From solid overcast, to towering cumulonimbus, everything was designed for the best visuals with minimal performance sacrifice. But in addition to the graphical textures, ASCA also includes something very different: Brand New 3D Cloud Structures, which replace and/or enhance nearly every aspect of the cloud scene within the simulator! Thunderstorms are bigger, overcast is more full, light “few” humilis-type clouds are more visually appealing, and all cloud scenes are specifically tuned to match the ASCA texture content and provide maximum realism.Ī primary design focus for ASCA was performance.
XENVIRO WITH ACTIVE SKY XP FULL
In addition, in ASCA’s Full Dynamics theme, simultaneous variation of up to 8 different texture sets (128 cloud textures total) are provided including simultaneous texture resolution to provide increased performance for certain cloud types that don’t require high resolution (such as overcast layers).ĪSCA’s graphical content includes replacements/enhancements for everything above the horizon: Cirrus clouds, Cumulus clouds, Stratus clouds, Thunderstorm clouds, Sky colors and Lighting.
The technology behind ASCA includes optional tight integration with Active Sky 2016, ASP4 and ASP3D (in non-EA mode) to enable features such as Real-Time Texture Dynamics, which allow you to manually change or have your textures automatically changed multiple times throughout a flight without the need to shut-down and restart your simulator! The variation experienced throughout a flight with AS16/ASP4/ASP3D + ASCA is unprecedented, especially when flying through areas of varying weather conditions and severity.
XENVIRO WITH ACTIVE SKY XP SIMULATOR
If you want to learn more about the Enhanced Skyscapes release, you can read our other article on the topic by clicking here.Active Sky Cloud Art (ASCA) is a new kind of graphics add-on for Flight Simulator X and Prepar3D that incorporates brand new technologies and content types to transform your skies and significantly increase realism, variation and dynamics. You can purchase the utility solely through the Threshold Store for $15 by clicking here. The utility is compatible with a majority of weather injection addons like Active Sky XP, and users should not notice any significant FPS drops.
Enhanced Skyscapse thus does also improve those offering much sharper shadows and more realistic lighting in various conditions.Įnhanced Skyscapes – Screenshots from trenujezaby#1167 on Discord This fact hence explains the reason why the release was so anticipated.Įnhanced Skyscapes – Screenshots from willfibs#8230 on DiscordīilogicalNanobot additionally made use of his previous development experience, and also reworked the overall atmospheric and shader visuals. Having volumetric clouds offers the user to actually fly through them and experience the full immersion. To give you a better idea first, the default clouds behaviour is that they go aside when the aircraft is about to go through them. Priced at a price of 15$, or about 14€ when converted, Enhanced Skyscapes is the first addon to offer fully volumetric clouds in addition to other atmospheric improvements. The majority of flight simmers do not give much attention to the tone of their sky colours as long as they look decent. When it comes to atmosphere, it’s a whole different story from the clouds. What is significant, however, is how they behave. Many flight simmers have been using them since their beginnings and do not mind lacking some resolution or detail. Let’s be fair, X-Plane 11 has some decent cloud textures from default. A notable amount of community members refers to it as the best cloud addon for X-Plane 11. The release was met with substantial success. However, to date users are reporting FPS issues, not to mention the heftier price tag.īiologicalNanobot, a community developer responsible for a number of visual enhancements for the platform, has last year released his first payware product which promised to change the situation – Enhanced Skyscapes. The first somewhat successful attempt was by the 圎nviro team. Many developers attempted to bring the legendary “volumetric clouds” to X-Plane 11, though unsuccessfully. Soon, various plugins began to arrive, unfortunately being only a temporary solution to our problems. For years, we had to cope with how the default clouds and atmosphere looks.
Atmosphere and clouds something that affects the experience of every flight simmer very much although they might not admit it.