- LOAD FLIGHT PLAN INTO ACTIVE SKY XP INSTALL
- LOAD FLIGHT PLAN INTO ACTIVE SKY XP SERIAL
- LOAD FLIGHT PLAN INTO ACTIVE SKY XP UPDATE
- LOAD FLIGHT PLAN INTO ACTIVE SKY XP DOWNLOAD
First of all, you can manually select which textures you want to install. AS2012 has some interesting features here. But it’s not just generically replacing textures.
LOAD FLIGHT PLAN INTO ACTIVE SKY XP UPDATE
What this means is that, besides sending more realistic weather to your sim, AS2012 can also update your actual FSX texture files, to make it look better, or more realistic. Also, it has the most realistic winds aloft simulation, making this by far the preferred mode for long range, high altitude flights.įor the first time in Active Sky 2012, Hifi Technologies gives us something they call ‘Total Weather Immersion’.
The upside is that it (again, according to the manual) has the best balance between smoothness and accuracy. The downside of this is that FSX ATIS stations (or the map view, for that matter) don’t give accurate weather and AI may go crazy. Direct Weather Control is a global mode, meaning that the entire FSX world has the weather your aircraft currently has. The final mode, is the default mode in Active Sky 2012: Direct Weather Control. Again according to the manual, this mode is the best for local flights and gives the best cloud smoothness, in exchange for slightly reduced accuracy. The ‘smooth cloud transitions’ mode is the mode closest to older Active Sky products, and uses and enhanced mode of writing weather to FSX via simconnect. According to the manual, this mode is the most accurate for surface weather. In the standard mode, Active sky works pretty much like the FSX default real-life weather, although more accurately portraying the actual real-life weather. They’re mutually exclusive, so you have to pick one of the three. Now, how does this work? In contrast to older iterations of the Active Sky series, AS2012 has three possible weather depiction modes. Finally, AS2012 weather can also realistically depict hurricanes, thermals, and even wake turbulence behind AI aircraft. A very neat feature is that you can even drag-and-drop a weather preset onto the map-view in AS2012, and have it update FSX as requested. Another possibility, is that you can assign user-defined weather, much like in the default FSX, but more detailed.
What it means, is that you can set ‘past’ weather, but not earlier than 2007.
You can also use ‘historic’ weather, although the word historic might give the wrong impression. You can choose whether it loads weather based on the PC’s system time (real-time) or FSX simulation time. By default, AS2012 will load real-life, real-time weather. There are a lot of possibilities with the Active Sky 2012 weather. The first section is of course what people mainly buy Active Sky 2012 for: the weather engine. Both of these section are also broken up into relevant parts. How it performs in flightsim will come later in the review. Firstly, I’ll be talking about the program (running in Windows) first. To keep this review organized, and help myself in writing it, I’m splitting it up a couple of times.
LOAD FLIGHT PLAN INTO ACTIVE SKY XP INSTALL
You can safely install the product on more than one system, but you can only run one at a time online. At this time, it will check for a correct serial, and will also activate the product for online use.
LOAD FLIGHT PLAN INTO ACTIVE SKY XP SERIAL
You’ll only need your serial (which you got upon purchase) the first time you run AS2012. Of course you have to go through the usual steps like accepting a EULA, and clicking ‘OK’ half a dozen times. Make sure all files (the 5 data files and the installer) are placed in the same folder, and run the installer. The fact that it’s split up into several files of course makes downloading easier under less than perfect internet connection, but it’s still a lot. This total file size of these downloads is just shy of 3 GB.
LOAD FLIGHT PLAN INTO ACTIVE SKY XP DOWNLOAD
If you download from SimMarket, like I did, you need to download 6 files in total. So, this review will have to look at more than just weather.īecause of the included textures, Active Sky 2012 is quite a large download. In this, it’s now eating from the same cake as Real Environment Extreme (and then some). Active Sky now also delivers a bunch of replacement textures for FSX, going from clouds, over water to runways. So, you can expect more realistic weather simulation compared to the stock FSX weather engine. In the first place, Active Sky 2012 is still a weather tool for FSX.
In this review, we’ll dive into Active Sky 2012 and see what it’s made off. Except This time, they did more than just tackle the weather. Active Sky 2012 is the latest iteration in a long line of weather add-ons by Hifi Technologies.