Hi guys,I've been reading so many accolades on Active Sky, I'm very tempted to buy it. However I'm hesitant because I don't have that great a machine and can't afford a huge frame hit. Does this program have a big affect on frame rates?I currently have the Chris Willis high performance clouds installed and that helps my performance. Will Active Sky overwrite these?My machine is:P4 2.41 gig ramATI Radeon 9800 128 megThanks.

Hi Craig,I'm running an Athlon 2600XP with 1gig DDR RAM and a Nvidea 6600GT and find ASV to work beautifully. I also used to use Chris Willis' cloud textures, then Flight Environment which I admit I liked better. Chris Willis did the texture sets for ASV and they are updates to the older free set and include many, many more. After installing ASV you have the option of converting the textures over to DXT format and mipmapping them which really boosted the performance on my system. I presently use Flight Environment's sky sets with ASV's clouds which are automatically selected depending on weather conditions and gives the best of all worlds for visual appearance.When using any add-on weather generating program you will notice some hit compared to the default weather generator, this is because it is an additional program running in the background and in addition it is more complex so there will be more cloud layers and more differing areas of cloud coverage. I personally feel the frame rate hit for running ASV in the background is very minimal, the weather generation is incredibly realistic, the views out my virtual windows are breathtaking and I wouldn't go back to default now.

If you select 3 levels of clouds in the menu, the frame rate hit for me, is non-existant.

Zane and Bob,Thanks for the feedback. Wow, I'm psyched now! I'm getting it!

>If you select 3 levels of clouds in the menu, the frame rate>hit for me, is non-existant. I had the same concern -- and the same experience. When I installed the program, I set the max number of cloud levels to three right away and never looked back. Have never noticed a dropoff in FPS with that setting, relative to the default. The best thing about this program, in my view, is the ability to see weather before you fly into or out of it. The default weather is not bad, but you don't see a thunderstorm until you're in it. Much more fun (and much more safe) to observe it from a distance. Ditto with clouds: they don't necessarily fill the whole visible dome of the sky. Instead, they collect over the places where are gathering in real life (e.g., on the windward side of mountain ranges).

Welcome!And thanks to everyone else for their posts!Hope this helps,JimActiveSky Sales and Supporthttp://www.hifisim.com/images/asv_dev_team.jpg http://www.hifisim.com/images/asv_proud_supporter.jpg