1 hour ago, wiler said:

honestly I had active sky and xenviro is pretty good considering its relatvily new and xp has its weather engine limitations. 

Yes I understand that core sim structure is holding back what Developers can possibly deliver. I guess when or if REX or whoever bring a product for Xplane it will be interesting to see what they can achieve given what LR has provided them to work with.

I hear so many mixed reports about XEnviro. I am not expecting an Active Sky visual equivalent but quite a few people are disappointed in the products ability to provide accurate winds. I will look at 1.07 when it's released, let the dust settle and see what the general consensus is then. If REX coming to Xplane does eventuate I guess a product would be a while in development so will probably cave in a purchase a solution.

Regarding the weather: The second best weather-addon IMHO is allready available for XP11: Pilots FSGRW. Together with the improved clouds it produces very accurat and good looking weather-systems. At least for my needs. And there is XEnviro wich is allredy cool and has a lot of promise. I have used all the Rex Products back in my P3D-days and appart from another weather injection addon, I cant see to much benefit from one of there products. Dont want to fly around billboards in the sky and changing background pics on the fly anymore. But if they come up with something that fits the current x-plane world, Im all in.

Hi all

What i was going add, Rex and Active Sky have been in this business a very long time. The resource and the experiance to deliver quality product and make timely updates.

The technology is different now where Rex or Active Sky can do things for Xplane where they don't have to worry about the constraints of the 32 bit world they have supporting in the FSX/P3D. Which is probably why there was a lot of billboard clouds solutions

I think they maybe looking for what are the gaps that they can fill , high performing volumetric clouds, seasons and upper level winds, horizon to horizon clouds coverage, servers, etc.

Now that P3D ver4 is out they will be looking for ways to exploit their technology in that sim. I would think they will be looking for something simular in the Xplane as well. 

Bob

35 minutes ago, michaelray said:

I hear so many mixed reports about XEnviro. I am not expecting an Active Sky visual equivalent but quite a few people are disappointed in the products ability to provide accurate winds. I will look at 1.07 when it's released, let the dust settle and see what the general consensus is then. If REX coming to Xplane does eventuate I guess a product would be a while in development so will probably cave in a purchase a solution.

It's not just the winds in XEnviro. I've tried it, and it has a lot of problems in the current version. The biggest one, from my perspective anyway, is the lack of a manual weather adjustment on the injected weather. That won't ever change, according to the devs. It will always be real weather only, with the possibility of "historical weather" later on. That doesn't work for the light GA and helicopter flying I enjoy in X-Plane. It closes out too many flying days in too many areas. 

When I had it installed, I was also seeing sudden, drastic changes in weather, without the smooth interpolation I can get with SkyMaxx Pro and RWC, or default XP clouds with FS Global Real Weather as the weather injector. Other days were clear sky only where the METAR was totally different, suggesting a server drop-out. XEnviro occasionally showed odd artifacts at low level, like blocks of rain with a sharp transition when you fly out of it. The representation of low-level clouds doesn't look good either, compared to either default XP11 or SkyMaxx. It's very obvious that they're 2-dimensional billboards, and there isn't enough layering.

The one place where XENviro does look great is up in the flight levels flying an airliner or biz jet. Which is why it's so popular, I guess. Airliners are better able to climb above severe weather and shrug it off at ground level, so XEnviro's "real weather only" isn't as much of a drawback as it is for GA flying. 

SkyMaxx Pro has its own problems, of course; mainly the limited draw distance at altitude. But I think it does a better job under 15,000 feet. FS Global Real Weather is also a good contender with default clouds. I want to do some more testing with that vs. SkyMaxx.

And I still think all of these plugins are basically lipstick on a pig, until Laminar beefs up the weather engine and makes it a full 3D weather model. With everything else working so well in the sim, it's ridiculous that we can't have real thunderstorms, vertical convection, and weather fronts. But until then, these cosmetic plugins are all we have to work with.

Paraffin,

Can you clarify a couple things about FSGRW?  The NOAA plugin works pretty well, but it has two shortcomings:  sudden weather updates and ATIS does not work at the airports until you are close enough that the current weather is the same as the airport.  It seems that the NOAA plugin loads the current weather from where you are located and then sets that globally, so if you dial up ATIS for an airport 10 miles out, it will report the weather you are currently flying through, not the local airport weather.  If these 2 issues are addressed by FGSRW, then that seems like a great solution.  I personally think the default clouds are ok.

Thanks.

Jim

3 hours ago, jelder said:

Paraffin,

Can you clarify a couple things about FSGRW?  The NOAA plugin works pretty well, but it has two shortcomings:  sudden weather updates and ATIS does not work at the airports until you are close enough that the current weather is the same as the airport.  It seems that the NOAA plugin loads the current weather from where you are located and then sets that globally, so if you dial up ATIS for an airport 10 miles out, it will report the weather you are currently flying through, not the local airport weather.  If these 2 issues are addressed by FGSRW, then that seems like a great solution.  I personally think the default clouds are ok.

Disclaimer: I have the least experience with FSGRW, because I was just starting to use it when SkyMaxx 4.5 was released and I switched over to test it with just the default XP weather injection to start with. So, not many flights for comparison or testing, but I did like the way it worked with default clouds. I didn't notice any sudden jumps in weather for the few flights I tried it. I believe FSGRW uses more data than just the airport METAR reports, so that may help with smoothing transitions. 

