You get a sense of speed when flying thru them which I'm always impress with, especially when doing takeoff's from LAX.Īs far as being concern with towering cumulonimbus or high clouds, if I want to see them, I just go to default if I am in the mode for it. Otherwise I could careless because I know they will find a solution in getting them into XEnviro at some point.

The clouds as far as I am concern, I know its a work in progress although you can get horizon to horizon coverage as well as low lever stratus clouds. With XEnviro I like the way if calculates the correct colors in the sky as well as the winds at all levels. I use XEnviro primarily as my weather engine and when its not working I use FSGRW with the default clouds as a backup. Maybe it will come from a 3rd party developer, but I suspect that Laminar has to step up to the plate and revamp the underlying weather engine before we can get things like vertical convection in CB's, active 3-dimensional storm fronts, etc. We still have fairly primitive weather modeling in X-Plane. I'm still open to other options, if something better comes along. XEnviro is always real weather all the time, without enough fine-tuning for light aircraft that can't handle current conditions. That's one reason I ditched XEnviro, aside from just not looking that great in the mountains. I still want a taste of real weather though, so this (and the default XP weather) gives me enough control. Most of my FSEconomy flights are 200-300 miles, so it doesn't break realism too much to use the same weather for the flight.įor FSEconomy, I'll often cheat and raise the cloud deck if it means I can't land otherwise, because each flight has to be completed. So I'll download real weather at the start of a flight, back down the winds if I have to, and leave that setting for the entire flight. With the light to medium GA planes and helicopters I fly, and the areas I like to fly in (Pacific Northwest and UK), real weather is often too windy during part of the year. I don't use Real Weather Connector even though I own it. I'm usually never flying above 16,000 feet and often lower on my FSEconomy runs, and this just looks better to me at lower altitudes than other things I've tried like XEnviro. SkyMaxx Pro here, because it gives me the best depiction of lower-altitude clouds for bush plane flying in the mountains.

Active sky xp vs skymaxx pro