Hi Everyone.
I'm looking for a weather engine for FSX. I have REX3 Essential+Overdrive and the textures are nice enough but the weather engine is awful. Getting it to work at all requires steps not mentioned in the manual and even then it only works about half the time. The weather it generates is also really bland and there's a ridiculous amount of highly visible pop in when it updates. Which is a shame as the feature where you can select weather and then have it load the best textures to represent that would be awesome, if it worked and created decent weather.
So I'm looking for an alternative. I don't mind paying a bit, although a free trial is always a compelling selling point.
My core requirements are these.
* Something reasonably up-to-date and ideally under active development. No abandonware.
* Smooth transitioning as the weather changes. No massive cumulous clouds materializing in front of your face as the weather updates.
* The clouds should move with the wind. I do mostly GA flying slow stuff like the Piper Cub, so clouds that are stationary in what is supposedly a force 5 would be really immersion breaking.
* Able to manually define specific weather conditions.
* Some means of obtaining a report on the current weather conditions, either anywhere, or at the current aircraft location, or at any airfield. Just the basic info needed to execute a landing.
I actually installed Active Sky 2016 this morning on the grounds that their website states you can try it free for 7 days, but it turns out that's not true. I don't mind coughing up the cash for it if I can be assured it will do what I want, but without a trial it's hard to know.
I've also had a look at some of the newer REX stuff and their pricing these days seems rather tight fisted. For all it's faults in REX 3 I got cloud textures, airfield and water textures, water animations, the weather engine and a weather radar UI all for about $30. In the current REX product line up it seems that almost every one of those things has to be bought separately. E.g. if you buy Sky Force 3D (for $35) it doesn't even come with the weather radar, you have to cough up an extra $16 for that alone. That's really taking the piss.
