gcharrie

Hi, I had same type of issue : in XP you can assign a button/key to something like 'nose wheel steering on/off'. I don't remember the exact name as i'm not in front of xp11 now. This action was automatically set to a button of my joystick. Maybe you should check all your buttons/keys assignments :-)

Thanks for the tips. It helped a lot for me ;-)

+1 To get the clouds displayed, while in game, I need to change the 'Cloud puff style' option, for example from Fast To Soft. When I do this, The clouds are displayed. I attached my log. log.txt

Hi, Just for information from the AS2016 editor support forum, a quick search gave this topic : >>> The following products have reached end-of-life and are no longer officially supported: >>> Active Sky v1 (2002) >>> Active Sky wxRE (2002) >>> Active Sky 2004 (2004) ... >>> Active Sky X (2007) Just to show that : Active Sky has been in development since 2002... not Sky max pro (correct me if I'm wrong). So why come here and compare the 2 products ???? Improving such a product need lots of iterations and many years... AS2016 AND SMP are both very good examples of product constantly improving, of serious editors listening to the customers. SMP is not perfect but I follow SMP since the begining and it is better and better... and it will probably become the AS2016 for x-plane ;-) Good flight everyone...

To my opinion, the way it is made today is perfect. I'm not a big fan of mouse scrolling. ... different users... different ways of thinking and using the planes :-)

The clouds disepear when I change settings in SMP (click or unclick Clouds Shadows for example) AND FS Global Real Weather as injector at the same time. When I get no clouds , I can get clouds again by : - stopping FS Global Real Weather - In XP : in 'Define global weather for all world' : put clear sky in the 3 clouds layers - Going back to the sim - In XP , in 'Download Real Weather' screen, click 'Download the weather from internet' - Go back to the sim and the clouds appear again Then, with real weather downloaded by XP (and not FS G R W), I don't have the issue of the disappearing clouds when changing SMP settings.

During my test flight I changed some SMP parameters few minutes ago... when applying changes, I had the no clouds issue again. Reinstalling RWC may not be the fix indeed...

Hi, same issue here, no clouds at all. I solved this by reinstalling RWC after updating to 3.3.1. I did a quick test in CYVR where I had FPS issue.... seems good !!!! no more FPS drop with weather of 2016-06-14 20h12... (that was heavy clouds/weather) Thanks for this quick release of update. A happy pilot

Hi, When looking at the provided metar files by jujub, we can see there are 4 or 5 cloud layers depicted for cyvr. This means lots of clouds ! And more than the 3 layers that are normally managed by x-plane. How does SMP deals with the 2 more layers ? Are they displayed ? Some time ago I did a post on this forum about a similar FPS issue... on cyvr too... @sundog : have you tested the provided Metars (from jujub) on your test system ? I would be interested to kown if you can reproduce the issue and if yes, the fix you mention solves this... Thanks. edit : my original post about this same issue (see this post and next ones)

In the weather menu, clic 'set weather uniformly for the while world'. In this screen in the upper left frame you have 'cloud top', cloud 'base' and a drop down list (you have this 3 times for 3 layers). In the 3 drop down lists, select 'Clear' : il will clear all your cloud layers. Then Go back flying until all your clouds diseapear and your FPS increased. Then Go to the weather menu again and select back 'Grab real world weather' on the top line of the screen. This is not a solution to the issue. This is a simple workaround to try to end your your flight in good conditions :-) (note : another workaround could be to disable the SMP and RWC plugins and enable them back. I've not tested this).

I did a post in june about same type of issue (http://forums.x-pilot.com/forums/topic/10694-skymaxx-pro-v32-has-been-released/?do=findComment&comment=106825) Even with display settings to minimum and no custom sceneries, I had a drop in frame rate when entering the clouds / and or with high cloud visibility range. My test case was with 5 layers of clouds and my conclusion was that x-plane/SMP was not able to manage so many clouds : even with settings to minimumsI had FPS issues with clouds. Yesterday I had same FPS issue with only one cloud layer. By setting the weather to user defined, then setting no cloud layers, flying few seconds to go back to go fps, then setting again weather manager by FSGRW, I could get good FPS setting (not as good as previouly) I don't know if FSGRW may be a culprit or not. Are you using it ? Has anyone FPS issues using x-plane real weather as weather injector only ?

