Hi gang,
one of the reasons I sort of stopped caring for the series couple of years back and went my way of not flying combat flight sims was plethora of controversial movements by TK around 2010-2013 period -followed by lack of QOL updates and Thirdwire's focus on mobile market that followed;
one of these design decisions was locking clouds altitudes at unrealistic and immersion killing levels of over 14-16k feet ASL which made game less of a fun or challenge
turns out solution was very simple hack of vertex shader in ENVCLOUDS.FX which you will find attached in this post, just drop it into your mod's Flight folder, overwrite if asked
tested with stock clouds, SARCASM 1.5 and excellent Menrva's realSKY Environment -which I am looking at modding a bit on my end
technical blurb:
this is simple vertex shader hack that pushes the vertices of clouds plane meshes downwards in world space by user-configurable value:
const float4 P = mul(float4(input.pos.x,input.pos.y,input.pos.z - 1900, 1.0), g_mMeshToWorld); // position, world-space
where 1900 is world-space units (= meters), all the hack does is feeds the shader skewed z (z being height in SF series, as things should be) value
of course there are some issues with intersecting with close range terrain meshes (near_scene) so visual glitches might ensue at times but that was the reason TK pushed them up in the first place
Also, if this or other method was posted earlier apologies, haven't looked around much the forums.
Cheers,
Stary
ENVCLOUDS.FX