ActiveSky FS Released

[Soulflight 97]

1 hour ago, Fiorentoni said:

6) You can live with the fact that you will not see distant weather fronts anymore (as in MSFS default), because AS injects globally

Well tbh with TS being broken / absent in MSFS default live weather, I dont care much about that. Also, when running AS in passive mode it still should work....right now, this is the way to go for me.

Edited April 19 by Soulflight

[Rene_Feijen 126]

15 hours ago, MrSpeaker said:

Installed it, all it says is waiting for simulator, it prompted me for the connector already. Nothing written to my exe.xml file. Is there supposed to be something in the community folder? My msfs is on my D drive, I installed AS on C

I had the same problem, in Task Manager ActiveSkyUtils.exe was not running. Deinstalled the connector and ...same problem. BUT. I noticed no mentioned Addons folder in the ASFS folder. But while installing I saw very short that Addon folder apparently was added... somewhere... with Roaming in it. So I searched  AND: I found it, but it was not in my Community folder (which I have on a handpicked location, and always found by other installation programs) but in the 

C:\Users\USER\AppData\Roaming\HiFi\AS_FS\AddonFolder

Ran the ActiveSkyUtils.exe et voila... ASFS now works. Now I have only to test it yet.

[Bobsk8 12,783]

Just finished my first flight on A Pilots Life  using ASFS, from KVPS to KDFW.  Everything worked perfectly, map showed the Simbrief flight plan, with the weather along the way, clouds looked great and realistic, descended through overcast into KDFW, broke out as approached airport around 3200 agl. Best $25 I have spent in a long time. 

[Stearmandriver 2,312]

15 hours ago, LRBS said:

This software has a feature that is missing in MSFS2020, and it is definitely something that should be mentioned. Under custom WX "surface visibility" can be set manually, unfortunately, RVR is missing as a value that can be set. Hopefully next update? 

I was wondering about this, thanks for mentioning it.  I was absolutely astonished that this was missing from MSFS when it LAUNCHED, to say nothing of now, years down the road.  This alone makes AS worth it for me. 

With no RVR option, just how low can you set the vis?  For instance, can you set .10sm instead of 600rvr, and get about the same thing?

[Cpt_Piett 4,741]

Not trying to derail the thread, but comparing with REX is relevant, as there are several weather addons available. Just did a quick flight in the Caravan in my local area. The weather was pretty spot on, but only cumulus, whereas looking out the window there's a stratus layer around 3000-4000ft or so. Nearest METAR is a 15 min drive away from where I am: 

Wind variable 2kt. Visibility 10km or more. light drizzle rain. Clouds few 1000ft, scattered 2500ft, broken 4500ft. Temperature 4°C, dew point 0°C. QNH 1007hPa.

Wind, visibility, light drizzle rain, temp, QNH - all correct with REX. Just the cloud type was a bit off comparing with real world. They did look more convincing than default though, with more clearly defined cloud bases. Which also seems to be the case with AS from the few screenshots I've seen. 

I didn't see any transitions during my 45 min flight. 

Edited April 19 by Cpt_Piett

[Flic1 988]

55 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

ust finished my first flight on A Pilots Life  using ASFS, from KVPS to KDFW.  Everything worked perfectly, map showed the Simbrief flight plan, with the weather along the way, clouds looked great and realistic, descended through overcast into KDFW, broke out as approached airport around 3200 agl. Best $25 I have spent in a long time. 

Did you do the same flight using MSFS default Live WX to compare?  These WX addons get all kinds of posts like this..."looks great!", etc but Live Wx also looks great nearly all of the time as well....

[mmcmah 418]

11 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

Not trying to derail the thread, but comparing with REX is relevant, as there are several weather addons available. Just did a quick flight in the Caravan in my local area. The weather was pretty spot on, but only cumulus, whereas looking out the window there's a stratus layer around 3000-4000ft or so. Nearest METAR is a 15 min drive away from where I am: 

Wind variable 2kt. Visibility 10km or more. light drizzle rain. Clouds few 1000ft, scattered 2500ft, broken 4500ft. Temperature 4°C, dew point 0°C. QNH 1007hPa.

Wind, visibility, light drizzle rain, temp, QNH - all correct with REX. Just the cloud type was a bit off comparing with real world. They did look more convincing than default though, with more clearly defined cloud bases. Which also seems to be the case with AS from the few screenshots I've seen. 

I didn't see any transitions during my 45 min flight. 

You're saying you took the flight with Rex and ASFS, or just Rex?

[Iiari 13]

Just to clarify, ASFS right now doesn't have cloud turbulence - That's a WIP, correct?  Thanks.

[vgbaron 3,688]

2 hours ago, Juliett Alfa Romeo said:

A question on a Twitch stream:

"So what's the verdict on active sky for msfs? Is it worth buying or is a scam as a lot of people are saying?"

Oh my God... a scam?!? why????

😑

Because there are a lot of "streamers" who are completely inept and only interested in click bait for subscribers. Talk about scammers. I haven't seen all the streams but so far the ones I have seen indicate that the user doesn't have a clue on how to use the product.

 

[Treetops45 1,082]

1 hour ago, Bobsk8 said:

Just finished my first flight on A Pilots Life  using ASFS, from KVPS to KDFW.  Everything worked perfectly, map showed the Simbrief flight plan, with the weather along the way, clouds looked great and realistic, descended through overcast into KDFW, broke out as approached airport around 3200 agl. Best $25 I have spent in a long time. 

Bob

From what I have seen so far in the promo material, the drop down menus suggest quite a bit of complexity, or fine tuning of variables, can be dialed up.

But can you also run it fairly 'simply'. ie, don't need to spend 15 minutes before a flight punching in variables data?
T45 

[mmcmah 418]

10 minutes ago, Iiari said:

Just to clarify, ASFS right now doesn't have cloud turbulence - That's a WIP, correct?  Thanks.

Cloud turbulence is there. It's very good.

[sd_flyer 6,065]

I set weather transition smoothness to 3 and it's much better, but there is still room for improvement. Occasionally clouds still pop and disappear 

[mmcmah 418]

5 minutes ago, Treetops45 said:

Bob

From what I have seen so far in the promo material, the drop down menus suggest quite a bit of complexity, or fine tuning of variables, can be dialed up.

But can you also run it fairly 'simply'. ie, don't need to spend 15 minutes before a flight punching in variables data?
T45 

Absolutely. There are two presets (Easy and Realistic) that can be set and then tweaked. I have gone through all the settings and have only modified one or two off of the Realistic preset.

The interface is a bit daunting the first time you look at it, but that depth and tweakability are what differentiate this product from Rex (which I also have, although haven't used it in a long time) and from MSFS. It honestly doesn't take that long to figure it out, though.

As a personal observation, I find the depiction to be great and much better than just live weather (more representative of the real world and less volcanic ash and greater variety of clouds and layers). I was also able to check out the storms in Dubai from a few days ago. Paired with PSXT for the traffic, it was fascinating to see how the traffic waxed and waned with the storms.

[mmcmah 418]

3 minutes ago, sd_flyer said:

I set weather transition smoothness to 3 and it's much better, but there is still room for improvement. Occasionally clouds still pop and disappear 

Agreed. I set it to 5 and it seemed good. Need to test more, as the new beta download made all transition s slower, so I'm going to restart the setting at 50 and tweak from there.

[sd_flyer 6,065]

Just want to say that based on my experience IRL sometimes cumulus can grow from little puff to a huge cloud in a matter of minutes, especially over mountains. So I think to incorporate something like that would sound reasonable as part of smoothing transition