Technical question regarding cloud layers

[FlyAgi2]

I read somewhere that Real Wether Connector is not limited by the three or in v11 six cloud layers X-Plane provides - is that right? The results I get seem as if RWC could workaround that limitation and gives a very different cloud positioning. 

Don't get me wrong, I don't have troubles with RWC, I am just interested in this point as this limitation ist something other people (and developers) are reffering to as a downside of XP. And, I don't like technical myths and like more knowing how things really are. 

[sundog]

Yeah, I know who you're talking about there.

SkyMaxx Pro combined with Real Weather Connector is not limited to 3 or 6 cloud layers - I forget the exact number, but last time I did the math the upper limit was in the thousands. Our approach is to completely disable X-Plane's cloud drawing and take complete control of it ourselves, so we aren't limited by anything.

Normally I'd say more, but I don't want to enable any competitors who are about to realize how hard this really is!

Wind layers might be a different story, but SMP/RWC only concerns itself with clouds. Actually, I can think of a workaround for wind layers as well without trying too hard.

Edited June 14, 2017 by sundog

[FlyAgi2]

Thank you... and the talking of some not yet xp-ready competitor is what me made think about this stuff. I have some thoughts about that talking and the expectations they create in the community just because of their general company reputation. I think those competitors until now did some very different stuff (injecting weather, injecting textures, minor visual tweaking of the default weather rendering) and this approach, as long as they are going to use the default weather rendering, won't bring the same results in XP as they do in ESP based sims (in my opinion, of course). Exactly, I think just positioning clouds and changing textures is something we can have in X-Plane already, and further most of the stuff is freeware. And, even if they could create good visuals, they will very likely run into performance troubles as the defaul weather is performing poorly as soon as there are many clouds on the screen and the airplane gets close to them. 

I had the RWC cloud layer stuff somewhere in my mind, but I had to ask for a clear answer to really know what I am talking about in discussions.