Fog from runway to 4000 ft then suddenly almost CAVOK

[Gottfried 0]

Good evening Active Sky Support,

 

I'm fairly new to flightsimming and this evening I was at a friend's house, he has been telling me that I should invest in REX and Active Sky 2012. To heighten my enthusiasm to purchase REX and Active Sky 2012, he gave me a short demo flight, taking off from KHQM - Bowerman Airport, an airport, which according to him, is frequently fairly fogged in.

 

I was quite amazed at the way the visibility gradually got worse as the weather was loaded and then visibility seemed almost less than 100 ft after all was done loading and he took off. All seemed fine until he approached 4000 ft, then all of a sudden the sky cleared and after the aircraft banked and he slewed the view to the left, we could clearly see the airport below. In fact almost the entire surrounding area was visible right up to the horizon all around the aircraft?

 

I had a good laugh and said that it hardly seems realistic that an airport is totally fogged in at runway level and up to about 4000 ft, when the skies then suddenly totally clear up to reveal almost the entire surrounding area.

 

As I said, I'm fairly new to flight simming, is this phenomenon I witnessed tonight just a shortcoming of FSX with the combination of REX and Active Sky 2012, or has he just badly configured the programs.

 

Any help and answers are much appreciated.

 

Thanks in advance and regards,

 

Gottfried

[Gottfried 0]

65 views and nobody can help me ? Is this a known problem everyone is keeping quiet about ?

 

Any feedback or input much appreciated.

 

Gottfried

[NoahBryant 26]

If there were a solution I'd sure love to hear about it.

 

It's worse when you're coming in for a landing - and the airport is reporting 1/4mi vis ability and you can clearly see the entire airport, then you cross that magical altitude and it drops down to 1/4.

[B777ER 2,485]

Dont know whats been going on with Activesky as a company anymore. No more official forum. Problems such as this one (which I have as well) and users get to fend for themselves in solving it here on the this forum. Maybe its time to look at REX again now that their new software is about to hit the market. Seems like Activesky has come to a standstill.

[netshadoe 144]

It's a FSX limitation. There is an option in AS2012 to "Use Stratus for Fog" under the visibility tab to simulate a cloud layer low on the ground, but because of the way FSX does clouds, it isn't perfect either.

 

Unfortunately, the FSX weather engine is poor compared to the FS9 engine, which was bad too. AS2012 has to live within what FSX does within that engine. AS2012 helps a lot, but FSX ultimately controls what you see and the winds you get. All weather engines out there have the same limitation.

 

You can try it yourself by setting a fog layer manually in FSX and climbing out of it...you'll see the same thing. It is not an AS2012 bug.

[MrSpeaker 122]

It's a FSX limitation. There is an option in AS2012 to "Use Stratus for Fog" under the visibility tab to simulate a cloud layer low on the ground, but because of the way FSX does clouds, it isn't perfect either.

 

Unfortunately, the FSX weather engine is poor compared to the FS9 engine, which was bad too. AS2012 has to live within what FSX does within that engine. AS2012 helps a lot, but FSX ultimately controls what you see and the winds you get. All weather engines out there have the same limitation.

 

You can try it yourself by setting a fog layer manually in FSX and climbing out of it...you'll see the same thing. It is not an AS2012 bug.

 

Unfortunately I agree with you, I don't think this can or will ever be fixed, so for myself AS2012 is the last weather engine I will invest in, if the problem is solely fsx their is no point in getting anymore software that will have the same issues.

[vgbaron 3,612]

Dont know whats been going on with Activesky as a company anymore. No more official forum. Problems such as this one (which I have as well) and users get to fend for themselves in solving it here on the this forum. Maybe its time to look at REX again now that their new software is about to hit the market. Seems like Activesky has come to a standstill.

 

The "official" way to solve a problem is to follow the official route and submit it to Hifi directly as outlined above You will get an "official" answer. This forum is just one user helping another.

 

The title of the post is "Official Support" in case you missed it.

[Strelok 0]

I know your pain, it's a frequent problem. Here you have a picture of my options, it helps for me (I'm not sure how well, didn't play fsx for some time). I'm not sure what's the most important option, maybe it's Graduation Ceiling - put it to the max (90000).