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JoTayhen

REX Essential vs Active Sky 2012

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I along with, I suspect, many have versions of REX and ASE. I seem to recall some discussion about how REX Essential would stack up against Active Sky 2012. I wonder if anyone has had the time and is in the position to give us a little insight regarding that question?

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I guess we have to wait. It was asked four times on one of the REX-E topic, but nobody was so kind to answer that yet.

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Hello

One function of the Active sky series that I could not be without is the historical weather.

I fly in the evening after work so the live metar download will never match flight time I use in the sim (daytime)

So if I choose to fly at 14:00 hours, with AS2012 I can grab the correct weather for 14:00 this is very useful.

 

REX Essential cannot do this so I would be stuck flying using that evenings conditions for a daytime flight which would not be realistic as evening conditions are usually quieter with cooler air temps.

 

Even though I have bought REX for both FS9 and FSX I have never used the weather part of it as I never had any success with any of the previous WeatherMaker programs from the same programmer.

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Does anyone know if the new REX weather system can work on a seperate machine? I have Active Sky running on a networked machine and would like to keep my setup working that way.

 

Cheers


Rob Prest

 

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The thing I preferred with Active Sky, was the clarity of the weather reports when setting up FMCs, for things like cruise alt wind predictions and airfield winds and temps when doing reduced thrust take off. Now REX has that displayed in a bit more of a friendly way, and it also does a similar interpolation of weather in regions without specific reporting stations, it stacks up pretty well against AS.

 

Still think AS has a nicer interface, but REX is now a lot better than it was for more than simply the eye candy aspects, so its 'one-stop-shop' ethos is now more credible than it was; where it used to be simply the best for visuals, it now stacks up against AS in the weather generation and reporting features too.

 

I like em both, but since I've lost the install file for ASE and can therefore no longer install it, and REX gave me a freebie update which I can still get the install file for, I'm going with REX.

 

Al


Alan Bradbury

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Does anyone know if the new REX weather system can work on a seperate machine? I have Active Sky running on a networked machine and would like to keep my setup working that way.

 

Cheers

 

Yes you can. They have a sticky in their support forum with a step by step guide.


Always remember to Find Your FUN!

-Bob

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Does anyone know if the new REX weather system can work on a seperate machine? I have Active Sky running on a networked machine and would like to keep my setup working that way.

 

Cheers

 

Pretty much on the same subject, anyone knows if the new REX Essentials work together with Aivlasoft's EFB in the same way you can have AS2012 "connected" to EFB?


Richard Åsberg

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i have a few zillion flights with ase/as2012....but only five or six with the new rex engine...

 

so i've been holding off on making any this or that comparisons until i mess with it more. but here's a few first impressions:

 

1. i still like the as2012 interface better, particularly for flight planning. rex's flightaware integration looks neat, i'm not sure if i'll subscribe yet since a lot of my flying isnt real routes anyway. my main sticking point is not being able to see temps and things like average winds on the weather report, fsbuild reading the info for fuel planning also means i was still loading as2012 to get that data before planning lol...

 

2. i have not done enough flights to vouch for the accuracy one way or another, in general winds and temps at the final airports seemed about right, winds aloft seemed way better than the old rex engine but prone to a little jumping around sometimes but not bad... on a couple flights the temps seemed kind of high, like staying at 15-20C up to 15000 feet and things like that, but i was flying in some weird weather i didnt crosscheck all that stuff very carefully yet... and to be fair there are issues like this with as2012 current version too..

 

3. the cloud textures imho ..have to give a salute to REX...they just seem to have great drama and personality

 

4. the cloud/weather simming stuff in REX has some really cool eye candy for sure. some awesome 3d looking structures like on the front line of storms, and stuff like that, looked really good..!!! this was easily the thing that impressed me the most, a very strong sense of the clouds not just being a random scattering of the relevant type. i enabled the enhanced thunderstorm stuff and those looked really good too, not really sure what's different there but nice job for sure.

