Need some advice on weather addons!

[JoshuaBrown 0]

I'm currently using P3D v4. I don't have any sort of weather addons at all, and I feel like I'm missing out.

From reading, everyone talks about Active Sky. Now, looking at their website, I'd need ASP4 for a weather engine, seen as though I'd like to fly in real time weather. But ASP4 doesn't include any textures, so I'd need ASCA for weather textures so clouds don't look ugly, right?
So that's £50 for ASP4, and then another £20 for ASCA? Ouch, that's pricey.

Could anyone confirm if this is correct? 

[speedyTC 194]

There was a similar thread just a couple of days ago.

In a nutshell, most, I believe, run with the ASP4 / REX SF3D combination. Do your own research though as these are not the only Wx engines/Texture generators available. What's good for the goose is not always good for the gander.

[sem 126]

I use Rex skyforce for all of my sky/cloud textures and i use fsglobalweather for weather or you can use the rex skyforce weather engine aswell

[JustanotherPilot 219]

Active Sky, ASCA, Envtex with EnvShade works fine with me, easy install and settings are easy to tweak, all have large community input for various scenarios. Excellent support from the developers.

[scottb613 1,186]

4 minutes ago, JustanotherPilot said:

Active Sky, ASCA, Envtex with EnvShade works fine with me, easy install and settings are easy to tweak, all have large community input for various scenarios. Excellent support from the developers.

Hi Folks,

It ain't cheap but ditto...

Regards,
Scott

[lownslo 590]

1 hour ago, JoshuaBrown said:

So that's £50 for ASP4, and then another £20 for ASCA? Ouch, that's pricey.

Could anyone confirm if this is correct? 

Wait for a sale (which may be coming soon...).  👍

Greg

[JasonPC 173]

REX Sky Force includes a weather engine and cloud textures and it’s on sale right now. But nothing beats ASP4. You could hold out for a sale on ASP4 and it works well in conjunction with Sky Force.

[Dexter1979 101]

3 hours ago, speedyTC said:

There was a similar thread just a couple of days ago.

In a nutshell, most, I believe, run with the ASP4 / REX SF3D combination. Do your own research though as these are not the only Wx engines/Texture generators available. What's good for the goose is not always good for the gander.

+1

[SP2472 2,285]

REX Sky Force is one great weather program for me, it generally correct in most situations.

Great interface too!

[meerkat 86]

Active Sky is the weather program of choice for me. Then I bought ASCA when it was on sale and was disappointed with the cloud textures - way too small scaled structures, just not looking right. The sky textures are overdone (too colorful) and when you choose dynamic changing sky textures you will get strange effects of sudden color changes (it affects haze and cloud color as well!).

Now I settled for the P3D standard cloud and sky textures together with ASCA's dynamic changing cloud models for best realism. I might probably buy REX Sky Force when it's on sale, but all these texture replacement programs need a ridiculous amount of SSD space which I better save for Real Earth...

[Rogen 1,086]

I use Active Sky Next and Rex Texture Direct Enhanced Edition with Soft Clouds.

ASN gives you great live, or sim date/time based historical weather with just a couple of mouse clicks and includes the option of installing a weather radar gauge.

Plus the Rex Texture Direct application not only gives a large choice of cloud types, it also replaces many other textures such as water, runways, runway markings, runway signs, airport lights, terrain bump mapping, surface refraction, sunset skies and even includes sound effects such as wind, rain and thunder..

You can also build a theme and make it publicly available directly from within the app, or download someone elses theme to try out yourself.

I like it for the type of flying I do.

I recently uploaded a few pics fo flying in clouds to the AVSIM Screen shots if you want to see what they look like. The theme in this instance is a downloaded one named "Flight Sim Jewels - Pacific" with my own personal mods, it's from Flight Sim Jewels - the Hawaiian Islands scenery dev crew.

Texure Direct clouds

Cheers

[el_kab0ng 29]

On 8/25/2019 at 9:02 PM, SP2472 said:

REX Sky Force is one great weather program for me, it generally correct in most situations.

Great interface too!

As a long time user of Opus FSI (until a recent M$ update nuked it for me), I switched over to REX and feel the weather rendering isn't nearly as accurate. Clouds popping in and out based on updates, inaccurate representation of real conditions and stale use of WX makes it just awful.