is simply that the sim doesn't have to worry about rendering objects beyond the visibility limit.

So go ahead and play with this slider-- you may be delighted with what you see.