Active Sky

[ardypilot]

I just tried to download the real world weather for 22nd March 2008 (The day I was at Warbirds over Wanaka) but got this error message-


Any ideas?

[ZK-MAT]

Your selected date is today UTC 4.00 about 4 hours ago (?) - maybe the system hadn't archived it by then so it didn't recognise the date and time as valid? Just a thought

[ardypilot]

Whoops, that screenie was taken after I had closed the sim and was trying to recreate the error message.

Say I enter the date as the 21st March 2008- what UTC time do I have to have? I still recieve the same problem if I leave the box blank, or try and number between 1 and 12...

[Alex]

UTC (Coordinated Universal Time?) is NZDST-13. So, 4pm in New Zealand (Daylight Savings Time) is 3am in UTC time (also known as GMT or Greenwich Mean Time). During standard (non-daylight savings) time, NZ is 12 hours ahead of UTC/GMT.

I suppose you would enter 24 hour time in the box, given as that is the aviation standard? So 12 midday would be 1200, 11:25pm = 2325 etc.

Alex

[HardCorePawn]

Just a thought, but the error message says the archived 'hours' that are available are 00, 06, 12 and 18... so I would try to set the hours as 2 digits ranging from 00 to 23...

ie. 00, 01, 02, 03 .... 21, 22, 23

If that is still not working, then maybe their server is down?? can you still download the current weather OK?

[ardypilot]

Sorry to dig up such an old topic- but for anyone pondering the purchase of Active Sky, I really recommend it.

The other day I thought I'd do a quick one hour, North Island east coast to west coast hop- didn't have any special scenery installed for the route, apart from the airport at NZPP and Christians Mesh and Topo, yet with the real world weather from AS, it make the flight feel so 'real'. It's hard to put into words, and static screenshots, but with an environment on your screen that is continually changing, it really adds another dimension to FS:

[waka172rg]

Nice Plane/wx Good shot Andrew the seneca is a nice a/c to fly a?!

[ardypilot]

She sure is waka- in fact, I clocked up over 13000 virtual km in the Just Flight craft above when I toured around Australia, as seen in my tour diary here

[waka172rg]

QUOTE (Trolly @ Dec 4 2008, 03:01 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

She sure is waka- in fact, I clocked up over 13000 virtual km in the Just Flight craft above when I toured around Australia, as seen in my tour diary here

WOW! long trip how lng did that take? would have had to do a overhaul of those engines! haha

[Charl]

QUOTE (Trolly @ Dec 4 2008, 02:27 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Sorry to dig up such an old topic- but for anyone pondering the purchase of Active Sky, I really recommend it...

Sorry for my credit card, perhaps!
Don't know why, but I've never gotten round to this one despite having heard only good things.
Can't remember, does it interfere with Ground Environment Pro, and/or Flight Environent?
How about a few more screens of encouragement, Andrew?

[ardypilot]

QUOTE

Can't remember, does it interfere with Ground Environment Pro, and/or Flight Environent?
How about a few more screens of encouragement, Andrew?[/quote]
I don't own either Ground Environment of Flight Environment, but seeing as they are made my different companies, I expect Active Sky would replace the replacement textures that come with each install, so it's down to visual preference I guess.

I'm not on my FS computer at the moment, but I'll try and take a sampling of screenies for you either tomorrow or at the weekend- for the time being, just look any any of my shots between now and November 07, if if the sky is visable, thats ASv6 for you right there.

Also, let me tell you, as I know you're more of a tubeliner fan than one of short hops, that aside from managing complex heavy-metal autopilot computers on long haul flights, having constantly updated 'dynamic' real world weather en route really makes for an entertaining flight. I remember one time, I was flying a 6 hour leg from LGW to DXB, had miserable grey clouds as I took off, was overcast all over mainland Europe, then when I hit Romania, I suddenly reached a huge cloud front and then I had a beautiful view of FS landscape unveiled beneath me for the first time in about 3 hours (I use the word beautiful as an exaduration but it was an usually nice treat to be able to see the ground clearly again, which was an unexpected pleasure that this addon had given me). Its the simple things that seem to make the most realistic difference for me

[Charl]

OK thanks I'll look out for your screens.
Loading RW weather (with updates) of course also gives changing weather between departure and arrival, I'm assuming AS just does it better?

[ardypilot]

Ya know, it's actually harder than you'd think to load up your sim and come up with some good real world weather examples- with it being actually 'live', I had to scout all over the world for WX varied enough to make comparative screenshots, and couldn't find anything very exciting:









Basically, it's textured a whole lot better than default.

The HiFi Sim website actually has plenty of screenies too: http://www.hifisim.com/as6screenshots.php?...5%20Screenshots

QUOTE

Loading RW weather (with updates) of course also gives changing weather between departure and arrival, I'm assuming AS just does it better?[/quote]
I think AS sources its data from a different engine to the default MS weather- not too sure about the technicalities, but it always seems more impressive to me.

Their website says: ASv6.5's weather engine utilizes our proprietary weather collection and distribution network (The HiFi DataNet) to provide the most complete coverage and up-to-date real-world information possible. Want to fly with the latest real-time weather data? Not a problem - just enable ONLINE mode. Would you rather fly in that big storm that happened last week? Also not a problem. Real-time or archived data is easily accessible with a few mouse clicks. ASv6.5 also supports Offline Sequential Playback, so you can download a certain time range starting at a specified historical date/time, and have the weather simulated dynamically from that date/time forward. If you'd rather specify your own conditions (or modify the existing ones), the Wx Configurator interface makes setting global, local, or regional weather a snap!

ASX Report Screen Realistic weather data access and representation isn't the only benefit... we've only just scratched the surface! Care for some realistic atmospheric effects such as updrafts and downdrafts effected by terrain and wind, vertical air currents, thermals, wake turbulence, fog layers or icing in clouds? All this and more is included with configurable options.

More info here

[cirrusnature]

I have both ASv6 & ASX. I find that ASX gives my system a bit of a hard time but that could be due to me not setting it up properly. Asv6 on the other hand performs flawlessly and provides that cosy feeling that your flying in weather similar to the real world. One thing about ASX is the hard haze layer between transition levels that really spoils the whole thing for me so I very rarely use ASX at the moment but the potential for some stunning skyscape is certainly there. By the way,there's anew version of ASX about to be announced shortly so hang on to your creditcard for now if your planning to buy.