Introduction

Whilst scenery and aircraft are themainstay of flight simulator add-ons since the very beginning,products that enhance the sky are seeing a surge inpopularity. Considering that most of flying is, in fact, done in thesky, this comes as no surprise.

Active Sky Cloud Art (ASCA) is one such product fromHiFi Technologies- the same company that made the highly popular Active Sky weatherengine that injects real-time weather into your flight simulator - andis advertised to provide a visually appealing experience whilst havingminimal performance sacrifices.

Product

So, what is ASCA? At its core, ASCA is not entirely unlike productssuch as Cielosim's Airport Enhancer HDX in the sense that it's atexture replacement program, only for the sky. However, its uniquenessarises from its ability to not only enhance existing cloud texturesbut also to add entirely new "cloud scenes" and "cloud structures" inorder to provide a more realistic experience whilst flying.

Despite the amazing visuals that ASCA provides though, it's still aperformance-oriented product. HiFi Technologies did not merely throwin a bunch of HD textures and call it a day, but instead created eightdifferent texture sets for a total of 128 textures so as to vary thequality of textures in order to improve performance. For example, ASCAuses lower resolution textures for overcast layers to improveperformance within the simulator as the visual impact of such adecision is calculated to be rather insignificant.

Booting up ASCA, you'll be greeted with the screen below. ASCAworks based on the concept of "themes", where each theme has adifferent sky color, cloud texture and cirrus cloud appearance. Ifyou own Active Sky 2016 or Active Sky for P3Dv4, you'll be able toutilize additional options such as "Full Dynamics" or "GlobalAutomatic", both of which automatically regulate sky colors andcirrus appearance, though "Full Dynamics" lacks automatic cloudtexture control. These options will provide a much more realisticflying experience as the program will be able to fully adjust thetextures based on the current weather.

The resolution of textures can be selected in the settings menu,going as high as 2048x2048 for the normal download, or, should youhave the desire, up to 4096x4096 with an HD content pack. Additionalfeatures include the options for how much of ASCA is enabled as wellas various simulator settings (such as choosing which simulator toinject weather into).

Finally, ASCA provides "Art Tools" which allows users to createtheir own textures for ASCA should they prefer to.

Visuals And Performance

Loading up the simulator, there is quite an obvious differencebefore and after installing ASCA. Here're some comparisons betweendefault P3D clouds and ASCA clouds with the default weather theme:Major Thunderstorm. The same settings were used in both tests andcloud coverage was set to maximum. Pay particular attention to howASCA creates clouds that are more defined whilst making the sky a morevibrant shade of blue.

Default P3D:

ASCA only:

As evident from the pictures, ASCA provides a marked improvement incloud textures and structures over that of default P3D. Due tolimitations of my computer system, I was unable to fully test the HDtextures in 4096x4096 resolution. Nonetheless, from the results above,there should be no doubt that ASCA will provide more realistic skytextures.

Performance wise, ASCA performs admirably as well. Despite thehigh-quality cloud models and textures, I didn't notice significantlowering of frame rates at all. In fact, I daresay that on higher endsystems, there will be no decrease at all arising from the use ofASCA.

However, whilst ASCA provides a welcome facelift to the skies overdefault P3D textures, I feel that its textures and models are nobetter than that of the competition. Whilst something as ambiguous asthe likability of cloud textures is really up to the individual, I dofeel that REX does offer more options when it comes to injectingvarious clouds in to your simulator. Especially when considering itsprice tag, offerings from Rex Game Studios are a compelling optionindeed.

Integration With Active Sky 2016 (P3Dv4)

However, the biggest selling point of this product is certainly itsintegration with Active Sky 2016. In fact, some have argued that ASCAshould have been bundled together with Active Sky 2016. Active Sky isperhaps one of the best weather engines available for flight simcurrently with its ability to recreate real-world weather. As bothActive Sky and ASCA are from the same publisher, there are numerousadvantages when combining the two products together.

Perhaps most obviously is the ability to use the "Full Dynamics"and "Global Automatic" theme settings in ASCA. What these themes docan be easily inferred from their names: allow weather to become muchmore dynamic. Both of these themes allow ASCA to load more than onetexture for each of the categories (Sky Color, Cirrus Appearance andCloud Textures) as per the current weather. As a result, you may getto experience several cloud structures and textures throughout oneflight, making the weather much more natural and less static. In fact,the effects of ASCA are said to be the most obvious when flyingthrough constantly changing weather.

Secondly, when combining ASCA and Active Sky, weather themes can bechanged on the fly. No longer are the days of restarting the simulatorevery time you wish to experience a new theme. When Active Sky isactivated alongside ASCA, the selected theme will be used by ActiveSky when injecting weather into the simulator, thus eliminating theneed to restart the simulator when changing themes. I personally foundthis feature highly helpful as it allowed me to quickly cycle throughvarious themes without restarting my simulator multiple times. Forusers, it will be much easier to experience all the available themes(or make your own!) to find something you like the best.

Conclusion

In the end, I feel that while a stand-alone product, Active SkyCloud Art was really developed with the intention that it would beused alongside Active Sky, especially considering the myriad offeatures that depend on Active Sky to work. As a stand-alone productthough, it is not highly appealing since most of the visuals it offersmay not be fully utilized by default weather themes.

Hence, if you're an existing owner of Active Sky and wish toimprove your flight simulator experience, ASCA would certainly be theadd-on for you.

Meng Yu

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