What's The Future For HIFI Active Sky

[GAJ52 54]

Active Sky has been a major player in our quest to achieve a realistic flight simulation experience for many years.

Does anyone know if they have any place within the new Microsoft Flight Simulator, it would be a travesty if all there good work and commitment to our hobby was lost on the release of MFS with 'possibly' most of us moving to new MS flight Sim.

[Thomasso 224]

2 minutes ago, GAJ52 said:

Active Sky has been a major player in our quest to achieve a realistic flight simulation experience for many years.

Does anyone know if they have any place within the new Microsoft Flight Simulator, it would be a travesty if all there good work and commitment to our hobby was lost on the release of MFS with 'possibly' most of us moving to new MS flight Sim.

Honestly, looking at the new weather system, I'd say that they're dead. Same as GSX, ORBX regions and others.

[travelabroad 177]

Hardly dead. P3D, FSX and X-Plane still exists, despite the release of Microsoft Flight Simulator.

[mwilk 1,107]

They'll be fine. This sim is not going to replace third party developers.

[Will Fly For Cheese 1,710]

Bleak I'm afraid. Maybe they'll have a go at selling something to do with metar depiction.

[snglecoil 1,828]

If MSFS delivers what they showed (and I don’t see any strong indication they wouldn’t), I don’t see a place for Active Sky in the new sim. Xplane and P3D aren’t going anywhere for a little bit. HiFi have provided such a great product for so many years, I hope they find some way to be involved with the new platform. Smart group of developers. 

[Thomasso 224]

3 minutes ago, travelabroad said:

Hardly dead. P3D, FSX and X-Plane still exists, despite the release of Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Yep, for now. My bet is that they will eventually also die. Because I don't see why anyone would stay with them.

[ahsmatt7 1,201]

I think that it all depends on the strength of the default weather engine in terms of live weather depiction. If the base sim can't do bit basic depiction, then activesky can improve tremendously on the base. They can improve frontal activity, weather movement and transitions between weather depiction stations......all this of the base sim can't do it.

[cepact 517]

In terms of weather simulation everything seems good to me in default MSFS

Cloud textures ? well there is no such thing as cloud texture when using volumetric clouds, it's full shader.

So the only thing they could do is to improve the volumetric cloud shaders. But I can't imagine a big enough improvement that could make worth paying more than 10 bucks

[duckbilled 310]

While I'm very pumped for the release, we are seeing a ton of threads where people point out the sim's shortcomings (sometimes fair, sometimes not). All of the shortcomings are opportunities for 3rd part developers. What developers produce may pivot slightly, but I believe they will adapt. I'm sure we'll find all of the flaws with the weather engine, and I'm hoping that they'll figure out a way to fix them. 

[Chock 17,769]

13 minutes ago, Thomasso said:

Honestly, looking at the new weather system, I'd say that they're dead. Same as GSX, ORBX regions and others.

Not really.

Quite the contrary in fact, there are all kinds of things which can open up as possibilities. Unless we imagine the weather depiction is absolutely perfect and could never be bettered. Same with the scenery, both static and mobile; do we really think those cars and airport vehicle are perfect in the way they act and is there no possibility that the scenery could ever be better than it is?

Hardly. MS clearly think so too. After all, they would we can suppose, not bother going to the trouble of setting up an infrastructure geared toward TPDs if they figured that would be only to find there's no market for such things.

Edited August 2, 2020 by Chock

[dilore 126]

5 minutes ago, Thomasso said:

Yep, for now. My bet is that they will eventually also die. 

As will all of us.

[Thomasso 224]

3 minutes ago, Chock said:

Not really.

Quite the contrary in fact, there are all kinds of things which can open up as possibilities. Unless we imagine the weather depiction is absolutely perfect and could never be bettered. Same with the scenery, both static and mobile; do we really think those cars and airport vehicle are perfect in the way they act and is there no possibility that the scenery could ever be better than it is?

Hardly. MS clearly think so too. After all, they would we can suppose, not go to the trouble of setting up an infrastructure geared toward TPDs and then not have a market for them.

We're talking specifically about Active Sky's role within the new MFS. The weather made for MFS is SO MUCH better in all aspects than Active Sky that Active Sky with its current product can't survive on the market. Would you buy it for $40 right now, knowing what it offers, while also knowing how MFS weather looks like?

Everything can be improved in the future and there will obviously be a place for 3PDs, but this specific case is a no brainer at the moment. It will take Active Sky some amount of time to catch up.

3 minutes ago, dilore said:

As will all of us.

Really? Thanks for letting me know.

[Farlis 2,300]

From what I have seen at least GSX has a high chance of continuos existance. Their ground handling is vastly superiour to the the default one of the new sim. Bigger library of objects, custom textures. 

In terms of Active Sky that depends on the true capabilities of the default weather engine. I have seen some not so stellar low lever cloud rendering in a flight demonstration video to San Francisco.

There is definately work to be done. It's just the question whether Asobo will do this themselves or wether HifiSim has to step in.

Edited August 2, 2020 by Farlis

[Thomasso 224]

1 minute ago, Farlis said:

From what I have seen at least GSX has a high chance of continuos existance. Their ground handling is vastly superiour to the the default one of the new sim. Bigger library of objects, custom textures. 

In terms of Active Sky that depends on the true capabilities of the default weather engine. I have seen some not so stellar low lever cloud rendering in a flight demonstration video to San Francisco.

There is definately work to be done. It's just the question whether Asobo will do this themselves or weather HifiSim has to step in.

Might be true about GSX. I've only seen the ground handling in MFS on pictures 🙂