Are Weather Programs Worth Buying?

[Vonduck1]

Howdy folks!
Say, looking at Simmarket and other places i see there are many weather programs to buy? Do these really make a difference in flying FS2004 or are they only for the ultra serious simmer?

Any comments from those who use them?

ta

Doug :)

[teecee]

I use high framerate clouds from FSw, and FSmetar, a freeware program, and I am delighted with the results. Teecee.


Athalon 2800+
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Terry c.

[davidvoogd]

FSMetar is a wonderful freeware program that I used for some time.

I bought Activesky 2004 and it is simply awesome. If you want to spend the money it's well worth it. Here's a quick summary

1 - It allows you to select many paramaters such as maximum visibility, amount of of cloud layers and other things that let you get better framerates. I love limiting the cloud layers (have mine set to 2), it's an option MS should have included in the sim themselves.

2 - It has it's own dedicated weather server that is very fast and quite reliable. In the months I've used it I've only seen an error once, for about 1/2 a day.

3 - The weather it generates is far more realistic. You can be flying in a clear area, see thunderstorms to the north and some low clouds and fog to the south. The transitions are as smooth as possible. If you fly towards a front or low pressure system you will see the clouds coming, it's quite impressive.

4 - As a bonus it simulates wake turbulance, which is a nice touch.

5 - It includes "Active Radar" which is a simulated Radar screen for your aircraft.

6 - It has a "Wind Smoothing" option that eliminates sudden wind changes when you climb and decend. Turbulance is far more realistic as well.

7 - The clouds it generates are more varied and realistic than the default clouds. I found with the default weather every cloud was a cumulus cloud. With activesky you will see more variety including stratoform clouds.

If you would like to know anything else about Activesky 2004 let me know.

[drobson]

I've used FSMeteoe since the FS98 days, and wouldn't be without it.

Darrell

[PiperCubPilot]

>I've used FSMeteo since the FS98 days, and wouldn't be
>without it.
>
>Darrell


I have as well and cant agree more with Darrell :)


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-Travis

[alastairmonk]

I can vouch for FSMeteo as well. Great program.

The big advantage is that you can download real weather definitions. As I only have a dial-up connnection, I always download and then fly off-line, but if you've got a broadband connection you can have the weather updated in real-time (about every 8 minutes, I think.)

Cheers,

Alastair

[chrispeel]

Have you tried the Real World Weather feature in FS9?

Its free and its stunning.

[PiperCubPilot]

It can be but very often inaccurate :/



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-Travis

[Kerosene31]

I'm a happy ActiveSky user. I formerly used FSMeteo. I found that after I bought the RealityXP weather radar, I wasn't seeing very much bad weather. I switched over to ActiveSky, and the improvement is very nice.

One example, is a flight of mine from a few weeks ago. I planned to fly from Buffalo (KBUF) to 44N (a small airport near Albany NY). I went on Weather.com and there was a line of T-storms which had rolled through Buffalo and was heading east. This line of storms was sitting right in the middle of the state. So I started up a flight, and imported my flightplan into ActiveSky. About midway through the flight I ran into a solid line of t-storms. I was able to fly south and get around them. Once on the other side, I was able to get to my destination before they arrived.

This is just one example. I've never really seen such accuracy from any real-weather program before. There are also a bunch of other nice things about the program. You really do have to import a flightplan to get the most out of it though.

It really shines for GA flights. If you only fly commercial flights, I would probably not bother with it, since you will spend most of your time above the weather anyway.

[davidvoogd]

I haven't used FSMeteo so I can't comment on it. Over default weather though Activesky 2004 is a massive jump. Be sure you look at Activesky 2004 and not the older Activesky WxRE.

The Default MS Real World weather system is full of problems I found. The servers would go down quite often (anyone who bought FS2004 the first two weeks it came out <or the day it came out like me :P> will know what I mean). The weather with the default real world weather is often many hours old, there are a lot of problems with stations that don't update during the night etc.

One feature of Activesky I forgot to mention, and an important one is the Dynamic TAF processing. Some weather stations will not report anything during the night, so what can happen is weather for that area wont' change until the next day. What AS2004 does is use the TAF for that station (if there is no TAF AS will make one itself based on the weather trends and nearby stations) and it will use that TAF to determine what the weather will be in later hours for the station until it begins reporting again the next day.

I'm not sure of FSMeteo does this or not, perhaps someone with that program could comment on its features more.