Would a reduction of this distance of 50km to says 25 km would improve performance ? I would guess that yes as XP would have less 3D cloud to draw. An option to reduce this distance of 3D cloud display would be nice. What do you think of this ?

I don't "expect" or look for this type of weather situation ;-) : I like to fly in CYVR area and recently I had bad FPS there (otherwise FPS is good with SMP/RWC) : I tried to find why and my conclusion is that FSGRW depicts 5 layers and RWC allows up to 6. This is a heavy situation that is probably not so common when we fly (or other people use other weather injector that don't generate so many layers). Neither FSGRW nor RWC give the option to limit the number of layers or give an option that would reduce the load (we have only cloud coverage in RWC). Having less layers or less complex cloud patern is ok for me. I'm not looking for the perfect look. I was just trying to understand why I had such a FPS loss at that time in this area. Having more options in SMP/RWC to try to limit these heavy depiction case would be nice : for example limit the number of layers (by carrefely choosing the ones to keep ) or the cloud complexity (I understand that RWC draws more clouds that SMP alone). Well, for the moment, I keep RWC because I love this product and the last version brings lots of things.... just reduced the cloud area coverage....

NOTE : sorry : posted my previous post with just images, here the text : Hi all, Following the answers from my previous post, I did a new test : reduce the x-plane settings to find the best settings : - x-plane settings to MINIMUM (using the provided button) and reboot (see settings screenshot in this topic) - DISABLING all custom sceneries (except SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/Global Airports/) - setting nvidia driver options to default except Threaded optimisation to disabled - Lastest Driver version. - using FSGRW to reload the conditions with 5 clouds layers (see my previous posts) - same situation : CYVR, IXEG, taking off from 8R, and climbing straight - skymaxx pro and RWC to 'Auto' - my system : intel i7 2600K - 3.4Gz - NVIDIA GeForce GTX980 - 32Gb - windows 7 64b (note : removed the CPU overclocking few days ago) At takeoff FPS is good (above 30) and during climb it progessively decreases to 10FPS and then after a bigger freeze FPS is 3 => issue reproduced with LOW x-plane settings. X-plane is not able to correctly display a cloud area of 17000 with 5 layers (with an important coverage). There is a big bottleneck somewhere in x-plane and RWC/SMP notes : - When cloud area is set at 10000 or less no FPS issue. - With less cloud layers (for example 3 manually set with broken coverage), and then baron plane (same place, same x-plane settings to minimum), I still have a drop from 35 to 15FPS. I perfectly understand that drawing so many 3d clouds is cpu or gpu intensive, that we must lower our settings to get a good balance.... but here, the x-plane settings are set to MINIMUM (giving graphics from the 90s) and skymaxpro is not set to max. I respect the product and the RWC dev team (that listens community and try to improve things), but there is clearly something wrong, either a bug or things that SMP/RWC can do and allows to do (hight layers, area, ...) that x-plane can't do.

please see next topic for text :-) something went wrong when posting

Cameron, Sundog, If I reach the limit of fill-rate of my GPU, should I see it in the GPU-Z in my GPU-Z screenshot (3 posts above) ? I'm not a specialist but I would say that if I reach a limit of my GPU, one of the graphs should be at 100%. GPU load is 11%, other loads are very low. So my GPU could do more work (draw more overlapping clouds ?) Is it correct ?

I agree with that : My GPU does not seem 'full', see attached the GPU-Z graphs. The FPS issue starts at around 3/4 of the graphs below. We have no modification of the graph curves at all. Or maybe the FPS issue comes from an internal limitation of x-plane ?

