SkyMaxx Pro v3.2 - Clouds changing heights very often

[Tom Stian]

17 hours ago, sundog said:

Coding up a fix now.

Is there any ETA on that fix ? Just wondring if I should revert to v3.1.2 meanwhile or wait for the fix.

[sundog]

2 hours ago, Tom Stian said:

Is there any ETA on that fix ? Just wondring if I should revert to v3.1.2 meanwhile or wait for the fix.

No ETA yet as it's not entirely under my control when it goes out. But I'm hoping for very soon. Just checking the boards this morning to see if there are any other issues I need to address with it before releasing it to distribution.

[Sweet19blue]

Hello,

Just want to report a behavior I had on my flight with new 3.2 version. 

I paused the game for about 1hr and when I went back to the flight, the FPS were very laggy. I had 30fps and smooth experience before pausing the game but after unpausing it was 15fps and not playable. No apparent weather change. What I did is refreshing skymaax setting and the game went back to 30 fps and smooth.

Also I would like to understand why there is no visual change in clouds when I set visibilty setting to max? Altough my FPS went really bad, there was always that clouds carpet with clear border around my plane. The clouds seems to move with the plane rather than the plane moving above them. I was flying FL340.

Best regards,

Pierre

 

[sundog]

Andy, I looked more deeply into your setup to see what might be going on.

First, I loaded up the metar.rwx file you provided and flew around Detroit. The weather was pretty crappy as you described, but I didn't see any sort of issues.

Then I took a closer look at your system specs, and realized you're using a graphics card that only has 1GB of video memory. I think that explains a lot, and video memory usage is something I don't think your Apple rep looked at.

I think you should try my original advice - temporarily remove custom scenery, and fly with a default plane, and see if that clears it up. I think the weather in this region just pushed your system over the edge because you ran low on memory on your video card. Ultimately you'll probably need to make some trade-offs by uninstalling custom scenery, reducing your render settings further, or flying with a less demanding plane.

I don't think the SMP 3.2 update has anything to do with it. You could try reverting to 3.1.2 as a test, but I would expect that to make things worse, not better.

 

[brucie1dog]

Hi Frank,

I appreciate you taking such a deep look into my issues. My question is why did all this occur with the upgrade to 3.2? 

Andy

[sundog]

28 minutes ago, brucie1dog said:

Hi Frank,

I appreciate you taking such a deep look into my issues. My question is why did all this occur with the upgrade to 3.2? 

Andy

It may have been coincidence that weather conditions got bad enough in the real world to trigger performance issues after you installed the update. Or, perhaps you adjusted some settings after upgrading and that's what affected performance, not the upgrade itself.

I have heard legends of mysterious performance problems resolving themselves upon re-installing the same version of SMP, however. I can't think of a logical explanation of why that would work, but may be worth a shot.

 

[brucie1dog]

Hi Frank

I just flew from Boston to Savannah. About 100 miles from Savannah  the weather started to get pretty nasty. I hit the reset button when the plane started to crawl (Thank You Pierre) and I was able to complete the flight like before the upgrade to 3.2. Hopefully doing a reset will solve this problem going forward. I have to admit I am always in search of the bad weather. Does hitting the reset give you any more thoughts on this issue?

Andy

Just completed two more flights. Savannah to Tampa (reset once) and Tampa to Raleigh (had to reset twice). Both had nasty weather. So the reset seems to do the trick. Will try another flight to Detroit tomorrow. To see how that goes.

Edited June 7, 2016 by brucie1dog

[sundog]

Well, when you hit "reset" it basically clears out all of the clouds and recreates them - which will have the effect of un-fragmenting your video memory in the process. I'm afraid it's more evidence that your video card just doesn't have enough memory on it to handle what you're asking it to do.

[Sweet19blue]

I had 1,5 go of vram free (on 4 go) in my last flight but even with that, all became laggy until I resest Skymaxx.

I will report back with log when I find time to do another flight.

Pierre

[brucie1dog]

According to Apple my Video memory is 2GB. So by hitting the reset which is un-frangmenting the video memory am I actually physically hurting anything? Is this a valid workaround for this situation with my current computer?

