Grid-like Flickering of Clouds

[Rockwell Lancer]

Good Evening,

I hope everyone's week has been going well!

 

I've been using SkyMaxx Pro v5 since release, and I've had a bizarre issue in Vulkan for the last little while where the clouds flicker and seem to turn into a grid-like wireframe of their shape, but only in cockpit view. When this happens, there also appears to be an outline of the cloud on the panels in the cockpit, too. I've been searching around for anyone else who may have had this issue, but unfortunately, I have come up dry, so I thought I would give creating a new topic a try. I have tried changing numerous graphics and SkyMaxx settings (including switching between volumetric and classic cloud styles) to see if it has any effect on the artefacting, but nothing seems to make much of a difference.

I have attached a screen capture of the flickering in progress, as well as a single frame of that capture, showing what the cockpit looks like when the clouds turn into these grid/wireframe objects. As well, my PC specs are as follows:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (16 GiB
32 GiB DDR4 RAM
Windows 10 Pro x64

If anyone can provide any insight or assistance into this strange behaviour, I would greatly appreciate it!

 

Thank you in advance!

RL

[sundog]

That's also a new one to us. Odds are it is a plugin conflict we haven't seen, with some add-on or third party plane that isn't restoring the graphics state properly. If you can post your log.txt it might tell us more.

Also make sure your drivers are up to date.

[Rockwell Lancer]

Good Evening Frank,

Thank you for getting back to me! My apologies for the delay in responding. I ran the sim again, and captured a log output while experiencing the same phenomenon as in my above screen captures. That is to say, this is a new log (i.e., not from the same time as the screen captures above), but I was still getting the flickering.

I also checked my video drivers, and can confirm that they are fully up-to-date. I hope this helps! Please let me know if there is anything else I can provide.

Dominick

Log.20210802.txt

[sundog]

OK, you do have several plugins I haven't seen before, and one that's been known to cause trouble in the past. As a first step, I would try temporarily disabling all plugins other than SilverLining (that's us) and Gizmo (which we need) via the plugin admin menu, and see if things render properly then. If so, start adding plugins back in until you find the culprit.

If that doesn't work, there are some specific combinations of anti-aliasing and HDR settings that have problems on AMD cards. Try changing your AA setting in X-Plane's graphics settings and/or the graphics quality and see if that clears it up.

Afraid it will take a little bit of experimentation, but there are lots of components here that can interact in strange ways. If you narrow it down, please let us know what you find here as it may help others.

Edited August 4, 2021 by sundog

[Rockwell Lancer]

Hi Frank!

Thank you for giving my log a look. You are indeed correct in suspecting it to be a plugin. It looks like the main culprit of the issues was the "iniDisplays" plugin, which is one of a few plugins bundled with the iniBuilds A310 being flown in the screen capture. Thinking back on it, I have primarily been flying both the A310 and the A300 over the last little while, both of which presumably use this plugin to render the PFD, ND, etc. in the cockpit. That would explain why I have only been seeing this issue recently.

I really enjoy both SkyMaxx though, and even though the A310 doesn't play nice with it, there are other aircraft I like to fly that evidently won't conflict with it. Is there a way to disable SkyMaxx without uninstalling it? That way, I can have my cake, and eat it, too, as it were (i.e., turn it on when not flying the iniBuilds airbuses).

Thank you again for your help in this matter!

Dominick

[sundog]

On 8/5/2021 at 7:26 PM, Rockwell Lancer said:

Hi Frank!

Thank you for giving my log a look. You are indeed correct in suspecting it to be a plugin. It looks like the main culprit of the issues was the "iniDisplays" plugin, which is one of a few plugins bundled with the iniBuilds A310 being flown in the screen capture. Thinking back on it, I have primarily been flying both the A310 and the A300 over the last little while, both of which presumably use this plugin to render the PFD, ND, etc. in the cockpit. That would explain why I have only been seeing this issue recently.

I really enjoy both SkyMaxx though, and even though the A310 doesn't play nice with it, there are other aircraft I like to fly that evidently won't conflict with it. Is there a way to disable SkyMaxx without uninstalling it? That way, I can have my cake, and eat it, too, as it were (i.e., turn it on when not flying the iniBuilds airbuses).

Thank you again for your help in this matter!

Dominick

Glad you found it... you should definitely notify the developers of your A310 plane as I think this is indicative of an issue on their end, where OpenGL is being left in an altered state.

To temporarily disable SkyMaxx Pro, you could deactivate the SilverLining plugin via your plugin admin menu in X-Plane. (Note there's an issue in X-Plane at present that will prevent you from re-activating it within the same flight, so restart X-Plane if you want to fly with it on again.)