 

5..i also saw a few glitchy things from time to time... a couple good overcasts but there was also one that mysteriously disappeared, same as always happens lol... i really need more flight time on it before i can say this is solved any more or less than as2012 does it but i think it's one of those limitations of fsx things and also can be mitigated by more studied settings.. it's not a magic bullet, although i get the feeling the stock settings are very tilted towards GA type flights and there are a lot of options to check out.

 

5. as another settings issue, i had typical s-turn things with turbulence and the ngx with the stock settings... but things smoothed out nicely with reducing the relevant sliders and it got farily smooth... anyway until i get to experiment with it more i can't really say but it looks promising

 

6. for the free price it's a REALLY impressive upgrade... overall i'm very positive about it so far

 

cheers

-andy crosby

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Pretty much on the same subject, anyone knows if the new REX Essentials work together with Aivlasoft's EFB in the same way you can have AS2012 "connected" to EFB?

You can Richard, but you need to use Vatsim weather selectable in Rex ESS

 

i have a few zillion flights with ase/as2012....but only five or six with the new rex engine...

 

so i've been holding off on making any this or that comparisons until i mess with it more. but here's a few first impressions:

 

1. i still like the as2012 interface better, particularly for flight planning. rex's flightaware integration looks neat, i'm not sure if i'll subscribe yet since a lot of my flying isnt real routes anyway. my main sticking point is not being able to see temps and things like average winds on the weather report, fsbuild reading the info for fuel planning also means i was still loading as2012 to get that data before planning lol...

 

2. i have not done enough flights to vouch for the accuracy one way or another, in general winds and temps at the final airports seemed about right, winds aloft seemed way better than the old rex engine but prone to a little jumping around sometimes but not bad... on a couple flights the temps seemed kind of high, like staying at 15-20C up to 15000 feet and things like that, but i was flying in some weird weather i didnt crosscheck all that stuff very carefully yet... and to be fair there are issues like this with as2012 current version too..

 

3. the cloud textures imho ..have to give a salute to REX...they just seem to have great drama and personality

 

4. the cloud/weather simming stuff in REX has some really cool eye candy for sure. some awesome 3d looking structures like on the front line of storms, and stuff like that, looked really good..!!! this was easily the thing that impressed me the most, a very strong sense of the clouds not just being a random scattering of the relevant type. i enabled the enhanced thunderstorm stuff and those looked really good too, not really sure what's different there but nice job for sure.

 

5..i also saw a few glitchy things from time to time... a couple good overcasts but there was also one that mysteriously disappeared, same as always happens lol... i really need more flight time on it before i can say this is solved any more or less than as2012 does it but i think it's one of those limitations of fsx things and also can be mitigated by more studied settings.. it's not a magic bullet, although i get the feeling the stock settings are very tilted towards GA type flights and there are a lot of options to check out.

 

5. as another settings issue, i had typical s-turn things with turbulence and the ngx with the stock settings... but things smoothed out nicely with reducing the relevant sliders and it got farily smooth... anyway until i get to experiment with it more i can't really say but it looks promising

 

6. for the free price it's a REALLY impressive upgrade... overall i'm very positive about it so far

 

cheers

-andy crosby

Great summary Andy. I am in the same boat as you, getting relevant data for programming the NGX is important for me, and AS2012 does that very well.

I have a very stable network, and run most tools on it like As2012 EFB etc, but REX just won't play the game, crashing all the time, so I am about to give up on it.


System: MSFS2020-Premium Deluxe, ASUS Maximus XI Hero,  Intel i7-8086K o/c to 5.0GHz, Corsair AIO H115i Pro, Lian Li PC-O11D XL,MSI RTX 3080 SUPRIM 12Gb, Samsung 970 EVO M.2 SSD, 1Tb Samsung 860 EVO SSD, 32Gb Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3200Mhz RAM, Corsair R1000X Gold PSU,Win 11 ,LG 43UD79 43" 4K IPS Panel., Airbus TCA Full Kit, Stream Deck XL.