[brucie1dog]

I'll be interested to see what happens on your next flight Pierre. Like I mentioned earlier I did not experience these issues until I upgraded to 3.2

[Sweet19blue]

As I am really new to Xplane (thanks to IXEG) I onnly did a few flight with 3.1 so it will be difficult to compare. I wonder if I will have the same issue withour pausing the game for a long time. Will see

Pierre

[brucie1dog]

Pierre,

I pause mine all the time and that doesn't seem to have caused any issues. II just took out off of pause after being on pause for 14 hours and no issues with it.

Andy

[sundog]

Even 2GB can be insufficient if you're running a complex aircraft and/or custom scenery. Can you try flying with a standard plane and standard scenery as a test, and see if that helps?

[brucie1dog]

I just downloaded and installed a new version of 3.2 to see if that would make a difference. Doing a quick KDTW to KTPA flight.  There some rain and weather in the Tampa area. We'll see if a newly downloaded version makes a difference. If that doesn't work I'll go ahead and use another a less complex  plane without the customs scenery.

[brucie1dog]

HI Frank,

Wanted to give you an update. I spent a lot of time flying around and uninstalling and reinstalling 3.2. Finally I ran out of downloads and wound up buying it again last night. After I had reinstalled 3.2 last night it didn't do so well. It seemed like no matter what I tried with reseting and changing the cloud density to particles it got worse. Thats when I decided to uninstall and wound up buying another set of downloads. I started a flight from MUHA to KJFK last night and completed it a little while ago. About 100 miles south of KJFK the slow down happened again. I may be wrong here but it always seems to happen when you are descending. I hit reset and it didn't clear the situation. I then went back in and changed to dense particles and and the cirrus cloud setting to dense particles and I was able to continue the flight without any problems.  I am enclosing my log text for your review. One more flight from KSAV to somewhere in South Florida. If it goes crazy again and I can't take care of it with a  reset I'll take the custom scenery out first (do another flight) and if that doesn't work I'll try a basic plane.

Andy

Log.txt

[Cameron]

1 hour ago, brucie1dog said:

Finally I ran out of downloads and wound up buying it again last night. After I had reinstalled 3.2 last night it didn't do so well.

No need to purchase twice, Andy.

I've processed a refund for you.

[sundog]

I really think you're low on video memory, Andy. I think experimenting with your usage of custom scenery and third party aircraft will make a difference. Reducing the cloud draw area setting in SMP may also help, but as I recall you already have that set fairly low. Ultimately you'll have to make some trade-offs, or upgrade your system I'm afraid.

 

[hw314]

SMP 3.2 keeps crashing my XP.  Not amused

Log.txt

[brucie1dog]

Hi Frank,

I read your comments about my system being low on memory. After I posted last night I completed 3 flights into heavy weather SkyMAxx  and had no issues. This morning  I completed a flight from JFK to RSW. All went well. I quit X-Plane and went to reopen it and after several attempts X-Plane repeatedly quit. I thin installed SkyMaxx 3.2 and washable to open up X-Plane. I then reinstalled SkyMaxx and now it won't open again. Something just doesn't seem right here.

 

Andy

Log.txt

[prattpt6]

I am as well getting CTD's after a certain amount of time flying, seems to be consistent too, might have to roll back to previous version 

[brucie1dog]

I am  also thinking as well to go back to previous version. I wish I was more technically astute so I understood exactly what is causing these issues. We'll see what Frank says.

Edited June 9, 2016 by brucie1dog

[sundog]

9 minutes ago, brucie1dog said:

I am  also thinking as well to go back to previous version. We'll see what Frank says.

You're free to go back to SMP 3.1.2 if you wish, but I can assure you that 3.2 uses fewer system resources given the same settings, not more.

Edited June 9, 2016 by sundog

[sundog]

53 minutes ago, hw314 said:

SMP 3.2 keeps crashing my XP.  Not amused

Log.txt

Please try updating or re-installing your aircraft; it's throwing a lot of errors in your log. And temporarily disable X-Life. See if that helps.

That's really just the tip of the iceberg; I see other errors associated with other plugins as well in your log, as well as a bunch of conflicting custom scenery.

I think SMP is crashing because one of these other plugin errors corrupted memory, or your custom scenery caused X-Plane to run out of resources when we were trying to create new clouds.

[brucie1dog]

Frank,

I will do all that later on today and see where I get and advise. However  I can't even find X-Life on my system.

Thanks, Andy

Edited June 9, 2016 by brucie1dog