The cloud rendering pipeline has been fundamentally reworked to accurately simulate real-world cloud typologies. By enhancing the rendering techniques, cloud formations now behave and look significantly more true-to-life. These upgrades are integrated tightly with overall weather improvements, refining the visual impact of lighting and autogen integration under varying atmospheric conditions.
Building upon last week's grass optimization, the tree system has been upgraded with a brand-new 3-tier Level of Detail framework. This dynamic system automatically scales the resolution of distant tree billboards, delivering a substantial boost to both visual fidelity and rendering performance during low-altitude flights and dense forest traversals. Procedural PBR Ground Texturing To enhance surface realism, Physically Based Rendering (PBR) textures have been applied directly to the ground and runway surfaces. This adds an extra layer of procedural detail, ensuring tarmac, grass, and terrain react accurately to dynamic lighting and weather conditions.
A native Replay Mode has been officially integrated into the simulator. Currently limited to a total of 5 minute recordings this will be expanded upon in the future. Airport Generation Fixes Significant bug squashing was performed on the airport generation systems. A critical issue preventing large scale airports from loading into the environment has been successfully resolved. Furthermore, the runway numbering logic has been corrected for accurate navigational alignment across all dynamically generated airfields.
The in-game Editor has received a major quality-of-life update, now fully supporting PBR material properties. Additionally, multiple texture projection methods have been introduced, giving creators significantly more control over asset texturing, surface details, and texture layering
The fleet is expanding! Development has officially begun on a new General Aviation aircraft, the Diamond DA40, modeled by sq380. Keep an eye out for more previews as this airframe progresses toward completion.