SkyMAXX 3 - What's Wrong With This Picture?

[djMot]

This is real world weather in XP-10 10.41.  Skies are completely overcast here, and I can tell you with complete certainty that it doesn't look like a disc overhead with the sun beaming in from underneath like in this screenshot.

 

Frankly, since installing SkyMAXX 3, I've been unimpressed, and this screenshot just cements that sentiment, but it also brings up the very real possibility that there is something truly broken here.  A much anticipated and highly rated product like this simply can't perform this horribly, right?

 

 

[Cameron]

Wish you would have posted a screenshot of the weather screen as well.

[djMot]

Wish you would have posted a screenshot of the weather screen as well.

 

The weather screen looked like the attached.  Not that much time has gone by since my flight, and conditions have not changed.

 

Main reason for the flight was to experience SkyMAXX 3 in our first snowstorm.  It's not snowing here at KMSN yet, well, at least not on the ground.  The radar shows there's snow aloft.  It took till just before landing at KDBQ (Dubuque, IA) before any snow showed up.

 

The flight went something like this:

• Take off with a cloud disc above me.
• Climb above it and find nice edge to edge overcast.  Yea!  At least that looks right.
• Sudden change to the disc above me again.  ???
• Sudden change to clear skies above and just a few cumulus scattered about below me. ??????
• Descend into the Dubuque area.  Encounter snow and that disc above again with a slightly more dense array of cumulus below.  Lightning too (but no thunder, btw, and SoundMAXX is installed.)
• Turn final for KDBQ Rwy36.  Aside from the low bottom cumulus, perfectly clear view of the runway end to end
• 2mi final and suddenly it's like fog and I can barely see the runway beyond the running rabbit.

So many wild and goofy swings in the sim weather, but there's just not much of any change between here and Dubuque in real life.  The distance is not all that great.  It's a quick flight.

 

IDK, maybe there is no weather smoothing in SkyMAXX, so probably all the abrupt changes are on X-Plane, but I have no idea what's up with the overcast disc.  As I understood it, SkyMAXX 3 was supposed to extend clouds to the horizon.  And given the relatively uniformly crappy overcast  weather currently in progress between Madison, WI and Dubuque, IA, there's something really wrong with more than just the visual engine.

Edited November 21, 2015 by djMot

[mmerelles]

This is real world weather in XP-10 10.41.  Skies are completely overcast here, and I can tell you with complete certainty that it doesn't look like a disc overhead with the sun beaming in from underneath like in this screenshot.

 

Frankly, since installing SkyMAXX 3, I've been unimpressed, and this screenshot just cements that sentiment, but it also brings up the very real possibility that there is something truly broken here.  A much anticipated and highly rated product like this simply can't perform this horribly, right?

 

It looks to me the weather conditions were overcast but because your draw cloud distance is at the minimum it is only rendering a tiny bit. Maybe the devs can comment on this.

 

edit: misspelling

Edited November 21, 2015 by mmerelles

[djMot]

I set the cloud draw distance to max, but it had no effect.  Then I hit reset just in case something I might have done previously was screwing it up, although I don't think I've messed with the settings at all since 3.0 was installed, but maybe a carryover issue from 2.5?  Anyway, it was then I took the screenshot - after reverting to defaults.

[sundog]

I would need to see your log.txt to figure out what's going on. That "disc" you're seeing is not normal, and I've never seen it before nor heard it reported before. It looks like your video drivers are ignoring our command to disable far clipping on the cloud layers, so we'll need to know what your video card is and what capabilities it exposes (which is in your log.txt file.) Your log will also report the specific cloud conditions present, which may be needed for us to reproduce what you're seeing.

 

Short story: what you're seeing is a rare fluke that I've never seen before, and may be specific to your video card and driver version. If you want us to track it down, we'll need your log.txt file after you've experienced it.