Regarding the ATIS report from an airport 10 miles out not matching current weather, I haven't tried that and don't have FSGRW loaded now. Maybe someone else can test this and report back? It may have something to do with the way XP works internally, reading only the current METAR.rwx file, but I'm not sure.

11 hours ago, Paraffin said:

It's not just the winds in XEnviro. I've tried it, and it has a lot of problems in the current version. The biggest one, from my perspective anyway, is the lack of a manual weather adjustment on the injected weather. That won't ever change, according to the devs. It will always be real weather only, with the possibility of "historical weather" later on. That doesn't work for the light GA and helicopter flying I enjoy in X-Plane. It closes out too many flying days in too many areas. 

When I had it installed, I was also seeing sudden, drastic changes in weather, without the smooth interpolation I can get with SkyMaxx Pro and RWC, or default XP clouds with FS Global Real Weather as the weather injector. Other days were clear sky only where the METAR was totally different, suggesting a server drop-out. XEnviro occasionally showed odd artifacts at low level, like blocks of rain with a sharp transition when you fly out of it. The representation of low-level clouds doesn't look good either, compared to either default XP11 or SkyMaxx. It's very obvious that they're 2-dimensional billboards, and there isn't enough layering.

The one place where XENviro does look great is up in the flight levels flying an airliner or biz jet. Which is why it's so popular, I guess. Airliners are better able to climb above severe weather and shrug it off at ground level, so XEnviro's "real weather only" isn't as much of a drawback as it is for GA flying. 

SkyMaxx Pro has its own problems, of course; mainly the limited draw distance at altitude. But I think it does a better job under 15,000 feet. FS Global Real Weather is also a good contender with default clouds. I want to do some more testing with that vs. SkyMaxx.

And I still think all of these plugins are basically lipstick on a pig, until Laminar beefs up the weather engine and makes it a full 3D weather model. With everything else working so well in the sim, it's ridiculous that we can't have real thunderstorms, vertical convection, and weather fronts. But until then, these cosmetic plugins are all we have to work with.

Thanks for the feedback Paraffin. I can understand your frustration with lack of manual weather adjustment given the type of flying you prefer. I fly mainly airliner flights so this is not as big an issue for me. If they do introduce historical weather than that is all I would need for those occasions when I did not want to use real time weather.

However FSGRW has got me interested. While I like good visuals, smooth weather interpolation is even more important to me. I see in another post that you have had limited exposure to it. I will do some more investigation on it.

Thanks Michael

12 hours ago, Cellinsky said:

Regarding the weather: The second best weather-addon IMHO is allready available for XP11: Pilots FSGRW. Together with the improved clouds it produces very accurat and good looking weather-systems. At least for my needs. And there is XEnviro wich is allredy cool and has a lot of promise. I have used all the Rex Products back in my P3D-days and appart from another weather injection addon, I cant see to much benefit from one of there products. Dont want to fly around billboards in the sky and changing background pics on the fly anymore. But if they come up with something that fits the current x-plane world, Im all in.

Hi Cellinsky

As it appears you are a current user of FSGRW in Xplane, can you provide some more specific feedback on the product.

I am specifically interested in how it smooths out the weather changes. The is from a cloud, wind, pressure point of view.

 

Thanks Michael

Dear REX Customers and Flight Simmers - With the release of Laminar's Xplane 11, AeroFly 2, Dovetail's Flight Sim World, and the upcoming expected release of Lockheed Martin's P3Dv4 we felt it necessary to address our thoughts on each upcoming platform. These are exciting...

Just to give an official word.  Thank you for the interest here for REX to come to XP11.  

We had a talk with Austin about XP11 just before the holidays in 2016.  The conversation went very well.  We received all the information we needed to begin looking at their weather engine and SDK.  Our team has been heavily involved in development for REX Sky Force..   We are planning to look at what we can do with XP11 soon after Sky Force is out.  

I want to be clear that nothing at the moment has been developed for XP.  So we are not trying to hype anything, but we have received many many requests and we want to follow through on that.  So we will say more later when we get a better look at things.

6 hours ago, rstough said:

Just to give an official word.  Thank you for the interest here for REX to come to XP11.  

We had a talk with Austin about XP11 just before the holidays in 2016.  The conversation went very well.  We received all the information we needed to begin looking at their weather engine and SDK.  Our team has been heavily involved in development for REX Sky Force..   We are planning to look at what we can do with XP11 soon after Sky Force is out.  

I want to be clear that nothing at the moment has been developed for XP.  So we are not trying to hype anything, but we have received many many requests and we want to follow through on that.  So we will say more later when we get a better look at things.

Nice to hear news of further discussions and appreciate you can't say much about your conversations with Austin so far but knowing what you currently do about the structure of XP11's weather engine and what Austin said to you, is REX considering offering something in the XP11 cycle, or thinking more about XP12?

Excited to hear about REX coming to XP regardless of when it actually happens!

Thanks for the update Reed!

 

Reed has already stated REX's position on the official forum, it would be the best news for people investing the XP11. Welcome! ;)

And also Reed, do you plan to bring SIMAIR to X-Plane 11 as well? We really need a cross-platform sim carrier product.

 

Cheers,

Gordon