How Does Weather Work on VATSIM?

[Richard Kinne 1414726]

Morning Folks:

 

I hope this is the right place to ask this.

 

I'm new so I'm still sussing things out. WX is a pretty important things for flights, as we're told. How is it handled in a flight simulator (specifically FSX:SE) and VATSIM? I figure you can tell FSX what the weather is, I guess, but what I'm wondering is if there is a way to have the actual WX put into the Flight Simulator from, say, the Internet?

 

Thanks!

[Richard Kinne 1414726]

Folks:

 

I think I figured out "real-time wx" in FS:SE. Sometimes it just takes me posting the question to figure it out by myself.

 

For those of you using Active Sky, I understand this add-on really improves the clouds. Does it have its own WX downloads as well?

[Robert Shearman Jr]

I'm not sure about Steam Edition, but the "Real-World Weather With Update" option in the boxed FSX does *not* work anymore. I know that the pilot client FSInn had a built-in weather injection system at one point but I can't speak for whether that one still works. Your best bet is an add-on such as Active Sky, REX, or FSRealWX (among others). These programs all do the same thing in different ways -- they pull from real-world aviation weather databases and inject that into your sim. They also provide ways to get weather briefings (although I just use the .metar function in vPilot) and some may or may not offer the option of specifying a weather scenario you want injected in.

 

Active Sky is the one I use and recommend, because it is better than the others (in my opinion) about really creating a living, changing environment which gradually transitions from one set of values to another, as opposed to others in which a static "snapshot" of weather data, updated once per hour, is injected based on which weather station you're closest to, and the borders between them can be unrealistically abrupt. But, that's just my two cents having played with FSRealWX and AS16.

[Randy Tyndall 1087023]

Actually "Real World Weather" in FSX does work. It uses a site called "fs2k.zone.com" which was the old FS2004 site that also works for FSX.

 

Also, if you are using FSX, It is not recommended to use FSInn weather, which also does still work by the way. The interface with FS2004 works flawlessly, but the interface with FSX was still in beta when the developer ceased worked and stopped supporting FSInn. He never got around to making FSInn weather work properly with FSX so your aircraft loses power as you climb because the OAT gets warmer as you climb..

 

I used to use Active Sky Evolution with FSX, but it sometimes struggles to depict the right weather for me. Now for FSX I use FSXWX 1.6.1, a freeware weather engine that actually does pretty darn good. The only weather engine I have used that gets rid of the irritating puffy clouds at ground level.

 

Randy

[Richard Kinne 1414726]

Many thanks, folks!

 

It does look like there is a real-world weather feature in FSX:SE that does seem to work, but I'm not sure how good it is as yet. I'll play around with it.

 

Thanks to you guys, I now know how these things work with the sim, which was the other question.

 

I'll be taking a look at Active Sky and FSXWX 1.6.1.

 

Thanks very much, guys!