The team over at HST Simulations has been kind enough to send us over an exclusive first look at the user interface to be included with their xAmbience Pro. xAmbience Pro has been in development by the team over at HST for an extended period of time and is to ship with many features that are new technology to the X-Plane platform. To learn more about the tech coming xAmbience Pro, check out the product information page.

Jumping into the exclusive previews. The first page to be shown is the home page, where users are greeted personally and can see a brief overview of various weather parameters. Four different widgets can be accessed from this page:

• A weather briefing page
• Weather control settings
• Visual presets
• Built-in updater

Also accessible on the same page are controls to start real-world weather and various other controls such as accessing the manual.

Moving onto the weather briefing page, this page is the centre of information to help prepare you for a safe flight. 

For those preferring to read the raw format, the undeciphered metar and for those preferring an easier to read format, the deciphered text is available immediately below. 

HST stated that you can also search the weather for airports by their ICAO, useful to check the weather before landing at your destination. Also below the weather search input is the weather for the 8 closest airports to your current position. 

Continuing to the weather controls, this is the place to configure all your weather setting modes, of which there are a mammoth 10 to choose from:

“Starting from a custom one where you can configure everything as you want yourself, ending with Live mode when the plugin reproduces the real weather situation. You can also choose historical weather, another weather injector, or a static weather theme, for example, Scattered Clouds.”

The pane on the left shows you infographics on the current weather situation and allows you to manipulate each layer granularly by clicking on the flag for the desired layer.

The final page we touch upon today, and arguably the most important is the settings page. The settings page is divided into 9 different pages (visible below), 6 of these pages are general settings for core plugin functions while the other 3 are responsible for the texture settings, allowing you to tune the plugin to your unique preferences. 

Further breaking down the texture settings, one page is used to utilise sky presets, the next for cloud presets and the third and final for snow presets. 

HST states that each page has full functionality and “it is possible to scroll through them to view the preset in each of the all conditions/time, on the bottom are the description and name of the preset, as well as clear manipulators”.

Once you have found the preset that you like the look of the most, it is automatically installed, all you have to do is simply choose your favourite.

Rounding off today’s previews, it was confirmed to Threshold that a release date for the product will be made public next week. Stay tuned for the full scoop on that news.

Thanks very much to the team over at HST Simulations for sending over today’s previews. If you want to keep up with more of their developments, you can find many exclusive previews available for viewing in the team’s Discord Server.