Very unclear from their text. I think the latter (transition plus some logic to the smoothing / blending) is all that would be possible but it’s really not obvious. The only bullet points that say anything about it are these but that can be interpreted in any way you like 
How much Weather Injection actually is allowed and how it really works, is beyond my skill. But I am afraid, that Aktive Sky will NOT be able, to do much more than REX. Simply spoken - inject Weather/Live Weather in the vicinity of the Aircraft. But maybe it makes it way better, especially the transitions. Or it uses more accurate Data. And you can have some historical Weather - which is ONE very big Pro over the other.
I agree their text is very vague, I don’t want to say misleading but it is on the verge. I can’t tell if they want to be intentionally unclear to “catch” more customers or if they just had a bad day of writing.
If It is METAR based you are going to transition into a preset matching the last reported condition. I really don’t think this will look nice and is not realistic either, weather is a dynamic system, forcing a static preset while the METAR report is current makes no sense.
Will be funny to see how people will be proved wrong. You can literally see the screenshots its like being back in P3D and the information that has been given. Its good for people who want historical weather etc and well smoother transitions list goes on. If you don’t like you simply don’t have to buy it.
I made the mistake of getting REX it was horrible, ended up going back to using MSFS weather altogether.
Checking the description, I saw that Active Sky FS will have two modes: Passive and Preset weather.
In passive mode, it will allow MSFS real-time weather to have full control of weather injection and Active Sky will just add weather effects to it. In preset mode, Active Sky will inject weather via presets.
Thanks for the interest everyone. I was hoping to answer a few questions.
Advanced radar is not something we are including in this release. It’s something we’re working on and hopeful that we can provide in the future. The ASFS preset control depiction system is preset-control based, as the product page and depiction specs indicate. There are limitations, but we’ve also found a lot of ways to curate and present the changes to make this work very well and we are confident this will be a great experience for most realism and weather enthusiasts and of course for traditional Active Sky fans. While it doesn’t provide precise control of variable localized conditions, the cloud scene with the transitions and smoothing system appears very similar. We hope you’ll agree, but we do know that some are not satisfied with anything but localized variable weather. That’s why we’ve added a Passive depiction mode where you get nearly all other Active Sky features outside of weather depiction control (for live mode only, of course).
We’ve recently updated our product page, features list and pricing. We appreciate all the support and encouragement and look forward to the opportunity to grow and expand ASFS far beyond our already exciting v1.0 release.
Thank you!
-Damian
I never fly with weather presets only life weather. At the moment it’s still not clear to me what advantages can AS provide in life weather… if it’s possible to inject turbulence I would me more than happy to buy this product 
Nice way to downplay the feature that would really set this apart as something only a few want.
There certainly are more than a couple of posters here who are cast iron sure (absolutely no two ways about it in fact) that this will be a disappointment to a lot of people. It will be interesting to see if they have to ‘eat their hats’ or if they were right all along.
Personally, I’m holding fire on any comments until I see a few reviews. Very much looking forward to it coming out though.
You never know. It could be great and just what the sim needs. Yet again …
Can’t wait to learn more though.
The one thing that irks me the most about weather engines is when the whole situation suddenly shifts to another one with a visible transition. Few things ruin the immersion more. Also, I want to see changing weather conditions en route in the distance before I even get there and not get jumped by an unexpected change that uniformly stretches to every horizon. Especially on VFR flights that prohibit flying into clouds!
The original MSFS weather engine (pre METAR) was perfect in that regard. Unfortunately that is no longer the case and unfortunately I don’t think that Active Sky will be for me with the current limitations, because preset blending will probably be even worse than METAR transitions.
I’ll wait for reviews, but I don’t have high hopes.
I am not sure - if I was giving a wrong impression wiht my comments, so I want to clarify:
I want to state, that I am not pessimistic when it comes to the Active Sky Addon, but only realistic in my expectiation. I think Active Sky will be great and I definitely will get this App. I was only trying to explain, that Active Sky has the same technical limitations, as other Weather injecting Addons and will just simply not be able to have different local Weather cells at the same time, but has to use Weather Preset injection. And that is something that the developer states themself. But these limitations are not the fault of the devs, this is MS/Asobo.
They still can be better, than other Weather Addons, with for instances:
Cheers
Hi,
It’s a great shame we have to wait on modders to fix what Asobo have been breaking, by all accounts Sim Update 7 was a poorly released update that broke a lot of weather features amongst other areas. The weather in live mode has not been very good overall.
I am looking forward to this product, I shall buy it to see what it is like. I’m just disappointed that I have to spend money to buy something that potentially fixes the base game. I hope MSFS 2024 further improves the weather, at least back to what it was like before Sim Updates 7.
Thanks
Yep, this looks terrible. It doesn’t fill me with confidence that they chose to include, in a promotional screenshot which should show the product at its best, something that looks so bad and unrealistic.
To make the weather look more realistic, Asobo need to rewrite the way clouds are drawn. The colours are wrong, the texture looks bad, the resolution is poor.
Sadly, all footage of MSFS 2024, though of course we haven’t seen much, also seems to use these same clouds, so I fear we’ll be stuck with poor looking clouds for the foreseeable future.
I wasn’t actually referring to you JayDee when I referred to a couple or so posters being sure AS was going to be a flop or at least not meet some high expectations here.
Personally I find your comments measured and well considered but thanks for the clarification anyway.
As I said above I’m not really sure yet how this one will pan out. I’m optimistic and hopeful but I am far from sure myself atm 
For anyone interested in this the introductory price will be 23 Euro plus taxes/VAT according to the AS website. It mentions that the price is subject to change. Make from that what you will.
The price is lower than I expected tbh. Not going to speculate why though.
Can’t wait for some Youtube streams or reviews. I have to guess that we won’t have long to wait for these to surface.
Out now on Just Flight. £23.99 GBP.
Will be interesting to see the videos over the next few days!
I’m cautiously optimistic about Active Sky, but I completely understand some people’s pessimism about it, considering the weather API is still closed and poor experiences with similar addons.
Personally I wouldn’t say MSFS live weather itself is bad. From what I’ve been able to test, weather depiction in MSFS is fairly accurate to the real world. What really disappoints me is the almost absence of simulation of adverse weather effects, such as severe turbulence, updrafts, downdrafts, windshear, gusts. On MSFS, you can even fly in severe weather and the most you’ll get is a few light chops and nothing more.
I intend to buy the Active Sky FS more for the promised weather effects than for the weather injection itself. I’ll wait for reviews to see how accurate these effects are.
Thanks Baracus.
Hopefully a few reviews/comments/Youtube streams will soon circulate.
Purchased. Will play with it tonight.
At the end of the day, good preset-based historical weather with some degree of transition is what I’ve been waiting for from REX and never got. It’s clear that we’ll never get other-than-live real weather or an API-based weather injection capability from Microsoft. I think people are fooling themselves if they believe otherwise. They’ve been as clear as they are ever likely to be that this is something their deal with MB doesn’t permit, even if I think they are wilfully misunderstanding what people are actually asking for (which is not the ability to read / change the MB data, it’s the ability to inject different weather). So, as always with flight sims, third parties have to make up for fundamental missing features. Again.