Hi all!Thought I will drop my two cents about online flying and weather add-ons. As for myself, I use AS2004 and it I think it's a great piece of app that has come a lot of way since the original to add to my flying experience. I also try to fly online because it adds a further dimension to flightsim but the issue of weather add-ons is getting complicated...IVAO has just released their beta-version of their new pilot's client which now depicts its own weather. It's crude, as most initial releases are and I somehow feel that it is a step back compared to any of the established ones, including AS2004, FSMeteo and so on...Now, it's all policy from the online networks that govern stuff like this and while AS2004 reads VATSIM METAR it won't read IVAO's METAR server because IVAO doesn't want it to.. :(Having said all that, surely weather can't be that different in any of the environments! A sunny day with almost no winds in real life at EDDF should be depicted as such in any weather client, right? Wrong! If latest METAR from from IVAO happens to be 1630z time while AS2004 reads the latest as 1800z that could be the difference between sun and late afternoon thunder storms..!Wouldn't it then be easier if developers at least could get their heads around and get their METAR info from the same source so that it could be our choice, as pilots and controllers, which app we want to use? At the moment we are getting into a situation similar to buying music on the Internet. It's the same tunes but different formats and while each developer says their way is the best we as consumers suffer the most...Anybody ever a-b tested different weather add-ons in order to see how much they differ in describing real life METAR? What about the VATSIM METAR server? How much different is the weather to real life online METAR services? Discuss! :)// Peter A. Mankowskihttp://www.mankowski.co.ukhttp://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/ng_driver.jpg

Peter,I think the main concern about where you get the weather from when flying on line is how up to date the data is, not whether one add-on depicts one set of clouds and another a different set.I use AS2004 also and fly both off line and with VATSIM, but if flying with VATSIM I set AS to get the METARS from VATSIM.The main concern is winds and pressure. VATSIM (and I guess IVAO) controllers get their weather from the respective servers. if a pilot comes along and has their weather from AS2004 servers it is quite possible that his/her winds and pressure are different to the controllers. So the controller is vectoring the pilot to, say, rwy 09 but the pilot wants 27 to satisfy the winds he/she sees, and the QNH could be appreciably different.Winds aloft can also cause problems for controllers. Imagine two planes on the same track, one has a tail wind of 50kts, the other a head wind of 50kts. Both, if asked, report an IAS of, lets say, 280kts but the relative speed the controller sees on the scope is not zero but possibly 100kts different - problems!Winds aloft can be a problem even if the VATSIM server is in time with the AS2004 one, as I understand it VATSIM (or it may be SB) simplifies or simulates winds aloft whereas AS depicts real winds aloft.

Yeah, I guess that winds aloft may be the most difficult part since SS as well as other apps try to simulate these but at the same time smooth data to get FS to depict winds correctly! My main problem at the moment is actually that IVAO does not support AS ar all (or any other outside app). In that sense VATSIM is much better at working with the community of third-part add-ons...