 

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I am running both ASE2012 and REX2OD, and now having downloaded and installed REXE, am running that - all over SimConnect. REX has always played ball with me on the network and REXE does the same. As for comparisons, first impressions of REXE are very good. I agree it has limitations with respect to certain functionality of ASE, but I didn't use many of those features..I agree the lack of historical weather can be a bit limiting (the ability to set the ASE time to the sim or RW time is great.)

 

As for actual depiction, imho, REXE blows ASE right out of the water..I have been doing some very non-scientific GA comparisons, and tbh, I won't ever use ASE's textures again, and when REXE-OD comes out..oh my!

 

The haze and transition layer depiction is truly a revelation. I was flying around PNW last night, and I don't use ENB or Shade, but I swear REXE haze has given me subtly different atmospheric refraction of light and the like..truly amazing flight at 0830 local time..the light was amazing; the clouds were amazing, but it was the haze that got me:

 

newrexepnw2.jpg

 

newrexepnw1.jpg


JAKE EYRE
It's a small step from the sublime to the ridiculous...Napoleon Bonaparte
newSigBetaTeam.gif
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I've posted several comments in other threads - but I'll summarise. REXE is very good, the new textures are a noticeable improvement over those in REX and REX OD. In terms of the weather engine - it depends what you're looking for in a weather engine. If you're like me, and fly PMDG aircraft you'll know how important fuel planning is using wind charts (as they do in real life) - the issue with REXE here is that they do not use the same data that is published on wind charts (such as http://www.aviationweather.gov/data/iffdp/2503.pdf) so if you're doing a trans-atlantic flight you cannot predict the winds over the atlantic (or any other ocean for that matter) as the winds REXE report have (so far for me) been TOTALLY different to what the charts report, not only for over the atlantic. Regardless of whether these winds are accurate or not, in real life these wind charts are literally the only source of what to expect in regards to winds in places such as the Atlantic - so we can assume they are fairly accurate. This is a deal breaker for me, fair enough it isn't an issue a lot of people care about, but when PMDG release their T7, and people are needing to calculate fuel for a 14 hour flight, incorrect winds could very easily result in you either running out of fuel, or landing with too much.

 

On the plus side, REXE's engine does have one advantage over AS2012, and that is it has superior fog generation, especially in regards to creating the illusion of fog without the use of stratus clouds - however, I have been informed that the AS developers are currently working on improving their fog generation.

 

If you're mostly doing GA flights, or short-hauls, then there's certainly no need to purchase AS2012 over REXE as you're not going to care what the winds are at FL340. If you are more concerned about the accuracy of winds, then I'd recommend Active Sky - especially if you're flying over oceans.

 

On a personal level, regardless of how else the engine performs, if it's giving me false data in one respect I'll doubt the accuracy in other areas. For 90% of my flights, incorrect aloft winds aren't going to have any impact, but it's the fact they're wrong that bugs me.

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but since I've lost the install file for ASE and can therefore no longer install it

 

Fyi, I lost my file also but emailed the developer, gave all my purchase info and was able to obtain the installer again.

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Flex1978 - I wonder if in fact networking something like a real-weather program would save much if any processing on your FSX machine. Your FSX PC has to maintain a connection and data has to be written into memory whether received across a network or through an internet connection, and it has to be processed by your GFX card and sent to display.

 

That's me just wondering, I'd be glad to hear other opinion and be guided accordingly.

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I agree 100% with spesimen's review. Perhaps with some adjustment of settings it will be better. I will have a hard time using the AS weather engine over REX just because the environment is so believable and it seems as though the upper wind data is much more accurate than old REX. But on the other hand, the software is really bad; AS is far better for planning flights and getting weather data summarized for flight planning. We also need a way to get data into FSBuild.


Jim Shield

Cybersecurity Specialist

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