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A mainstay of the audiophile world since the late 90s, AudiogoN is the largest, most respected high-end audio community in the industry.July 2016 saw the release of the latest in a long line of Active Sky products. Features:If its audio related and you want to buy it, sell it, or look for it, then we are your one-stop, comprehensive resource. Using a hybrid weather depiction interface through XPlane 11’s weather API, a realistic, high-performance and high-fidelity weather experience is realized. Active Sky XP (ASXP) brings the popular award-winning Active Sky weather engine to the XPlane platform for the first time. Product information 'HiFi Technologies - Active Sky XP'.

Hifi Tech’s Active Sky series has been around a long time. If you own Active Sky 2016 for FSX (AS16FSX), Active Sky 2016 for P3D (AS16P3Dv3) and Active Sky for Prepar3Dv4 (ASP4), then you can upgrade for 24.99. Let’s take a look.HiFi Technologies ActiveSky P3D works for both Prepar3D v4 and Prepar3D v5 and is available for new customers and for customers who own previous HiFi Technologies products from the past.

They previously included new cloud textures in some of their versions to achieve this goal. Hopefully, Version 2016 lives up to the expectations.Link to Review: to Software (FSX): p.Active Sky Cloud Art is a new attempt by Hifi Tech to not only insert the weather into our sims, but also the way that weather is turned into visuals. The Active Sky series has a long standing reputation of excellence in this regard.

The FSX and P3D are completely separate purchases, and there is no bundle discount. Please note that versions of P3D earlier than 3.2 are not supported, and are not likely to work at all. One for FSX (both boxed and Steam Edition) , and one for Prepar3D v3.2 and later. Active Sky 2016 is available in 2 versions. Also, much of my testing of AS16 happened concurrently with the FSX version of the FlightSimLabs A320, so you’ll see a lot of that aircraft in this review.First of all: compatibility. It also is a separate product, and thus purchase, from Active Sky 2016.All screenshots in this review were taken using AS16 and ASCA in combination.

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A whole lot of cloud replacement textures were included in this product. Note that you can request a fully functional, time limited trial for Active Sky on the Hifi Tech Website.When thinking about this purchase, I can’t help but compare to the first AS version I tried: Active Sky 2012. ASCA supports both FSX and P3D in a single purchase.

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ASCA is a 720MB download, with an optional 1.12GB HD Content pack. For transparency’s sake: I did not have to pay this price, I got it for free in order to evaluate the product for this review.Once purchased, AS16 comes as a 230MB download. That was for the whole deal though, AS16 (Upgrade) for FSX, AS16 (Upgrade) for P3D and ASCA. The result is that, even with the discount for owners of previous versions, the price at checkout for me was still over €110. Additionally, the price for Active Sky 2016 has risen significantly over previous versions.

You’ll not have to look very far to find a lot of familiar pages. When looking closer though, you’ll notice that most of the changes are cosmetic. At first look, the AS16 User Interface is markedly different than the one from Active Sky Next. Similarly, you’ll get a message if a newer version is available. If it isn’t, it’ll tell you so in a popup. But of course, it’s not meant to be viewed from there.If you first run Active Sky 2016, the program will check whether everything is set up correctly for it to work.

These options are rather self-explanatory. A nice example of the AS16+ASCA combination keeping things interesting.The Weather Control page lets you switch between Live, Historical and Custom weather. Not nice flying weather! Also note the different look of the clouds compared to those in the screenshots earlier. This page provides a quick overview of important data: the METARs at your favourite airports (of your choice, this list will be empty unless you pick some favourites) the latest Active Sky News, primarily telling you about updates and stuff like that, and finally the active ‘Named Storms’, hurricanes and cyclones which will provide some interesting situations in their vicinity.Searching for ‘Thunderstorms’ on the AS16 search page directed my to Iceland, among other places.

You can also save weather situations, and load them again on this page.The Conditions page is one I use a lot. Custom weather lets you create your own weather, and choose where to apply it. Historical uses weather from a past date (back to august 2014 when I looked in February 2017).

You can just load a saved flight plan and be done with it. What the Flight Plan page does is quite obvious, but it has some features you might not immediately expect in a weather program. There’s also a dropdown to select any of your favourite airports or, when a flightplan is active, departure, destination and alternate.While the Flight Plan and Briefing pages are separate pages, they are close linked in that the Briefing page requires a flight plan to be active.

You can also save presets, if you want different settings depending on what type of aircraft you fly, for example.A new feature in Active Sky 2016 are Scenarios. There’s a lot here to tune the experience to your liking. Options range from weather depiction over wind and turbulence scaling to audio and Active Sky warning options. A lot of the option are familiar, but there are plenty new ones too. If you enter your speed and vertical speed information, the flight plan will also show top-of-climb, top-of-descend and ETA information, including ETA at all intermediate waypoints.When then looking at the Briefing page, it’ll give you a very detailed briefing including weather and winds at all waypoints.The map page, with quite a lot of overlays active: Clouds, Visibility, Precipitation and surface winds are shown.When looking at the options page, you’ll quickly notice the relation between Active sky 2016 and Active Sky Next. Quite neat if you want a quick flight without too much hassle, although you are limited to VOR to VOR, VOR and NDB or Direct GPS flight plans.

Default or very simple aircraft should make this quite easy. How effective the scenario loads depend on the aircraft you use. There currently are 6 of them, of which 5 are based on specific real world events, 4 of those ending in a fatal crash.

It doesn’t need Active Sky to work) by Hifi Technologies to specifically change the visual representation of weather in the simulator. Personally, I probably only use a fraction of them in regular use, but it’s great that the possibilities are there.The Active Sky XGauge is still here! This 2D panel, installation of which is automated and extremely easy, can function both as the AS Map page, or like a weather radar.Active Sky Cloud Art is a stand-alone program (ie. I’d love to see more scenarios, or variations of the existing ones, show up in the future.All in all, Active Sky 2016 is a very powerful program filled with features and capabilities. It really puts you on your toes. But after trying it a few times, I quite like it. At first, I had limited interest in this feature.

But it turns out to be more than it at first appears.First, ASCA works on the basis of weather themes. At first run, ASCA looks very simple and basic. But, and this sets it apart from the competition, it also changes the 3D cloud structures. This means: clouds, sky colours and lightning.

These directly influence performance and memory use in the simulator. Very important here are the ‘Quality’ settings. While not as powerful as picking specific textures, it’s a lot easier and faster as well.Although using ASCA is easy, there are some important settings and sliders on the options page. Not that you do not pick specifics, just sets. A theme exists of a certain set of Sky Colours, Cirrus Clouds and Cloud Textures. Several themes are available out of the box, and more can easily be created by the user.

It works well on its own, or with other weather add-ons. With ‘Enabled Content’, you can pick which features ASCA installs in the simulator, and allows ASCA to work well together with other texture replacement add-ons.Active Sky Cloud Art can be used without Active Sky 2016. To use the highest definition textures, you’ll also have to install the HD content pack for ASCA.

In my opinion, it’s good, but not great.