In the first activity from the developers of weather addon Ultra Weather XP since October 2019, lead artist Abdullah Almuntassir has dropped a single preview of version 2.6 in a "pre-alpha" state.

This contradicts messages from last year which stated that 2.6 "upcoming", likely indicating the developer has used the extended five month break to overhaul the textures used in 2.6 following criticism leveled at the initial images.

The Almuntassir brothers' break has come to an end suspiciously close to news of Laminar Research opening up further aspects of X-Plane for use in weather addons, in a blog post released yesterday. While no confirmation from either side was provided, the timing of the posts seems to suggest an element of cooperation could be at play behind the scenes.

Published on the Ultra Weather XP Facebook group, today's preview simply shows the wing of Laminar Research's Boeing 747 in between two layers of cloud.

While that's the only first hand news out of the developer, comments asking about Ultra Weather XP's volumetric cloud venture announced last year were met with a response from a group moderator who claimed that both 2D and 3D cloud packages were being worked on side by side, though noting the forthcoming Vulkan update has potential to put a spanner in the works.

You can learn more about Ultra Weather XP's new volumetric cloud venture in a previous article.