Active Sky Next for X-Plane - maybe?

[hhbrbg 136]

Hi,

Nels Anderson the founder of flightsim.com has interviewed Damian Clark the founder of Hifi Technologies this June. Most of us know Hifi Tech. for their great weather addon Active Sky Next. Damian Clark answered a question of Nels Anderson as follows:

Quote

We've been working on X-Plane for a while now, but the weather-related API functions and weather depiction system in general is fairly limited in comparison to FSX/P3D, which has been a challenge. For a realism-based weather simulation solution, having only three cloud layers, of only a few potential types with no cloud type, structure or independent coverage control has been the main setback. We are still a ways out with our X-Plane solution, but it is coming and we're pretty excited about it. Some nice examples of what is possible have been shown in products like SkyMaxx Pro and X-Enviro. We look forward to joining the mix here soon and helping push each other to raise the bar even further.

Could be that we have sunny weather ahead 

Tom

[wiler 394]

good news, still a fan of xenviro but competition is always good. 

[Sesquashtoo 2,846]

1 minute ago, wiler said:

good news, still a fan of xenviro but competition is always good. 

Yep. I passed last night over the Great Lakes, at 12,000 feet, through wispy cloud banks, that blew by the side windows...very, very immersive... I'm waiting for the next xEnviro update, but hope I don't succumb to old age before it shows up!

[Desaix 235]

The fact that every third part weather developers complains, one more one less, against the XP weather should hurry up LR to rethink the system once for all.

[ohsirus 241]

1 hour ago, Desaix said:

The fact that every third part weather developers complains, one more one less, against the XP weather should hurry up LR to rethink the system once for all.

I don't think anyone can persuade LR to focus less on eyecandy effects and more on it's elephants in the room.

[x-plane 123 61]

They talked about it at FlightSimCon today as well. 

 

 

[Denco 48]

Yup. Can't wait :)

[BobFS88 633]

This is without a doubt BIG NEWS that HI FI has been working on a XPlane solution, this is great news to hear.

Hopefully LR will make some improvement that certainly help improve the weather system baseline so that HI FI can take it even further.

Bob

 

[BobFS88 633]

One more thing on this announcement.

I like what like about HiFi said in their presentation is that they are interested in developing for all plateforms. 

This is welcome news

Bob

[Paraffin 2,197]

1 hour ago, Desaix said:

The fact that every third part weather developers complains, one more one less, against the XP weather should hurry up LR to rethink the system once for all.

One would hope so. What worries me is that new players entering the weather plugin market might have the opposite effect -- encouraging Laminar to think that 3rd party solutions are "good enough" when they're clearly not.

I have yet to see an actual, discrete, towering thunderstorm in XP after all these years. No weather plugin shows this realistically because it can't be done in this weather engine. There is no vertical convection in cloud systems, no discrete modeling of weather fronts. Your plane is surrounded by world-universal weather, instead of the weather OVER THERE on the horizon being different from the weather RIGHT HERE. 

Austin has confirmed (in a prior interview somewhere) that X-Plane really needs a 3D weather system instead of the current horizontal layers. And guess what happens to the current weather plugins, when that eventually happens. 

Another form of inertia is that a full 3D weather system will probably hit the CPU/GPU harder. It won't be easy on the frame rate, and we're in a period where the big focus from Laminar is on optimizing performance. On the other hand, if FSX/P3D can manage better weather without killing frame rates, maybe that's enough of a stimulus to move forward with a better weather engine.

Anyway, this is why I have trouble getting too excited about new plugins that are basically different versions of eye candy that hide the flaws in the system. I just hope Laminar manages to look past the current plugin "solutions" and continues to push the modeling forward.

[anden145 2,285]

Interesting thoughts...

ActiveSky for X-Plane would indeed be nice. But I'm fairly certain, that they need something to work with. As I understand it, the weather modelling and depiction is severely limited as it is now.