HiFi Simulation Technologies has shed a light on Active Sky XP, or ASXP. ASXP was announced earlier this year, and its reveal was very welcomed by the community. The HiFi SimTech team has been perfecting the ASXP Prepar3D counterparts, ASP4 and Active Sky Cloud Art, for many years now. In a recent post on their website, they shared some details about what users of this product can begin to expect.
The team working on ASXP highlights several features, to begin with active air effects. This will enhance turbulence and air effects that can manifest themselves in a whole list of different ways and take several factors into account. There will also be weather depiction, a feature we already know and love from ASP4. It will allow users to change the weather to a theme of their choosing, including a ‘real weather’ mode. There will also be voice weather delivery, surface crosswind attenuation and to top it all off there will be a mobile companion app.
Nothing of this could work without the Active Sky Weather Engine. This is the platform used for the Active Sky products (both X-Plane and Prepar3D). It allows for advanced weather synthesis and interpolation, high-resolution global winds aloft, realistic air and atmosphere effects and much more. It has been optimised and perfected to make it work with X-Plane.
Unfortunately, at time of release, there will also be a few limitations to ASXP. To begin, there will be no complete visual replacement for cloud rendering. HiFi SimTech is currently working on a new visual cloud rendering tool that is set to debute at the end of next year. Due to this, the team is focussing their efforts on that instead of replacing X-Plane’s default cloud rendering. However, ASXP will feature high-performance cloud depiction using high-performance photorealistic cloud textures. Another limitation of the addon will be that it will be supported by 64 bit versions of Windows only, starting at Windows 7.
Last but not least, the team made a huge announcement regarding a release window. ASXP is currently undergoing release candidate testing. If all goes well, the team is hoping to get the product out as soon as next month. You can find the system requirements for Active Sky XP at the end of this post.
Requirements
- X-Plane v11.26 or later, 64-bit Windows Version (Mac and 32-bit Windows versions are not compatible)
- Windows 7 or later, 64-bit Version
- Active internet connection (broadband recommended)
- 500mb available hard drive space
- 1GHZ+ CPU
- 2GB+ RAM
- nVidia GTX 500 series or later Graphics Adapter (or equivalent)