Indeed I noticed the number of clouds is lower without RWC. I attached a screenshot with the weather given by FSGRW : we have 5 layers of clouds. I will do more tests, but with less layers I don't have this performance issue. I need to change from a cloud area setting of 17000 to 5000 when installing RWC (with the conditions of 5 clouds layers reported). It is quite disapointing. With this setting RWC is less interesting. I bought RWC just to have different weathers on the horizon, not to have more clouds :-). With RWC the sky clearly looks nicer with all these clouds. But an option in RWC to reduce the 'number' of clouds or layers would be nice so that we can adapt to our system (for example draw only 3 layers of cloud at max)

thanks for your reply sundog. I did lots of tests : checking GPU health and load with GPU-Z, resetting and testing lots of values for the nvidia settings including defaults, removing antialiasing (I use 2SAA +FXAA by default), ..... None of them solved the issue (My system and GPU are not overloaded).... Until I uninstall real Weather Connector (with the uninstall program in X-aviation subfolder), leaving skymaxpro installed... And the issue I described (... 2) low fps when entering clouds : ...) in my previous post... disepeared. So for me the culprit was RWC (I did not try to reinstall it). It seems in accordance with my previous remark : with RWC installed, the FPS was going back to normal when using 'Never' instead of 'Always'. For information, my test is : ixeg (or MD-80), taking off from 8R from CYVR, climbing straigh above the clouds, with weather from FSGRW with 5 layers of clouds (I get an error while uploading the image from FSGRW weather screen, will try later).

My screen resolution is 1980*1024. I'm in windowed mode so with the task bar at the bottom it's slightly less. What do you mean by fill rate bound ? That the GPU bandwidth is full ? a) is there a windows tool to check this ? any tips to reduce this ?(nvidia settings for example ?, reduce which setting in x-plane) ? I did another flight after reducing the cloud draw distance and I had no fps drop. What I find "strange" is that when on ground or after take-off, everything is ok with same amount of cloud drawn. This is when I'm below the clound layer that the fps drops, the clouds filling only one part of the screen. Does this means that the closer (or the bigger on the screen) I am of the clounds the more fill-rate bound I am ?

hi, I just saw this thread. I have a gtx980 and I had : 1) issue of low fps when enabling cloud shadow. Sorry no screenshots at that moment (by GPU free ram was ok) 2) low fps when entering clouds : taking off from cyvr (30fps with lots of clouds), and just before reaching the altitude of the lower cloud layer, the fps drops to 10 fps or less. Same when inside clouds (weather of course not changed). Attached are some pictures : - sky maxx pro settings and free memory (out of 4Gb) - shot whith low fps and 'always' selected in RWC (bad fps) - shot few seconds later, still in the clouds whith 'never' selected : very good FPS. What could explain this diffference of FPS ? Hope it helps. This is with latest version of SMP. Version before was working better for me. EDIT : added log.txt and I confirm that when I go out of the cloud layer (when climbing, the FS goes back to normal) Log.txt

It means that if you only fly localy for one hour, the weather may not change. I mostly fly long distances with airliner (mainly 150 to 200 NM) so I'm mainly interested in this option. But sometimes I fly locally with helicopter... Some suggestions/ideas : - keep this as an option that we can toggle depending on the type of flight. - update only the clouds behond x NM from the aircraft (x being a parameter) : would be useful for shorter flights. x could be dynamic, depending on the alitude of the aircraft (lower value for lower altitude) - make the local weather change more gradual from one metar report to the other ?

Putting settings to Fast helped a lot for me (to eliminate stutters). And the clouds look is still nice. Does this help to improve performances ? I hesitate to put the cloud size to minimum as I thought XP would have more clouds to draw (as they are smaller), giving bad performance.

great ! Thanks for the continuous improvments Sundog !

Thanks for the explanations. One question : when in VNAV, I tried to force a MCP SPEED (so that we don't use the speed defined by the FMC). I was not able to click on the SPEED button on the MCP (could not engage it) Is it the normal behaviour ? (I mean we can use only FMC speed while in VNAV) (Or bug, or wrong usage from me ?)