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Announcing Real Weather Connector for SkyMaxx Pro v3!


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Okay. Your shots are from of 2500-20000ft ?? And how it looks from 35000 ft ??

 

I don't have a screenshot handy, but it looks great. First time I tried it, I thought that SkyMaxx Pro had turned itself off somehow and I was seeing some sort of weather map representation from X-Plane. But no, it was SkyMaxx Pro's clouds, just in very realistic weather patterns.

 

As with the current version of SkyMaxx Pro, you control how far out the clouds draw to strike your own performance / draw distance tradeoff. As Cameron alluded to, we're introducing a few more performance tricks to make sure more people can turn that cloud draw distance slider up high enough to get the full experience.

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I don't really understand,

I have currently skymass pro 3 and fsgrw, so what will real weather connector offer in addition compared to fsgrw ?

 

SkyMaxx Pro had always represented a single set of weather conditions surrounding the plane. As you flew into new conditions, the clouds around you would just suddenly all change. It was a limitation of X-Plane's SDK for plugins, but our customers really wanted a solution, so we found a way to work around it.

 

Real Weather Connector + SkyMaxx Pro lets you see different weather conditions in the distance, and fly into them smoothly, just like in real life. All of the clouds around you will be in the right place and at the right altitude, and won't just "pop" in as you fly. If you look closely at the screenshots above, you'll see there are many different weather systems and cloud conditions visible in the same view - that wasn't possible before with SkyMaxx Pro.

 

Don't think of it as a replacement for FSGRW. It just enhances the experience by creating a more direct link between FSGRW and SkyMaxx Pro - and it also works great with X-Plane's built-in real world weather or any weather engine that drops METAR files.

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". . . Don't think of it as a replacement for FSGRW. It just enhances the experience by creating a more direct link between FSGRW and SkyMaxx Pro - and it also works great with X-Plane's built-in real world weather or any weather engine that drops METAR files."

 

I appreciate your work for X-Plane weather depiction and thank you for answering the question about the 'FSGRW' / NOAA weather engine, either of which we have to use for winds aloft in Europe.

 

I am really looking forward to the release of this new enhancement.

 

Cheers

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Just to provide an update, Real Weather Connector + SkyMaxx Pro 3.1 is totally decoupled from X-Plane's internal 3-layer limitation now. Internally weather is represented by a grid, and each cell of that grid can have up to 6 layers of clouds at any altitude. Development is moving fast ;)

 

The only limitation is the METAR data itself. If the METAR has been changed by an external weather engine to fit within X-Plane's default 3-layer system, then that's the only information we'll have available to us.

This sounds terrific, have you made contact with other weather providers like the chaps at FSGRW?  if they can provide more data to your program, the results could indeed take X-Plane to a new level

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As with the current version of SkyMaxx Pro, you control how far out the clouds draw to strike your own performance / draw distance tradeoff. As Cameron alluded to, we're introducing a few more performance tricks to make sure more people can turn that cloud draw distance slider up high enough to get the full experience.

I would expect some performance increase because with RWC it shouldn't be necessary to redraw clouds all the time. I've been using SMP 3 with NOAA plugin and, besides the fact that distant weather systems aren't rendered, there's an annoying frequent cloud redraw that momentarily freezes x-plane; I would expect the new combination of RWC and SMP 3.1 to avoid this.

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One question - will it be METAR based only?


 


Because it is there that lays most of the limitation in XP weather depiction, specially in Europe where it is very common to find the sector altitude not higher than a mere 5,000 feet...


 


Storms  / TS, specially when embeded, are usually another aspect where XPX is very poor compared to FSX / P3D, specially when ASN is used...


 


And... let's not forget: Synoptic scale is required for good blending of data, not only winds and temp aloft, but also cloud cover. ASN for instance uses, through it's own server and processing network, this kind of scale ( and even above it ) for it's depiction and "weather matrix".


Edited by jcomm
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What a coincidence! Just yesterday I was thinking what a shame it was that SkyMaxx only shows one kind of weather at a time and today you announce this! Seems like another great year for X-Plane.

I wonder how you made this to work with the overcast stratus layer which is currently drawn across the entire sky.

Edited by ONDR4.cz
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I don't have a screenshot handy, but it looks great. First time I tried it, I thought that SkyMaxx Pro had turned itself off somehow and I was seeing some sort of weather map representation from X-Plane. But no, it was SkyMaxx Pro's clouds, just in very realistic weather patterns.

 

As with the current version of SkyMaxx Pro, you control how far out the clouds draw to strike your own performance / draw distance tradeoff. As Cameron alluded to, we're introducing a few more performance tricks to make sure more people can turn that cloud draw distance slider up high enough to get the full experience.

Great. Thank you. I have SKM v3 and FSGRW and I'm happy.  Only  " look into the distance at the clouds and the approaching weather quite lacking" So any improvement will be great.

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Real Weather Connector will be its own product, but is dependent on SkyMaxx Pro v3 to run. A lot of R&D has gone into this to make this work. As usual, all SkyMaxx Pro v3 updates will be free for that respective product, but we need to be able to pay the bills for the development and time it took away from our families to create this Real Weather Connector add-on. A price will be announced at a later time. To be clear, there are more lines of code to produce Real Weather Connector than there is in SkyMaxx Pro v3. It's been that big of a project!

 

As Cameron stated, the Connector will be its own product but it will need SkyMaxx. 

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...... ASN for instance uses, through it's own server and processing network, this kind of scale ( and even above it ) for it's depiction and "weather matrix".

 

Does ASN use the server FS2k.zone.com to download METAR? My understanding is that this is not their server.

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WOW! I knew that this had been requested before but I wasn't expecting a solution anywhere near this soon. Seriously, weather-wise, this looks like a game-changer for X-Plane. I know you guys don't like to provide release dates, but generally speaking, are we looking at weeks or months (or longer) for this? Will be buying for sure when it comes out, actually being able to see the weather a couple minutes in front of you is going to be seriously great! I am continually impressed by all the efforts of Maxx-XP (and of course X-Aviation) to create a more immersive sim environment. 

Edited by asheft
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