Have been a long customer of HiFi. Have used, ASE, AS2012 and now testing ASN.
Had a chance to install and use ASN yesterday evening. Thought it useful to post early observations.
Install – Went through successfully. Had an issue with “Waiting on Simulator” message. Finally read that SP2 Simconnect was needed. That solved, the connection went through fine. [Maybe useful to add that to the requirements pre-requisites in the manual]
Before I provide any comments, here is some context to my sim environment.
Triple Projection, 180 degree visuals, part scale simulator.
i7 3770, 4.2GHz, 8 GB Ram
GTX 660, 2GB.
ASN running remote on a dedicated PC and connected via SimConnect.
Flew from FRA) to AMS. Fra had low ceilings and EHAM was reporting precipitation and thunderstorms. In short,was a good day to test live WXR on ASN.
ASN worked well in Live WXR mode and in manual mode. The WXR is very very REAL. I fly a lot for work and am an ardent photographer of weather outside. I took some pictures and video of ASN-rendered WXR yesterday and compared them to my pix from the real world.
I have to say the ASN is a leap forward in its rendering. The comparisons are very close.
The cloud textures are more appealing. The transitions are very smooth. I did notice that more than once the clouds still disappear and reappear. That could very well be a problem with resource limitations in my computing environment.
ASN does a great job of rendering full layers of OVC across distances. There was also another thing that I hadnt seen before – when you are skimming over a cloud base, the feeling is exactly like in real life. The cloud base stays underneath you and the engine renders it continually. Cloud pass through effects are very well rendered. Precipitation is more realistic. Thunderstorms are better depicted and lighting in the distance is well defined. Turbulence is handled well, although sometimes noticed an unrealistic swing of the plane which appeared more like a shift in my image rather than a smooth movement of the wind gust. This, of course, could be a resource latency issue.
In manual mode, the impact of changes is far more quicker. Any new config is rendered almost instantly. Configuration is easier.
One noticeable observation is that I see a whole lot more screen rips and visual glitches – continuously. After my early – and minimal – tweaks to FSX.CFG when I installed my setup last year, never saw any of that with ASE or AS2012. Indeed it is pumping more into FSX than AS2012 did and I understand that these are limitations of the GPU. However, the GTX 660 is not a trivial GPU by any standard. For a more direct compare, maybe I need to adjust my ASN options to match what I had in AS2012 and see how that performs.
I will have more feedback as I test more this week.
I do have some questions in my mind as to the various options that AS2012 brought to the user – Graphics, Snapshots, color and hue control, Wx-influencing etc. Did we lose all that control or does ASN handle all that now?
The UX is easy, takes a little bit of learning – or unlearning the old – I should say.
I like the product and I am sure with a little tweaking on my part and some fixes from HiFi over the coming months, this is a nice product and will bring new realism to sim environment.
More to come…
Regards,
CPJ
