RALF9636

Yes, that's a known issue they are currently working at alongside with some finetuning on vectoring. They plan to have that fixed in the next beta version.

I can't follow. IRL the weather looks the same 360 degrees around you as well most of the time in most regions of the world. So how would you know such a depiction would be wrong when you are in the sim? How could it break the immersion when you don't know if IRL you would see a weather front right now?

You won't see a front in the Active Sky Preset Control mode like you can in the default live weather and also in the passive mode of ASFS. When you approach a front from a region with clear skies ASFS will slowly fade in clouds on your way towards the front. But you won't notice that as immersion breaking. Depending on your flightplan, aircraft and ASFS settings this process can take maybe 20 minutes or 100nm. You will notice that the weather is deteriorating continuously as you approach the bad weather region. That in itself is immersive as long as you think along the lines of "I am getting into a region with bad weather and clouds are building up all around me". If you think along the lines of "Oh my, there should be a front visible here, it is all so wrong" you won't find it immersive. But you will only come to that idea if you simultaneously run another instance of the sim with live weather alongside your ASFS session and see a front there. So in short: The weather in ASFS Preset Control mode with its transitions is immersive in itself, just don't expect to see weather fronts. And as someone else has already mentioned, this weather-front-topic is kind of over-emphasized here. It's not that you see such an impressive weather front everyday IRL. Mostly the change from good to bad weather (or vice versa) happens as a continuous transition IRL as well - and ASFS depicts that quite well.

Required diskspace. Dowload size 1,95 GB.

You can read about what it does here: https://hifisimtech.com/asfs/ I try to give a TLDR: ASFS can be used in two different modes. 1. In "Passive Mode" you get the default MSFS live weather with all its features like regional weather with fronts (but also with all clouds being cumulus and weather sometimes not accurate according to the METAR). The default live weather is enhanced with atmospheric effects like microbursts and improved thunderstorm effects. Also you can use all the planning tools of ASFS like the weather lookup, map or briefing. 2. In "Active Sky Preset Control" you can also use all the planning tools and it is ASFS that injects the weather - accurately according to the METARs. So you have for example the cloud variability (including stratus and cirrus), humidity and visibility effects, snow coverage and thunderstorm depiction by ASFS which at least can subjectively be considered preferable to the MSFS default live weather and its shortcomings. Also in this mode you are not limited to live weather but you can also get the weather of a date and time in the past (=historical weather), optionally automatically synced to the date and time you have set in the sim; so other than with the default live weather your weather will always be appropriate for the date and time you are flying in the sim. This mode is based on presets (due to the limitations imposed by MS/Asobo) so the weather is set globally, i.e. you don't get weather fronts. But it is not like you are flying in clear skies to the horizon and then all of a sudden you are in overcast to the horizon. ASFS takes into consideration the weather of neighboring stations and - if you loaded a flightplan - your whole route to produce smart and smooth transitions all the time to maintain an immersive experience.

Remember this video shows footage from different stages of the beta testing. There is still some fine-tuning going on. So expect the final product to look even better. 😉

I think it is very good. I mostly used a very slow transition setting and it was barely noticable. Not disturbing at all. And I was deliberately looking for transitions for testing purposes. Would I just focus on flying instead, I guess I wouldn't notice them at all.

There is a customizable setting for the transition rate. You can set it to instant transition (very noticable but instantly accurate according to METARs) or very slow transition where clouds are fading in and out just like they were naturally building up resp. dissipating. Barely noticable as transitions. Or anything in between to your liking. (I've been using it for a while too.)

Another idea to improve performance during the most crucial parts of the flight (takeoff and landing) without having to wait for the FPS to drop below the "freeze-limit" (which is problematic for those who are using an FPS cap for smoothness): (Optionally) automatically freeze calculations for aircraft pending to be injected between - takeoff clearance and handoff to departure (for the user) - landing clearance and "runway vacated" (for the user). I just experimented with the performance balancer settings and simulated such an option by manually setting the "freeze-limit" 1 FPS above my FPS-cap during these phases. It significantly improved the smoothness. Apart from that I'd suggest to keep the performance balancer settings customizable. Systems and personal preferences are so diverse.

If I understand correctly the FSHud calculations don't run inside the sim itself but in an app outside of the sim. I wonder if some affinity settings would help with stutters of the sim? By moving the FSHud calculations away from the MSFS main thread?