[djMot]

Awesome.  Attached is the log and some screenshots from just now.  As you can see, the weather screen shows overcast at the departure airport.  Taking off, however, I was in what appeared to be high-level haze with scattered cumulus clouds.  At least at takeoff, the high-level stuff was blending pretty well, but it was far from what I would call overcast.  Then all of a sudden the clouds disappeared.  The disc above the aircraft continued to become darker and more defined.

 

I switched Fly With LUA/RTH on and off, but the despite dramatic effect on the scene, the disc of overcast or haze remained.

 

 

Log.txt

[sundog]

That doesn't look like the first set of conditions you posted - those screenshots look like what I would expect for the weather conditions it's receiving. It's that small disc you posted originally that I found unusual.

 

There's nothing unusual about your video card, so my hunch was probably wrong on that. Updating your drivers couldn't hurt, though. You mentioned RTH was in the mix, and I could see that causing strange artifacts in the sky if it were configured in certain ways.

 

One thing I did notice is that your aircraft is using an old version of SASL, which may be causing problems. You may want to see if a newer version of your aircraft is available.

 

I think however you'd be happiest if you changed SkyMaxx Pro's stratiform setting to "dense particles" or "sparse particles" though.  What's going on in this scene is that your weather conditions are specifying stormy conditions with a low stratus cloud in the scene. SkyMaxx Pro is trying to prevent the stratus cloud from intersecting with the storm clouds by pushing up the stratus layer, which is why you see a gap at the horizon below the high stratus layer. The real problem is that the quality of the METAR data you are receiving is suspect. Here's what we're getting sent:

 

SkyMaxx Pro: Created cumulus congestus layer alt 409.000000 size 50000.000000 density 0.333333

SkyMaxx Pro: Created stratus layer alt 1018.000000 thickness 1829.000000 density 1.000000

SkyMaxx Pro: Created cumulonimbus cloud at -7886.328125, 10575.523438

SkyMaxx Pro: Created cumulonimbus cloud at -36486.750000, 24566.734375

SkyMaxx Pro: Raised stratus layer to avoid a layer collision.

 

It's pretty weird to have a cumulus layer that low with a stratus layer right on top of it!

 

However, if you set the stratiform setting to one of the particle representations, Skymaxx Pro won't be forced to juggle the cloud layers around in this situation, which will probably look better to you.

[djMot]

Couple of things about the difference between my first flight and the one you commented on, Frank...

 

First - it's the altitude.  The closer you are to the disc of overcast, the further out it appears to extend.  Sitting on the runway makes it look like a much more local phenomenon - like the very first picture I posted.  Compare that to the middle image in my second post.  Same overcast, but as I'm flying much closer to it, it appears to extend quite a bit farther out.

 

Second is the time of day.  In my first two posts, the time of day was late afternoon.  At that point, the sun could literally appear below the disc of overcast making for a completely bizarre and unrealistic looking scene.  In my last post, we're seeing the same type of overcast, but at mid day.  The 4th and 5th shots look entirely similar to the one in the first post, but the time of day results in blue rather than orange sky colors under the disc.  Still, the edge of the overcast disc is equal distinct at either time of day.

 

As for the quality of the METAR, well, there's not much I can do about that.  But we're looking at METAR over just short of a 24 hour period with essentially the same results.  I thought we were getting METAR from the same sources real-world pilots use.  And given that this was a particularly dangerous flight condition for this region with upwards of a foot of snow forecast, I would think the weather service would be paying particular attention to accuracy.  idk.

 

I'll play around with the stratiform settings, but if as you say, I'd be much happier with them set differently, then why not ship that way out of the box?  After all, it's not like the kind of complete overcast we had here over mid-day Friday to mid-day Saturday is unusual or rare.  Or does this setting turn out to be the magic FPS kill switch?

 

Apparently, I disabled the GeForce Experience otherwise I would have realized I'd fallen a few versions behind on the video driver.  Oops.  My bad.  I'll "clean install" the latest version.

 

As for the aircraft, I found there is a minor update available (1.12 to 1.15) but the change log does not mention integrating any more current edition of SASL whether they did or didn't include one.

