Cockpit Whiteout

[cybersleuth]

I have been having trouble for about a month with whiteout in the cockpit when flying through overcast clouds using X-Plane 11.50,  SkyMaxx Pro and Vulkan. Here is what I do to make it happen. 1). In SkymaxxPro 4.9.5. set the "Overcast Textures" at either "Solid Procedural" or "Broken Procedural" 2). Set "Visual Effects" in the XP11 Graphics menu to medium or below (SkymaxxPro works ok with HDR on). When you enter a overcast cloud layer, all goes white (See Picture below). With Vulkan turned off and the  above steps applied , Skymaxx Pro generates no overcast clouds.  Thank you.

Log.txt

[mjrhealth]

Are you running 11.5 beta which version

[cybersleuth]

I am running 11.50 Beta 17 (Log.txt). I talked to Ben Supnik at Laminar Research a few times about this. He didn't have a fix for it. He told me to post the problem here.

[sundog]

Thanks for the details; I'm looking into it. I'm also in contact with Ben about the issue; not sure if it's on our end or theirs yet.

[sundog]

After some troubleshooting I'm pretty sure this is a regression in X-Plane itself. I forwarded the details to Ben. 

For now, choose a different overcast representation, or enable HDR, to work around the issue in Vulkan.

[sundog]

OK, so Ben figured out what's going on here. The short story is something did change in X-Plane, but the only way to work around it is on our end.

This problem only occurs if:

- You are running X-Plane 11.50+ AND

- You have HDR off AND

- You have anti-aliasing set to more than 1X AND

- You have cloud shadows or "solid" or "broken" overcast selected in SkyMaxx Pro.

Changing any of those things should work around the issue until we can get a fix out.

 

[cybersleuth]

Thank you.

[sundog]

OK, I have a fix coded up and tested here on Windows. Just need to make sure it builds on MacOS and then I'll package up SkyMaxx Pro 4.9.6.

There are some more performance improvements in this upcoming release, too.

 

[oldflyguy]

Busy hand are happy hands!  

[mjrhealth]

Cool teh more teh better

[sundog]

It turns out it's only possible to really fix this issue on Windows; because Apple deprecated OpenGL in 2018, MacOS doesn't have the newer features needed to work around this problem.

Laminar has agreed to add a new "dataref" in X-Plane so we can fail gracefully in this case (using MacOS with X-Plane 11.50, with HDR off and anti-aliasing on, while using solid or broken procedural overcast clouds.) As soon as that's released, we can release our fix.