Cloud Coverage

[Deviant]

Hello,

I've looked at some of the various screenshots people have posted, in different parts of this forum and I've noticed that the detail of clouds and distances clouds appear are greater than I see on my system.

My question is are people using add-on utilities that improve on sky detail?  It annoys me when I'm flying and cannot see distant cloud coverage.  Clouds just pop up in front of my aircraft as I'm flying.  It looks so unrealistic; shouldn't I be able to see storm clouds in the distance when using real world weather?

My settings are as follows under the weather tab.  Detailed Clouds checked.  Cloud Coverage Density slider set to max.  My cloud draw distance was set to 60mi, but I changed it to 100mi, I didn't really notice an improvement.

Any feedback would help.

[Daube]

Hi Psovod,

In your graphic settings, you have a cloud drawing distance if I'm not mistaken. Additionnaly, when you download real world weather, it seems to me that the weather you get is only the one of the closest meteo station from your position.

If you want to get nice weather layouts, I recommend you to start with downloading the real weather somewhere, then set your weather modification frequency to "Medium", and then start flying. After half-an-hour or so, you will notice the weather changes. Sometimes you'll get clear skies, sometimes huge storms, very often interesting weather

There's also some payware alternative, if you want to spend money, like Active Sky for getting a realistic meteo, as well as some payware cloud textures.

EDIT: sorry I misread your post and didn't notice you already played a bit with draw disance :/

[garymbuska]

Payware is the ticket for this I use ACTIVE SKY X and X Graphics and it is fantastic. One of the features I like is the ability to import your FS generated flight plan into Active Sky X and then it will recreate the real world weather for each of your way points giving you the actual weather at the time so you really see the changes as you fly. It is worth every sent. 8-)  

[Deviant]

As far as you know, are there any issues with Active Sky and X Graphics with SP2/Acceleration?  Vista 64 bit?

[BFMF]

[quote]As far as you know, are there any issues with Active Sky and X Graphics with SP2/Acceleration?

[SubZer0]

Gotta love ASX. Well worth the money.

[Deviant]

Thank you all for your replies.  I read a little about the Active Sky X and it looks real nice.  I think I might try it.

[BFMF]

One of the features I like is the ability to import your FS generated flight plan into Active Sky X and then it will recreate the real world weather for each of your way points giving you the actual weather at the time so you really see the changes as you fly.

I don't think you need to import your FS flightplan into Active Sky X for it to give you real world weather in FSX. It should already recreate real world weather in FSX regardless, because i've never imported a flight plan from FSX.

If I go into the briefing page and enter in my departure and destination airports, it will give me weather brief for the weather along the route, including winds aloft... 8-)

[NickN]

FEX 1024x1024 x DXT5 Cloud themes with the ASX engine and not their clouds. You will also want to get the ASX Xengine process off the first core and place it on the last one by using the task manager (set affinity, uncheck all but the last core of the processor) in order to cut down on FSX stutters and lags from the weather engine thread.


Also, weather settings should be:



With the exception of NATURAL being set to NONE if you have a slow system, everyone should be on those settings, unless your system is really dog slow, then the cloud coverage density must come down a tad

[Deviant]

Nick, I understand your reply regarding FSX weather settings.  I will move my draw distance slider back to 60mi (didn't really notice a difference with it set to 100mi anyway).  But I'm a liitle confused on the following:

FEX 1024x1024 x DXT5 Cloud themes with the ASX engine and not their clouds. You will also want to get the ASX Xengine process off the first core and place it on the last one by using the task manager (set affinity, uncheck all but the last core of the processor) in order to cut down on FSX stutters and lags from the weather engine thread.

[NickN]

First of all, you must understand how FSX works. It throttles you if your hardware can not keep up so setting a 100 Mile cloud range is useless if the hardware can not keep up. FSX will not display clouds out that far if your hardware wont do it

Dave just discovered how dynamic FSX really is and how even with high settings he could not get Bloom to show up... turns out he was overtaxing his hardware and as soon as he reduced his settings to what the hardware could handle, he got bloom to enable

So you see, there is more to this than sliders. As I have been posting for well over a year, FSX WILL throttle what you see even with everything cranked up. Even us guys on serious hardware do not see everything FSX is doing, yet

Ok, now... FEX is Flight Environment X which allows cloud, sky, water themes to be installed, and, it allows you to select the texture format of those textures. 32bit is the default but they are hard hitting on resources so even I set the FEX control to install 1024x1024 (scale) xDXT5 (texture format) textures.

I use the following themes which come in FEX or you download them from the FEX server:

SKY: MISTY SKY
CLOUDS: REALISTICLY DENSE
WATER: DEPTHS OF TROPICS2
WAVES (water Animations): I switch between STORM RUGGED and MEDIUM PACIFIC and a few others


ASX can be purchased with just the weather engine or you can also include their graphics upgrades for an additional cost. I do not use any of XGraphics products but that does not mean they are bad, I just do not thing ASX Xgraphics provides better clouds or other features and I so not like the lights they change.

Setting Affinity is the process of assigning which processor core an application uses. It is accessed by going to the task manager, processes tab, right click the application, in the case of ASX (after it is started) that would be XEngine.exe and select SET AFFINITY. You uncheck all but the last core and click apply so it does not drain the first core of the processor which FSX needs everything that core can give.

So, you need Flight Environment X and the ASX weather engine

But, none of the above is going to help you greatly if your system is slow and has a low memory video card. FSX is still going to throttle you because of lack of ability and resources.


In your case however that should not be a problem. And make sure you are using the latest version of nhancer and follow these directions very careully

http://www.simviation.com/cgi-bin/yabb2 ... 53/165#172



...and after, set the Nvidia Driver control Panel, in the 3D settings list: Vertical SYNC: FORCE ON

[Deviant]

Ok, I understand now.

[NickN]

[quote]Ok, I understand now.

[Deviant]

Thank you.  I'll give it a go.

[garymbuska]

This is what i am talking about notice the way points the other way does not give you specific way points 8-)