Sudden changes / not so good :)

[xplaneorgisdumb]

hey, I am using this thing now since a week or so and I am facing problems when descending through several cloud layers, the sudden changes to the clouds produce a little pause which is annoying.

 

Its not unflyable, but after 1 week I have to say that I uninstalled it and will wait for an optimized version.

 

And yes, I have tested with no weather, FOAA, VATSIM... etc... not funny at all

 

Sorry to say this, I hope there will be more updates.

[JohnMAXX]

Sorry to hear you all of a sudden decided that SkyMAXX was no good,  are we speaking of small pauses in the simulator or abrupt changes in the cloud conditions?

 

If you are having pauses in the simulation, there may be a hardware missmatch on your system.  I suggest trying to adjust your rendering settings for best performance in X-Plane.  Additionally you can tweak SkyMAXX for better performance, a couple of big hits are the crupuscular rays and the cloud reflections......SkyMAXX is waaaaaaayyyyyy more frame-rate friendly over default.....

 

If you are speaking of when you fly through cloud layers how the clouds transition, this is a feature in SkyMAXX, like it or not.  We decided to de-activate "the grey screen of death" in favor of letting the new clouds dictate visibility, we have no plans on bringing this feature back since the vast majority of users were keen on this happening...

 

-John

Edited December 30, 2013 by JohnMAXX

[xplaneorgisdumb]

Pauses come only with Skymaxx. Pretty reproducable. Technical problem. I will try on different hardware and OS.

 

Transistions: OK, your decision. Its behaviour by design, I don´t like it, but thats not the biggest problem. Technically theres - at least from my point of view - the one or other opportunity to make it smoother   

[JohnMAXX]

Out of curiosity what are your rendering settings in xplane?

[xplaneorgisdumb]

Oh, I am playing around with it since i just got a 770 GTX. At the moment its all default with 4xFXAA/SSAA, and extreme Textures. And just for info: I am not gonna say "bwahaaha my 40 $ are gone I wanna refund", I will support the development of enhancements in the future as well, I am "just" not using it until its better.

 

Any tips for Rendering settings?

Edited December 31, 2013 by xplaneorgisdumb

[JohnMAXX]

2 things to look at right away would be your water reflection detail and draw distance......

 

Try setting the water reflections to low.......not even a noticeable change IMO

 

Draw distance to high......

 

Really with the overall lack of info on how you are running X-Plane  the best advice would be to tweak a bunch of settings to include SMP  until you gain better performance....

 

There is no such thing as a silver bullet solution,  just offering up some advice

[xplaneorgisdumb]

Yeah, I will play around the next days, but maybe you can get a look into the sudden changes and maybe be able to provide smooth transitions when loading the next cloud layer?

[HarryCYUL]

I also still have minor pauses with SMP but I finally got xp10 looking great and running smooth.  The clouds look great and I will keep an eye out 4 future updates.

[julianlockwood]

I am experiencing a similar problem. At random times, SkyMaxx decides to suddenly re-draw all the clouds in the frame simultaneously, instead of gradually replacing clouds as you move towards and through them. It detracts from an otherwise excellent experience.

[Cameron]

I am experiencing a similar problem. At random times, SkyMaxx decides to suddenly re-draw all the clouds in the frame simultaneously, instead of gradually replacing clouds as you move towards and through them. It detracts from an otherwise excellent experience.

This "random" re-draw you speak of would be because you are using real weather and X-Plane is communicating to SkyMaxx that it's time to re-draw the scene. SkyMaxx doesn't decide anything. X-Plane does.

[julianlockwood]

Hi Cameron

Thanks for your response. However, I never use the X-Plane real weather feature so this is unlikely to be the case. But - I have noticed that X-Plane does occasionally jump forward in time - this is apparent when flying at dawn or dusk, where the sky will suddenly lighten as if you had manually advanced the time by perhaps 5 minutes. These two issues tmight be connected.

Regards

JL

[xplaneorgisdumb]

Yes, exactly thats the point - but X-Plane-Redraws are quicker, so the stutter/pause is almost not noticable. And its not during actualization of weather, its during changing altitude to new cloud layers.

[Cameron]

Yes, exactly thats the point - but X-Plane-Redraws are quicker, so the stutter/pause is almost not noticable. And its not during actualization of weather, its during changing altitude to new cloud layers.

We draw clouds in true 3D, non repetitive form. X-Plane default clouds do not.

In 1.2 our draw code was optimized by roughly 75%. I do not anticipate we can squeeze much else out of this.

If you have uniform weather in X-Plane I do not understand why you have any pause. It only seems logical if you have real weather or randomly generated, non-uniform weather.

There's give and take here, guys.

[xplaneorgisdumb]

As I said above, I know Lets see if an upgrade of my RAM (from 6 to 32 ) will bring some more power to it. Seems that 64-bit xplane, even if its showing that its "just" using 4 GB by having 1 still free is starting to swap.

