Is Active Sky XP Essential for X-Plane 11?

[Kronovan 14]

I have Active Sky Next for FSX:SE and consider it top quality product providing significant improvements to the weather simulation. With that flight sim though, due to there no longer being active weather updating with the core sim, ASN is a no brainer and an essential if not mandatory product. I'm wondering though, with XP11 being a big step up from FSX:SE, if ASXP is as much an essential product? I've only been flying the XP11 demo and that hasn't given me much exposure to varying weather conditions, so I don't have got a good sense of what's there in the core product. I do find ASN's popup X-Gauge app to be very useful, but from the ASXP webpage it doesn't make clear whether it's includes in the XP edition?

I'm buying XP11 today and noted that on the same website that ASXP is onsale. So I'm hoping someon here can give me some feedback as to whether ASXP is must-have, and if so, a comment or 2 on what significant improvements it brings to XP11?
I should probably mention that my simming PC is far, far, far from state of the art, so any hits to frame rate performance is a concern for me.

Edited September 30, 2019 by Kronovan

[Paraffin 2,197]

I use ActiveSkyX, it's a great weather injector for XP. I don't know if I'd call it essential, because you can get a basic form of real weather injection in the default XP sim, but it's a major improvement on the native weather injector. 

The essential feature, which I assume is the same as the FSX version, is the degree of finely tuned control over how rough the injected weather is. I fly using real weather almost all the time, but in some of the places I fly like the Pacific Northwest, the storms rolling off the Pacific would make flying impossible in the light GA planes and helicopters I enjoy using.

The turbulence model feels much more realistic than default XP as well, although it may take some tweaking with settings to get it right for the weight of aircraft you fly. It allows loading a flight plan in the XP format, which improves the accuracy, and with that feature you can set it to not make any weather transitions when you're on final approach. I love that feature, because I do most of my flying in the FSEconomy game, where the idea is to actually complete the assignment!

Note: The version for XP is only a weather injector, it doesn't include new cloud depictions and will use the default XP clouds. So it won't look different outside the cockpit, it just behaves much better than default in setting up the weather conditions. It can be used alongside other programs like SkyMaxx Pro or various free cloud texture replacements if you want. HiFi has said they're working on their own cloud depiction add-on to work alongside ActiveSkyX, but I haven't heard anything about it lately. They might be waiting for the pending move from OpenGL to Vulkan/Metal graphics. 

I've bought other programs with weather injectors like SkyMaxx Pro/RWC and xEnviro, but I like ActiveSkyX the best, for the amount of user control over the conditions: a blend of what's real out there, and what I can actually handle in my current aircraft. 😉

[Bulva 98]

See also here:

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/183583-my-short-look-at-active-sky-xp/&tab=comments#comment-1691022

[alexcolka 183]

I love the historical weather mode, for that reason I consider AXP essential plus the other great features.

[leinsters 42]

No. It depends on what you want. X-Plane itself does a pretty nice job. AS as you know just does it with more fidelity 🙂