Offline weather engine?

Hi.

As I sim entirely offline, I have no useful access to real-time weather. In FS9 I use FSMetar by Ivan Alvarez, with a year's worth of downloaded metar text files from which I choose the most appropriate for the day & time. Since the particular metar is loaded manually I don't have dynamic weather changes, but the weather does vary from location to location when the engine detects that I'm now within range of another airfield. The setup works well enough for me and, combined with High Definition Environment v2 clouds and some home-modified sky textures, it's been all that I wanted for a number of years.

Now that I'm using Prepar3D I spent the weekend tweaking cloud and sky textures. While the appearance of clouds and sunsets has improved dramatically from the default, the clouds still have a rather cartoonish appearance: the cumulus still seem to have an odd scale, the stratus still looks rather like scale armour and the cirrus mosaic is still quite obvious.

If I haven't misunderstood the blurb, it looks as though REX or ASCA are the favourites for cloud textures; I'll probably make my own decision based on screenshots.

On the other hand, and here's the rub, an offline weather engine into which I can load the day's weather from a local file is something I would really like as it would save me from having to create weather manually every time I launch P3D for another flight.

Stone-aged, I know, but is there anything that fits the bill for P3d v4?

D

B**ger.

From the HiFi Simulation's AS16 page:

'Active Sky 2016 (AS16) is NOT compatible with P3D v4. '

Must wait for ASP4 I suppose, but asking questions about it is not easy. Just like a couple of other developers, they won't let you post questions in their support forum unless you've already bought a product. Makes finding out about stuff beforehand rather difficult...

Anyhow, it's years since I was last here and it's nice to see you're still here Jim :)

D

B**ger.

 

From the HiFi Simulation's AS16 page:

 

'Active Sky 2016 (AS16) is NOT compatible with P3D v4. '

 

Must wait for ASP4 I suppose, but asking questions about it is not easy. Just like a couple of other developers, they won't let you post questions in their support forum unless you've already bought a product. Makes finding out about stuff beforehand rather difficult...

 

Anyhow, it's years since I was last here and it's nice to see you're still here Jim :)

 

D

ASP4 is the version for P3Dv4. But other weather engines exist...

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/518799-weather-engine-for-p3d-v4/

ASP4 will do what you want.You need to be online to verify your license but after that you can use manual mode or archived weather.

Vic

https://hifisimtech.com/asp4/

There's the P3d4 version.

Thank you all very much.

Well... now I feel really stupid. Failed to follow links, and it was the third hit down in my 'active sky 16' google search, and I assumed it was still in beta...

Now that I've taken the time to read, it looks ideal. And HiFi Simulation have their own weather archive too. I feel a purchase coming on: I think even my tiny tethered data allowance will handle that download and the registration.

D