Requesting Recommendations on Weather AddOn

[FlyBoy2]

Brad stop being Cheap and Buy the Damn Thing (J/k) :-)




Joel

[SWAFO]

Lol... I've gotta be cheap, my pay raise was only a few thousand a year!!!

[Cookie]

ASV to me does worth every penny. I use ASV along with Flight1's Flight Environment v2. Only drawback is the overcast clouds caused
framerate took a nosedive.

[SWAFO]

I've heard that the lower resolution ASV textures can INCREASE frame rate. Is this true, or a myth?

[Ryanamur]

SWAFO wrote:
I've heard that the lower resolution ASV textures can INCREASE frame rate. Is this true, or a myth?

Yes, It's true.

I have a 128Mb X300 card and used to get about 20fps with the following settings:
- Clear skies
- Day time (night was much less because of all the lights in Ultimate Terrain Alaska/Canada)
- Ultimate Traffic 85% traffic
- Display settings (grounds) at Medium Low
- Display settings (weather) at Low
- Bilinear filtering

Since I got ASV and brought the textures back to 64x64 with MIPS enabled, I get 25fps:
- in rain, overcast clouds
- Night time with UT Terrain Alaska/Canada all enabled (lots of lights)
- 100% traffic in Ultimate Traffic
- Display settings (ground) High
- Weather on Medium high
- Trillinear filtering

[nem]

On top of that you can use ASV to convert all the textures (all the cloud textures at least) to DXT format, which gives a nice performance boost in
heavy weather as well.

On the other hand of course you can just use one of the many replacement cumulus texture sets at Avsim and the like, which are mostly DXT, but I
thought I'd point out that ASV feature nonetheless.

[SaVas]

I believe Flight 1 also has a weather appearance enhancer. Though more testure based than functionality like ASV

[nem]

Yes. F1 Flight Environment. As mentioned above.

[jboweruk]

Yup I use both. Something I have noticed since ASV though is the little touches it has made; has anyone noticed the little glow halos
around lights on other aircraft for example? And on the VASI lights at airports.

[SWAFO]

I'll check both out. I'll probably end up getting ASV if there's a performance boost, PLUS increased features! Can't beat that!

[nem]

has anyone noticed the little glow halos
around lights on other aircraft for example? And on the VASI lights at airports.

Depends. If someone has chosen the same runway lights textures in Active Environment as you have, they might have noticed.
(Runway light textures and aircraft light textures are the same.)

[jboweruk]

Hmm, I only noticed it after installing ASV though, so thought it was maybe something to do with that......

[nem]

Since Active Environment is part of ASV - yes, it has something do do with that. Provided you pressed that "Submit" button in the AE window before
running FS.

[Passenger57]

Hi Folks,

I'm back for another week of torture, dullness, boredom, rushes and incompetent project leaders. Business as usual.

Following Your recommendation, I bought ASV as soon as I came home (rather early on friday) and got it installed.

MY GOSH what have You recommended there?!?!?!

FS feels addictive again, the weather outside the door and inside my computer now looks similar, that's really fantastic! Kudos to Hifisim, I did not
know to the full extent how crappy the default M$ weather generator was...

Thanks again for this great advice

Torsten (Pax57)

[nem]

Let's be fair, MS' weather is not crappy. It's just not excellent.