Yes, I finally got REX 2004 after all those positive reviews and amazing screenshots. I have to say, I am not disappointed. It's the best texture addon I have come across so far. I also have FS Elemental, Flight Environment, and Zinertek Water Advanced. The only texture type open for criticism in REX, in my opinion, is the pulsating water. It's not as subtle as Zinertek. However, the colors of the water are breathtaking, and they seem to go better with the sky colors than Zinertek. Thus, I have decided to keep my REX water until I get really tired of it.Since the sky colores are slightly different each day in real life, I am going to push the random button before each flight. It's kind of fun to be surprised by an unexpected and stunning sunset/sunrise, just like in real life.Well done, REX team.Here are two questions. Comments would be much appreciated:1) What exactly is REX Overdrive? I've heard it's coming soon. Is it a free addon?2) What is the difference between REX weather engine, Active Sky 6, and Active Sky Evolution?Thanks,Doc

The only texture type open for criticism in REX, in my opinion, is the pulsating water. It's not as subtle as Zinertek. However, the colors of the water are breathtaking, and they seem to go better with the sky colors than Zinertek. Thus, I have decided to keep my REX water until I get really tired of it.Thanks,Doc

Doc, That is my only criticism of REX is the pulsating water. It drives me nuts.

Without getting into boring details, the REX weather engine is an improvement on the default weather engine, but the focus of REX is a one-stop-shop, it has that weather engine, flight planning stuff, textures for water, sky, clouds, airports, grass and lights, and probably something to make your dinner as well. So you can't complain at the value it offers, and as you know, the textures and clouds are really cool, but with so much in one package to then expect the weather engine to also challenge the one in Active Sky when they've been honing that thing for years would understandably be a stretch.Because that is so, a good many people have gone for the choice of using REX for its strong points (i.e those cool textures), and Active Sky for its strong points (i.e a weather engine that has more whistles and bells than a whistle and bell factory), so with both REX and AS, you have the best of both worlds. Active Sky Evolution is what the name suggests, an evolutionary improvement on previous incarnations of Active Sky, with Active Sky Advanced being the one that immediately preceded it, and in fact you can upgrade ASA to ASE since the Evolution version is close enough to make that possible.Things that were upgraded in the most recent version of Active sky include the vertical air simulation, the interpolation of several distant METAR sources to provide better coverage in areas that don't have a specific METAR, an aircraft gauge which gives your cockpit real-time weather data, improved mapping and stacks of other stuff really too numerous to mention, but along similarly clever and useful lines. So it is a lot more than just a weather engine these days, being more like a complete weather control program that allows you to leave it to do all the smart stuff for you, or let you tinker with it to your heart's content.But what really makes that so good, is that despite its complexity and all the clever stuff it can do, the interface is beautifully simple to use, to the extent that it makes Active Sky Evolution appear simple despite all the really very complex tricks it is pulling off under that pretty face. Note that there's a review of Active Sky Evolution coming soon on Avsim, it's all done and simply awaiting publication in the reviews section.Al

These days, a flight might start like this:Flight Environment, to pick some sky, water and cloudQuick paste back of the freeware HD clouds of choiceActive Sky, setting up weather for the flightplan, launchingGround Environment Pro, taking up the offer of ground and some sky textures suited to the weather, and then launching FS2004.It looks, well, orsim.This doesn't contribute to the OP question, but I'd like to ask also:Would there be any advantage in using REX in there (other than the 1-stop shop effect)and, what will REX Overdrive offer?

Well, after trying out REX for a few hours, I am still very impressed. My PC is a laptop with a GeForce 9600, so I was afraid that the clouds would have a massive impact on fps - but I largely solved that problem using 512x512 and DXT3 clouds. I'm very satisfied now, since all my cloud sliders in the sim are maxed out.Thank you for responding about Active Sky and REX Weather Engine. I'll wait for the avsim review of ASE.Does anyone know about REX overdrive?

Overdrive from what i know will be a texture addon pack with even more clouds, themes ect.... if the fsx overdrive pack is anything to go by there will be lots more to choose from, it is over 4gb in size and i must say im looking forward to it as i think REX 2004 is among one of my best ever purchases for FS2004!

I'll wait for the avsim review of ASE.

You don't have to wait. :wink:http://www.avsim.com/pages/1110/ActiveSky/EVO.html

You don't have to wait. :wink:http://www.avsim.com/pages/1110/ActiveSky/EVO.html

There you go, told you so LOLAs you can see, I recommended ASE for a shiny Gold Avsim Gong, and the Reviews Editor Robert agreed, so it duly has one. In case anyone is curious, what swung it for me was the GUI - a marvelous bit of interface design which makes a complex and extremely powerful program as simple to understand as it is pleasant to use.Al

And a damn' good review it is too...now I must go and figure out why I recently bought AS 6.5!PS Is your quoted machine spec correct? What CPU?A desktop PC with an ASUS P5 KPL SE motherboard, running 2Mb of DDR 3 RAM, an ATI Radeon 4800 PCI-x graphics card with Jan 2009 Catalyst drivers. Windows XP Home with Service Pack 3 and DirectX 9.0c.

Nope, that's actually a mistake on the review, and I'll tell you how that happened...Normally we use an MS Word template for the Avsim reviews, but occasionally I am lazy and just open up an old review from the folder where I back up all the reviews I do and simply do a 'save as' and overwrite an older review. Ordinarily that's not a big deal, but on this occasion, I wasn't paying too much attention and selected a really rather old review, now, I remembered to update the date on the disclaimer at the bottom to 2010, but I forgot that the specs panel would not be up to date, so it shows a really rather old computer probably from several years ago in fact.The real specs should be: ASROCK M3A770DE motherboard with an AMD Athlon II X2 245 CPU on an AM3 938 socket, memory is 4Gig of DDR3 and the graphics card is an ATI Radeon HD4850.I did also do some testing on an HP Pavillion DV2000 laptop that has a dual core CPU and 2 gig of RAM too incidentally. It runs okay on that too.Well spotted by the way. Silly me.Al

The miracle of the Word Processor...I have actually addressed a large report to entirely the wrong client...I did think the computer spec looked a little like "what MS recommends" - you'd certainly be using all of that 2MB of RAM! :(

You know, the really ironic thing is, I spent pretty much all of Wednesday of this week (when I was training some people on Adobe InDesign) in repeatedly advocating how very much wiser it is to use templates when creating artwork because of all the advantages it confers in supporting the techniques I was showing them, and how it will prevent the very error I made there. All of the people on the course sent me emails saying what a great course it was, and more than one of them thanked me for impressing that on them LOLAl

Hey Chock:Can ASE be used in a WIDEFS network with FS9 being on the server PC and ASE on the client??Dennis

Yup, ASE works with WideFS. Didn't try it myself, but I spoke with someone who has done that and they reported that it worked okay.Al

Yup, ASE works with WideFS. Didn't try it myself, but I spoke with someone who has done that and they reported that it worked okay.Al

OK, Thanks....