HST Simulations is the latest developer to have chosen to initiate development of volumetric clouds for X-Plane 11.

Posting to the x-plane.org forum, Egor started his post with the current status of xAmbience Pro, which is to be an extension of the original plugin.

xAmbience itself swaps out the default clouds, atmosphere, and other aspects for more realistic-looking assets and visuals.

"The development of xA Pro is getting close to becoming truly complete," wrote Egor. "I am currently working on the last edits to the plugin code and some visual changes, after which I will start showing the media content. Now it just looks a lot different from what it should look like in the final. I will post dev status in special thread very soon.

"Overall, everything is going well as planned. We have planned a date for ourselves when we will be ready to let it go. And of course, this is not the only news for today."

That news is referring to volumetric clouds, and the developer has succeeded in introducing such clouds to the X-Plane environment.

"The time has come to announce this. I showed this on Discord for a few weeks earlier, but I must now announce it officially. We are working on and we have something to show. These are of course W.I.P shots, and this does not show the product that is in the final. That is why I can show it, in contrast to xA Pro, which is awaiting release."

He signed off the post by stating these clouds will be produced in 2020, though this does not strictly imply they will be in users' simulators by year's end.

Other developers who have dabbed into volumetric clouds in X-Plane have done so with varying degrees of effort and success.

The first and most notable example was xEnviro, which introduced volumetric clouds fourteen months ago in version 1.10.

Ultra Weather XP followed with the release of v2.6 one year later and used a different technique to achieve what they term volumetric clouds in the weather plugin.

Additionally, a freeware experimentation with volumetrics was released only yesterday by BiologicalNanobot in an alpha state.

To see more screenshots and information relating to the development of xAmbience, refer to the thread on the x-plane.org forum.