[bruced39]

Cameron,

 

I appreciate all you guys have done. But I must still say, I have the latest update, have been using this since day 1. use NOAA and have since even tried x-plane on default settings hoping skymaxx would work better and it just doesn't. I find, areas where there is no precip on radar and just clouds the pause is about 2-7 seconds. When precip is on radar but flying above it and not through it there are constant 1-3 second pauses for unknown reasons. But when a major weather update is called for from x-plane and precip is around its still a good 10+ seconds. I don't know what else I can do. I see others having the same problems. 1.2 has been better but it's taking the realism of flying a step back with the pauses. I have stated before. I have the following:

 

INTEL Core i7-3770K @3.5 clocked to 4.2

16 GB of ram installed

64-bit Windows

Geoforce GTX 780 with 4 GB latest driver of 331.82

(Note, this is my sim gaming computer) no other programs are running.

 

This may be for the X-Plane forum, I do note in my task manager X-plane is only using 3gb of ram when flying with the 64-bit version. i may need to see if this is normal and if not then why this is. I have 55% more memory available it says to use and thought X-plane would use as much as it could.

 

Your product is amazing, I appreciate the work you have done. But for me. I must also wait until someday the pauses are minimized much more. As I type my sim is paused at FL450 all clouds below us with precip below and just had a pause of 15 seconds. Then 15 seconds later a small 3 second pause..

 

I will continue to read the forums on ways people may find to minimize this problem.

 

 

Still think the product is a step up for X-plane just a step down for me for the realism with the pausing.

[JohnMAXX]

Bruced39 did you say you were using NOAA?  If you are I once suggested it but problems with that weather injector have become apparent after the release....

 

 

I like the NOAA plugin but in hindsight I wish I didn't suggest it for use with SkyMAXX Pro.....

 

 

You will get better results with default weather......Not perfect by any stretch but I can't suggest using NOAA because of a few problems.

[bruced39]

Hi John,

 

yes I use noaa. I will have it disabled now in flight and see if it helps. Thanks.

 

Dave

[bruced39]

I know your looking in the future for a new weather injector, but do you think until then you may find a good compromise update to have this work with the noaa app?

 

Dave

[JohnMAXX]

We are always working towards 100%  

 

With that said most are very happy with how SkyMAXX works, keep in mind better cloud representations, better frame rates and a better overall appearance and we do have an understanding that not everyone will be happy.....  But we will try.....

[Cameron]

I know your looking in the future for a new weather injector, but do you think until then you may find a good compromise update to have this work with the noaa app?

 

I think you have a misunderstanding as to how this all works.

 

NOAA (a weather injection app, but using close to default X-Plane real weather standards), tells X-Plane's weather engine what to do. X-Plane's weather engine tells SkyMaxx Pro what to do. 

 

The problem with NOAA is the refresh rate at which it updates weather, which will make the pauses more visible. In comparison to something like XSB or X-Plane real weather, NOAA will perform worse. This is not something we can control, as we did not program this NOAA application and how it deciphers when to change weather state (or how often for that matter).

 

I quite clearly stated that from a pause standpoint, we have essentially got the best we can out of this. MOST of our customers who reported pauses now report less than a second to NO pause at all with 1.2, whereas others report better results, but not satisfactory from a personal point of view (read: people like you).

 

I can't offer much for you here other than to say you should try flying without NOAA. You must realize that you're bringing in more plugins to play with one another, and we are not magicians for everything here.

[sundog]

A lot of what I'm reading in this thread sounds like memory thrashing, either on the CPU or GPU. Too many add-ons can lead to this condition. You can reduce SkyMaxx's memory footprint, if necessary, by reducing the cloud layer size setting, and selecting lower resolution cirrus textures. This isn't an issue with SkyMaxx Pro per se, it's just that there's only so much you can throw at a given system, and for some very small percentage of users SkyMaxx Pro is the straw that breaks the camel's back.

[bruced39]

Camron and John i totally understand and will do what I can with skymaxx if its possible to make my flying as best for myself. Thank you for your responses and thank you again for the quick replies and updates to the software.

 

I never meant this response as a dig on the software, rather trying to find out if there was something I was doing wrong or something i needed to do.

 

Dave

[JohnMAXX]

Not at all Bruce!  Just hoping you can find a solution.....

[bruced39]

Cameron,

 

i am tryinga flight right now with the real weather from x-plane 10. Its set to grab real-weather from the net and it does as I see the precip and clouds, but when flying the precip and clouds dissapear and become clear skies after takeoff. This is all while using Skymaxx and have the NOAA wx script not even loaded on start up. I notice after it downloads the button for the real weather moves to set weather uniformly.

 

Dave

[Cameron]

but when flying the precip and clouds dissapear and become clear skies after takeoff.

 

That's correct behavior. X-Plane is telling SkyMaxx Pro that the weather has changed in the pocket/area you are flying, and that the weather should change. 

 

There's a topic here somewhere on this. If you fly in areas with heavy precip, then fly to an area of a pocket of clear sky, X-Plane will tell SMP to re-draw for the area currently being flown in. We haven't figured out how to tackle this yet for such real weather scenarios.