Real world weather

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Real world weather

Postby Ghostrider114 » Mon Jul 23, 2018 12:11 am

Has anyone else noticed anything weird with the Real World Weather in FSX lately? It used to give me accurate weather conditions, but now it seems to use the same settings whenever I use it at a given airport. I've had 80-90 degree weather with CAVU skies here all week but it's always 40s and raining here in FSX.
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Re: Real world weather

Postby FabioL » Mon Jul 23, 2018 1:58 am

Sorry, I don’t fly FSX any longer.

However, I would recommend trying out a freeware weather engine called FSXWX to see if your weather depiction improves:
http://www.plane-pics.de/fsxwx/home.htm

The installation for FSX is trickier than P3D due to FSX’s age, and requires updating the location of worldwide weather stations (BGL swap), but is worth following.

This should increase reliability and accuracy.

Good luck!
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Re: Real world weather

Postby Canuck1955 » Mon Jul 23, 2018 2:05 am

I blv the licence expired with whomever supplies the data to MS.....
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Re: Real world weather

Postby garymbuska » Mon Jul 23, 2018 7:32 am

Ghostrider114 wrote:Has anyone else noticed anything weird with the Real World Weather in FSX lately? It used to give me accurate weather conditions, but now it seems to use the same settings whenever I use it at a given airport. I've had 80-90 degree weather with CAVU skies here all week but it's always 40s and raining here in FSX.


The real world weather in FSX has never been all that great which is why i spent a little money and bought Active Sky 2016 and Active Sky Cloud Art that works with Active Sky 2016. There are other similar programs out there that do the same thing but I have been a user of Active Sky for the last 5 or six years and have never been disappointed with it. When using a flight plan it will give you the current weather at every way point in your plan and it is the actual weather that is there at that time and it updates as you fly so you actually fky in the weather that is currently over each way point. The briefing it gives you is very precise and tells you everything you want to know. Here is the link if you want to check it out
http://hifisimtech.com/?title=Welcome%20To%20HiFi

If you want to fly as realistic as possible than you need something like this
In my opinion it just does not get any better than this.
The clouds are awesome
Mind you this will effect your frame rates so if your system is struggling already think twice before you buy any kind of weather generator . 8-) <<v
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Re: Real world weather

Postby Ghostrider114 » Mon Jul 23, 2018 2:37 pm

garymbuska wrote:
Ghostrider114 wrote:Has anyone else noticed anything weird with the Real World Weather in FSX lately? It used to give me accurate weather conditions, but now it seems to use the same settings whenever I use it at a given airport. I've had 80-90 degree weather with CAVU skies here all week but it's always 40s and raining here in FSX.


The real world weather in FSX has never been all that great which is why i spent a little money and bought Active Sky 2016 and Active Sky Cloud Art that works with Active Sky 2016. There are other similar programs out there that do the same thing but I have been a user of Active Sky for the last 5 or six years and have never been disappointed with it. When using a flight plan it will give you the current weather at every way point in your plan and it is the actual weather that is there at that time and it updates as you fly so you actually fky in the weather that is currently over each way point. The briefing it gives you is very precise and tells you everything you want to know. Here is the link if you want to check it out
http://hifisimtech.com/?title=Welcome%20To%20HiFi

If you want to fly as realistic as possible than you need something like this
In my opinion it just does not get any better than this.
The clouds are awesome
Mind you this will effect your frame rates so if your system is struggling already think twice before you buy any kind of weather generator . 8-) <<v

that's the main reason I don't have active sky, my machine barely keeps up with FSX as it is sometimes.

FSWX seems to be working, although today is CAVU again, so for all I know it's just cleared all weather. ;) It is a bit confusing to use, since it appears that I just need to open FSWX and it automatically overrides the weather setting ingame. TBH, the instructions on the website are somewhat lacking after installation.
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Re: Real world weather

Postby FabioL » Mon Jul 23, 2018 4:20 pm

To get the b st out of it, you must understand date the database of weather stations, as this is a legacy of FAX’s age. The other setup options might be worthwhile, I don’t know for sure.
Perhaps by way of a test, go somewhere with some “weather”, and then try FSXWX. To find somewhere with some weather (!), try badbadweather.com or skyvector.
It uses FSUIPC to communicate with FSX, so literally all you have to do is switch it on.
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Re: Real world weather

Postby garymbuska » Mon Jul 23, 2018 6:13 pm

Before I got the system I now have i used a version of Active Sky all I did was to use all of the cheats I could find and tuning down the sliders so I could still get descent frame rates. My old system was a 32 bit system and I had a average graphics card If you look at the stickies at the top of this forum you can find all kinds of tricks to help you get the most out of your system <<t
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Re: Real world weather

Postby Daube » Tue Jul 24, 2018 6:10 pm

A small note concerning the performance impact of weather generators: usually, the FPS hit comes from the fact that these programs generate much more clouds than the default real weather did.

There are however, two ways to limit that FPS impact:

1- In some programs, like Active Sky Next or Active Sky 2016 (which is the best of them all), you can configure the maximum amount of generated cloud layers. By default, it is set to 5, which was too much for my old computer. I limited this to 3 only, and I got an excellent weather rendering coupled with almost no FPS hit at all

2- Many people tend to forget the default FSX clouds are both ugly and heavy on the performance. I'd recommend them to download and install the freeware clouds by Pablo Diaz, named HDEv2. By choosing the cumulus textures in 512x512 DXT5 format, the clouds will not only look greater than the default, but their FPS hit will also be lower. This is very sensible in heavy/bad weather conditions, you can really see the difference. I know 512x512 sounds like very low resolution, but I assure you the visual quality is so much better than any default cloud. In fact, I'm still using these clouds in my P3Dv4 today. And they look magnificient :)

Bonus: some people chose to activate the Sparse Grid Super Sampling (SGSS) antialiasing mode on their NVidia video cards, because it is more or less the only way to obtain a decent antialiasing in DX10 preview mode in FSX. Unfortunately, this kind of antialiasing will kill the FPS each time a transparent object occupies too much space on your screen. This is valid for clouds, but also engine smoke, etc... Disabling this antialiasing mode (done through NVidia Inspector) is a good way to improve the performance in bad weather, although the antialiasing quality will become much worse...
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