Don't do it, he is very sensitive when it comes to his monitor settings. I tried to help him with this advice a few weeks ago already. It didn't go well... 😉 And btw I can also easily read the top line of the PFD in that screenshot on my monitor. I agree though that the displays of the Fenix should be a little brighter. The current max setting brightness should rather be the medium setting brightness.

Of course you are correct. I have mentioned that many times here myself, when the Vatsim crowd demanded exactly this. Unfortunately MS/Asobo listened to them and implemented METAR matching into MSFS ruining their formerly promising weather system.

Yes, that has always been a great feature of Active Sky. Also you could easily check the METAR for any airport and for any given time or day in the past (within the coverage). And you don't even need to run the sim for that. I have always used the Active Sky weather map and its clouds and visibility overlays to plan my VFR flights. And if I saw that the weather wasn' feasible for my VFR flight I just changed the time or day to find better conditions. How I miss that in MSFS!

That has always been just an illusion made up by some who wanted to believe. I have to admit that I had hoped for this as well - but it has never been true. On the contrary there has never been a sim that was so predisposed for addons to be further improved by. In previous sims I've spent most of my time trying to keep all the addons compatible with the sim and foremost with each other. They kept breaking each other and fiddling around with settings and files was my daily fare. None of that has ever been necessary with MSFS and all its addons. I run dozens of addons that make MSFS so much better and never had any major issues with them. I'm glad that soon Active Sky will be one of them.

... or just use the historical weather automatically synced to the date and time set in the sim in the upcoming Active Sky for MSFS - and you are all set. 😉

I posted this about three years ago: Even though all this is still completely ignored by MS/Asobo, now it will be possible soon with Active Sky in MSFS! Great!

In previous sims I used the historical weather option of Active Sky for this. Just choose any random date and time in Active Sky and there you go. That way you can even choose if you want the weather to be more like summer or winter. Historical weather alone will be worth it. Totally agree. Having the same interface we are used to from previous sims makes you feel at home right away and you don't have to spend time understanding the interface. If Active Sky for MSFS will be a success even inside the limits imposed by MS/Asobo that might finally convince them that they can only win if they open up the weather system for third party developers.

Interesting. Thanks for sharing. I had also wondered why there is no METAR for many NZ airports.

Of course BATC does not come as a subscription, but if (=you don't have to) you want to use the premium voices depending on how many flights you make a month you can easily end up with $30 a month as well. And - other than with SayIntenions - you can even exceed that number. There are several articles and threads on Avsim around regarding the pricing structure of BATC.

I don't think anybody has a problem with a one-time purchase for $30. It is the $30 per month SayIntentions (and eventually also BATC if you want to have the premium voices) charges that is completely out of proportion with everything else we've known so far in flightsimulation.

You can do that already with FSHud as well. You can start FSHud at any stage of your flight and FSHud will catch up to the current situation. P2ATC does not control AI traffic, does it?

I still don't understand how SayIntentions is supposed to work on a busy airport with lots of AI traffic (assuming they will control AI traffic as well in the future - until then it's not really an ATC-addon anyway). With that 8-10 seconds delay for each transmission how should that work out when SayIntentions has to control about 20 aircraft or more at a time? It can only be a great mess unless they can solve this delay issue. To me it seems that whole AI thing in ATC addons is just not yet ready for prime time. It is too slow and it is too expensive. It is a nice proof of concept at this time but not yet utilizable for the average user.

I completely agree with that. Actually it always was one of my pet peeves in flightsimulation. But we had no choice because no so called "ATC" addon could do it. What has changed is that meanwhile we have a real ATC addon that controls AI traffic as well - including sequencing and separation in their latest update. And many simmers who have experienced how immersive that is just can't go back to these fake "ATC" addons which really aren't ATC. Of course FSHud is still far from perfect so I would appreciate to have more choices when it comes to real ATC addons. That's why I regret that BATC reversed their previous decision to implement AI control on release. As others have said that will most probably slow down development significantly.

Indeed. So it seems we are back where we started months ago when they proudly presented a demo video where the user was cleared for takeoff right at the moment when an AI aircraft that had just landed on the opposite runway collided with him. I will wait for them to implement the control of AI traffic. Until then it actually isn't ATC (= Air Traffic Control).

Nice to see this app is evolving so fast. I am going to try the demo after they will have implemented the control of AI aircraft and things have matured for a while. On the other hand I just can't imagine myself paying $30 a month for this, no matter how good it is. So hopefully they find a way to significantly lower the price some day.