The Reality XP GTN is the best add-on I’ve ever bought for X-Plane. It is really nice. It will work as a pop-up in any airplane you have, but for 3D panel integration do some research and make sure the aircraft supports it either natively, or through a user mod.
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You mean buy the modules you have so you can email me the files? 
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Damn…that trip to Missoula was for nothing! Apparently when I was looking for commodities out of Pullman I clicked on the map and it changed the listed parameters on the map (green/red and values) and so I thought I was taking Wood Products to Missoula for a +20 gain for 300 pounds…I get there and it was only like $1 per pound difference…ugh!
Did a short flight for the company back in England this evening in my old faithful G-KSVB from EGBJ (Gloucester) to EGCK (Caernarfon) Wales. It was nice to do a cargo job rather than a commodity job as I would like to increase my cargo rep.
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So what’s the general consensus 
on 3rd party wx engines, for XP 11?
I’m still using the default wx.
[-] Clouds hurt perf. noticeably but livable.
[+] Get some nice subtle turbulence effects
[-] Wx transitions are questionable: Tooling along in the clear then, white-out, or nearly so, and visa-versa.
[-] Going into KTWF yesterday the winds suddenly switched about 180-degrees about 8 miles out. Thought that was odd.
Have FB2’s Idaho Ortho installed and up now. Nice change. Default was very bland.
I haven’t wanted to invest money yet, so I’ve done the cheap route:
- Installed CloudArt add-in (just replaces the art assets for clouds in XP11, prevents that sudden “white out” effect, though there are shortcomings compared to the paid options)
- I use SimToolkitPro which does real-time weather by writing to the custom weather file that X-Plane then uses.
I like the SimToolkitPro approach as you can configure it not to update weather when you are under a certain speed or altitude (to prevent sudden transitions while landing or taking off).
I haven’t used any of the for-pay alternatives though yet, so I can’t speak to that side of things. But I’ve been wanting to try them out eventually :P. I’m just a cheapskate and would rather spend that money on planes right now :).
I’m using Active Sky. Not convinced it’s always Working tbh, but it’s been pretty reliable.
Also has an option to stop the weather changing while on approach which is nice.
Awesome, thanks for that. I’ll check them both out.
On mobile…so short answer:
SkyMaxx…I used several versions and grew to like it less and less. Performance issues and not very good at mid and high altitude depictions…
Active Sky - a great company with great support and they seem to always be working toward making their stuff better. What I’m using now.
That expensive one…can’t remember the name (XEnviro?) never used…too expensive and originally had very pancake clouds. Is probably better now but I’m committed with Active Sky now…
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Can someone explain to me how I go from a flight with cloud cover at 3400 ft, 16000 ft one flight. Start a new one 5 minutes later from same airport I just landed at, and skies are clear entirely??? Using ASXP. I didn’t change anything except the flight plan (which is almost a backcourse anyway).
I mean, I get clouds can move on… but in 5 minutes? ASXP updates it’s weather every 5 minutes already… so weird.
Anyway, spotted cygon and wanderer on the radar.
Welcome to AWOS! LOL…that is probably what is happening. Unfortunately, AWOS only reads straight up and sometimes cloud layers move in and out and cause some janky changes in our simulator depicted conditions because they are just reading numbers. Interestingly, this actually happens in real life, but of course the conditions are rarely changing that quickly…but you’ll get an AWOS report that you’ve tuned in 10 minutes out and when you get there…all the sudden it is 500 overcast and you are scrambling to set up an approach.
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It could be related to being near the airfield. When I was doing the air race last year, I found that if weather coverage was spotty (not a lot of weather stations in the area, you would end up with decent weather over/near the stations but then some weird averaged weather everywhere else. If ActiveSkyXP is holding the weather static as you approach an airfield, you may be stuck with the ‘averaged weather’ for the landing. Then, it updates to the new, proper weather station weather. I had that happen a bunch of times on approach where the weather suddenly changed when I got near the airfield, going from clear to IFR conditions was a surprise 
It does have some settings for that (if I remember correctly). I tried to tone down the turbulence a bit because, as far as I could tell, there is not much note of turbulence in the weather briefing. I may be missing something but I’d really like to know a rough guess at the turbulence before i take off
The red/green colouring is relative to the airfield that you have selected. The colours change if you select a different airfield. I was mighty confused for a bit when I thought that I had a good run identified only to have the colours seem to switch on me
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That whole UI section needs reworking. It’s not great.
Re: the weather update… I guess it’s possible. But a 20 minute flight where the weather was consistently cloud covered only to be clear as far as the eye can see 5 mins later… All off the same reporting towers… Lol. Just seems weird. Always makes me feel like asxp isn’t working.
0s0 to kmwh, then loaded kmwh to go to kpuw. Just for reference. Anyway! Weather seemed to update ok on the way to kpuw as the turbulence only hit around there.
METARs update just after the hour. But an observer might take an observation off that schedule either because he wanted to or because changes warranted. Let’s say two stations are 200 miles apart. Both updated at 1205. You are halfway between the two at 1245 when one station updates. The game sees the update and since it is the most current weather in your general vicinity it applies those conditions to your flight. With a frontal passage cloud and wind conditions can change a lot in 15 minutes. All the sim is doing is applying those changes instantly. I haven’t noticed X-Plane doing this, actually. My experience has been that it seems to “massage” changes over a few minutes so that if seems more natural. But then you might have been unlucky in that the reporting stations were both far apart and not updating regularly and the game saw too much delta to “massage”.
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On my way back to KJAC from Antelope Valley, ID (U92). By waiting a couple of days, more passengers showed up. I made so much money off the previous leg that I was planning to ferry the plane back. It’s a rental and I fee bad about leaving it in the middle of nowhere even though the owner only charges $100/100km. More cash! My seven vict… er… passengers for the ferry home are just icing on the cake.
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That’s probably more what it was… The hourly updating of metar. Doesn’t matter how often weather downloaded in that regard haha.
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Nice day over central and eastern WA today. I’m hauling a double load - one out of Glacier Park, MT and another out of MT53 - Carson, MT back over to Pullman. Clear skies, cold temperatures (2C) and some turbulence…but great views!
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Oh yeah. Don’t get me wrong. I was struggling to figure out what was up with that, and for a large part of my Air Race, wondering if ASXP was working correctly (or at all :-)). Same for the turbulence, which seemed somewhat unmanageable given the relatively benign
weather that I was flying in.
That is true too. You could be operating under a weather ‘time event’ as well. I expected ASXP to smooth that out but sometimes the changes can be abrupt.
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Like @BeachAV8R, I had some spectacular views on a MAD job KEPH > CYXX yesterday, but more north west Washington. As I got nearer to Mount Baker and closer to the descent, the gods of aviation thought to add a three thousand foot layer in the mix for fun. Never fear with the GTN750’s terrain feature keeping us safe. Some views along the route.
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Where did you find CloudArt for X-Plane? I don’t see it listed as a product on the HiFi Sim Tech web site.