I have yet another question before I purchase this. If ActiveSky is based on METARs, how does it know cloud top height?
The only thing I can imagine is that if the metar says RA BKN010, it knows it needs high cloud tops to produce rain. And if it says DZ BKN010, it know the cloud tops need to be high enough for coalescence but not high enough for ice to form. Is this the way?
I am a meteorologist and I’m eagerly looking at an improvement of MSFS weather and also historical weather. But I don’t understand how it can fill the entire 3 dimensional atmosphere with only METARs.
I purchased Active Sky and I want to add a very big flaw I notived: snow cover goes completely wrong.
When temperatures are around 0 C it completely changes the landscape every 5-10 minutes. It goes from fully covered in snow to no snow at all and back and back. It’s so bad, I had to stop using Active Sky (since I mostly fly in Scandinavia). Unfortunate.
I think the main advantage in 2024 is it mitigates the excessive drama in the 2024 weather generator. Sometimes an overcast is just an overcast, not a jumble of ominous cumulus and proto-cumulonimbus darkening the sky as if God’s own rapture was imminent. It certainly looks great for YouTube videos, but I don’t think it’s particularly realistic at the level and volume the sim applies it. (Sometimes conditions ARE exactly like that - but it’s not common.) It also does wind better.
The downside is, of course, that 2024 still only allows injection via a weather preset, which means the injected weather applies to the entire world. ActiveSky, I think, does a really good job in blending the condition changes to keep it from being obvious what’s going on, but you don’t get the experience of running into a storm front you can see coming from miles away in ActiveSky. Having said that, you can use “passive mode” in ActiveSky, which lets the sim generate the presentation of the weather, with ActiveSky just adding winds and other details into the mix.
It does not seem to work for me. I installed the test version but it does not seem to control the weather in my sim, despite the weather conditions being shown in ActiveSky and saying it’s connected without an error. Any ideas?
It was working for me earlier. One bug I noticed was in the weather panel where I had many duplicate weather presets, mainly Live Weather, and the Active Sky FS preset.
I’ve had the same issue you described in an earlier version of the sim but despite the multiple weather presets in the menu - it didn’t seem to cause an issue with the weather.
Something caused all the HiFi weather presets to disappear, since back when it working and I don’t have any of those presets shown in the sim currently - probably why it’s not working for me.
As a related aside, it’s another of the minor irritations of 2024 which all add up to be really annoying, that the toolbar selections don’t stay even from flight to flight within the same sim session, never mind if you close and open the sim like 2020. It’s really frustrating having to start every flight by removing the stuff I don’t want from the toolbar.
Thanks, that is important yes - but that is not the issue here. I did check this.
ASFS is working with MS2020 but somehow doesn’t take control of the weather in MS2024.
The sim’s weather is working in general though.
