HiFi Sim (Active Sky) September 2020 Development Update

[mutley 4,498]

Hello Everyone,

It's time for a HiFi development update!

Over the past months we have seen some amazing things in the simulation community along with big events including the release of P3D v5, MSFS and X-Plane 11.50. Through it all, we have been doing our best to respond to all the changes, technical considerations, compatibility challenges, and restructuring of the sim community and market, with new market directions and demands. This is in addition to continuing development on multiple projects on multiple platforms while supporting our existing products and data network. Of course, we are also dealing with the local, national and world-wide issues that we all face lately in an unprecedented fashion. In short, our plate is very full and as a very small team, and we haven’t been able to respond or engage as frequently as we’d like to, nor have we been able to release as many updates, upgrades and new products as we had hoped.

Despite the slow-coming updates and community engagement, we are definitely making progress on several fronts and wanted to take the opportunity to give everyone an update on what to expect from HiFi over the next months.

MSFS: We have received tremendous support and encouragement from the community to create an Active Sky for MSFS weather engine and we really appreciate all the feedback! While Asobo and MS have done an incredible job with the new weather system, it has clearly stoked the demand and need for Active Sky features for more advanced weather experiences. We're looking at this as a future potential platform to develop on, but currently, we are not aware of any weather extensibility and we are not sure at this time what the timeline is or what the eventual possibilities will be. We have prepared foundational components for an eventual MSFS Active Sky weather engine, and as soon as we have the capability to interface with MSFS, we certainly will. We are anxiously awaiting more news and updates to the MSFS roadmap along with planned SDK improvements and will provide further updates when we can.

Anyone who would like to see MSFS weather-related SDK functions and potential weather add-ons from any developer, sooner rather than later, should upvote this wishlist item posted on the flight simulator forums: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/open-up-the-weather-system-to-3rd-party-devs.

P3Dv5: As we are all expecting further updates to P3D especially to the EA TruSky cloud depiction implementation, HiFi has been preparing for this along with finalizing the ASP3D product in preparation for release. We have extended the OPEN BETA that is open to all ASP4 licensees and we hope to move to the release candidate stage very soon. See the ASP3D page at https://hifisimtech.com/asp3d for more information. As a reminder, every ASP4 customer who participates in the OPEN BETA will receive ASP3Dv5 FREE of charge when released.

X-Plane: X-Plane 11.50 has officially released and we have updated ASXP and related systems accordingly to provide full support. The latest ASXP Open Beta is available and expected to become official very soon. Beyond that, we are actively developing and extending the ASXP technology we debuted in late 2018 and will be announcing details of our next major version very soon. Covering all ends of the weather experience, we are working to improve everything from visuals to realism while preparing for expected new improvements in the X-Plane weather visualization system. We are expecting to have development wrapping up sometime around the middle of next year, but as always, cannot make any guarantees as to when it will be ready. As always, significant discounts via upgrade pricing are planned for all new major versions. Stay tuned for more at our website at https://hifisimtech.com.

Thanks go out to all our customers and supporters! In these very challenging times we sincerely appreciate you and everything you do to enable us to continue our passion of developing advanced aviation weather simulation for desktop flight simulation.

Get the latest news and upcoming product information from the HiFi website at https://hifisimtech.com.

-The HiFi Dev Team

[UKJim 502]

I can't wait for Active Sky for FS2020. I have spotted REX have been working on a product, but I've always preferred Active Sky for my weather engine. Hope it doesn't take too long 👍

[mutley 4,498]

I was a Active Sky user too Jim, AS doesn't seem to have a development plan yet, I really hope I am wrong with that but it's great to see REXs plans, looking forward to future updates.

[needles 1,013]

I too am/was an avid Active Sky user and hope they are going to release something soon for 2020, but as Joe says, they don't seem to have a development plan for it so far.