Best overall weather program?

[cavity]

I have been using the default weather program that comes standard with FS9.  I am interested in improving on it, what systems out there are the best?  I have heard of weather rx, active sky, etc.  Do any of these programs have a gradual weather transition so you dont go from sunny and clear to thunderstorm instantaneously at the next weather reporting station?  That drives me nuts.  I would love to go from sunny to partly cloudy to overcast and then rain, but can flight simulator even model this accurately with reall world weather?  Thanks, Todd

[JBaymore]

Cavity,

Hi.

[BiggBaddWolf]

I have been doing some beta testing for weather maker pro, but so far the results havent been very good  :-/

I like the default one in FS2004 much better, I have my settings for rate of weather change on NONE or MILD, and that seems to work great for me  ;D

[cavity]

Hi, again Jbaymore, it has been a very long while.  Since we gave up on the driver thing a while back, I just sort of followed along, patiently trying to pull more FPS out of my machine as well, and of course, not much luck.  Thanks for the info from you and Wolf, I thought maybe somebody has figured out a way to let the game read the next reporting station ahead of time and start building the weather before you get there, but I guess maybe that is for the next version.  I hate to say it but I am running out of places and situations to fly in, I think I may start saving to finish my private pilots license, which will surely invigorate me once again.  Take care, Todd

[JBaymore]

Todd,

Woah....... lots of things to do.

Go into Google and search for "Doherty's Difficult and Dangerous Approaches".  It is a series opf volumes of difficult landings.  Each volume has about 8-9 serups in it...and there are something like 40 volumes.  They are GREAT!

Also... come over to the WSPilots flight server and fly online a bit.  They are a very nice group of people...reminds me of SimV.  Some SimV folks are discovering it lately.  On many Saturday nights they set up a somewhat informal live ATC session.  Otherwise there is a built in hoplist that takes you interesting places.  or you can just do the "freeflight" thing.

And no...... the framerate problems have never gone away.  :P  Thinking of a new 3.?? gig machine now.

best,

................john

[jubjub47]

By far the best third party weather program is Activesky.  I've had it for about a year and refuse to fly now without it.  It fixes all of the bugs in the default weather engine and it depicts the weather with it's own weather engine to generate the best weather visuals i've ever seen.  

[cavity]

How is the active sky with frame rates?  Are you able to fly through heavy weather smoothly, and are the transitions fromgood weather to bad a gradual process?  Todd

[jubjub47]

The only reason that Activesky would affect your fps would be if your system can't handle your cloud rendering settings.  That really is dependant on your systems settings.  As far as the transitions go, I get nice smooth changes for the most part.  There are times when the metar reports don't allow great smoothness, but Activesky uses a nice engine to blend reports in the area to give it's representation of what it should look like based on surrounding reports.