[Cameron]

It's not shipped that way because the eye candy people like is not that selection. It just so happens in your scenario it may work better with Frank's suggestion.

[djMot]

Sorry, I guess I interpreted Frank's suggestion to mean it would be a more faithful representation of the real-world weather.  What I saw out my window here in the Madison, WI area was a solid overcast.  Not even sure where the METAR came up with a cumulus layer because I would have called it a solid stratus layer from what I could see from below it.  What I was expecting to see in the sim was what is shown at time index 1:10 in this RedPiper1 video, except from beneath rather than from above.

 

[Cameron]

What I was expecting to see in the sim was what is shown at time index 1:10 in this RedPiper1 video, except from beneath rather than from above.

 

What is shown is only what it's told to show. It definitely sounds as though your METAR was perhaps majorly messed up. That's all controlled/interpreted by X-Plane or whatever other plugin you use to download such sources and set X-Plane weather, so I'm not sure we can be all to blame.

 

A test:

 

Open X-Plane and set your own weather settings manually of what you personally would have expected to see. Does this now look better represented than what you saw in this real weather download situation?

[djMot]

Based upon the weather settings in the first attached image - solid stratus, and the images set at the different Strats / Overcast settings, no, I'm not seeing any better representation than before.  One change I did make between the other flights and this test is that I set the Cloud Draw Distance to max.  No effect really.  Still an overhead disc that clearly allows the sun to get in underneath.   And wow was I right with my suspicion about the FPS Kill Switch, lol.

 

 

[djMot]

Here's another set I just took that also makes no sense to me.  X-Plane's weather screen shows overcast skies, but what I'm seeing is just a sparse cumulus layer in what might also be considered a "disc" but the sparsity of the clouds makes it just look a little less disc-like.  Log after the flight included.

 

 

 

 

Log.txt

[sundog]

Well, for whatever reason, X-Plane is interpreting the conditions where your plane is as cumulus there. Perhaps you should consider using a third-party weather engine.

 

Your other post (13) looks as expected for the conditions specified.  I think what's going on is that the visibility is a little bit low, and that's limiting how far out we can draw clouds. If you were to increase the visibility, you'd see the clouds start curving over the horizon, which I think is what you really want. If you were the reduce it, X-Plane should start drawing the sky as gray which would also look more natural. If you were to disable SkyMaxx Pro, I think you'd find that X-Plane's default weather representation also allows the sun to shine through in those conditions as well.

[djMot]

Okay, I played with the visibility setting a little today.  If I set it for greater visibility, the edge of the cloud disc became more sharply defined, but closer to the horizon.  If I lowered the visibility the sun got a bit fuzzier, but the band of sky under the disc became taller.

 

I think I can sum up all of this with a few observations at this point:

 

1) Regardless of anything else, SkyMAXX Pro 3.0 has the best weather visuals (that I've seen) for X-Plane thus far.

2) In all probability, the X-Plane weather data supplied to your addon is crap.

3) Any claim that SkyMAXX Pro 3.0 draws a complete overcast cloud layer such that it "Extends all the way to the horizon" is simply not true.

4) The inability to extend clouds to the horizon is probably a limitation of X-Plane that is insurmountable by any addon.

 

Not what I had hoped for, but it is what it is, I guess.

 

Thanks for all your patience getting to the bottom of this.

[sundog]

I think your main quibble is that due to X-Plane's flat coordinate system, it's possible to position the sun such that it is visible from underneath a stratus layer *if* X-plane's visibility is not consistent with what I'd typically associate with a stratus cloud. Usually in those sorts of overcast conditions,  X-Plane will draw the sky as gray, which blends in with the stratus cloud at its edges. But when the sky is bright and visibility is high, the edge of the stratus cloud becomes visible when seen from below, breaking the "to the horizon" illusion. What we're really speaking to with that claim is the sheer size of the stratus cloud layer (250km) which does extend to the horizon when viewed from typical GA altitudes from above.

 

Mostly I think we're on the same page, but I want to make clear we're not setting out to deceive anyone.