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Captains, It is with a lot of enthusiasm and excitement that I get the opportunity to announce SkyMaxx Pro v4.0 to you today! A few people have speculated out there on whether we were announcing the next version soon, or what may be in it, and today we can tell you a whole lot more! Without question, SkyMaxx Pro v4 is going to be our most exciting of the SkyMaxx Pro series to date. The features it brings to the X-Plane experience are pretty awesome, so without further ado, the feature list for SkyMaxx Pro v4 is as follows (a preview video will follow soon): - Double your maximum cloud draw area! Big performance improvements allow clouds to be drawn across an area up to 320 km across surrounding your plane. Go ahead and crank up SMP's cloud draw area setting and achieve fast, realistic scenes at FL300 and above. - Did we mention big performance improvements? SMP4 is faster than ever. - New 3D precipitation system that represents rain, sleet, wet snow, and dry snow - as well as mixed precipitation that responds automatically to the ambient temperature. Precipitation is even lit by your landing lights! And an whole new precipitation control panel lets you tweak its appearance to your own liking. - Precipitation is tied to individual clouds in SMP4. Rain will start and stop realistically as you fly underneath or through the clouds. - All-new "HD Cloud Puffs" overcast representation! Fly through large, thick overcast layers built from real HD cloud photos, without killing your framerate. Overcast clouds have never looked so good from above and below. - Higher-resolution scattered and broken cumulus clouds, with twice the resolution as SMP3. - Cirrus and cirrocumulus clouds now move realistically relative to your plane's motion. - Works better than ever with Real Weather Connector: more accurate representations of ground fog, thunderstorm placement, and stratus/overcast cloud placement when used with RWC. - Adjusts lighting on distant cloud puffs at night ...and a few more unannounced features yet to come! Screenshots (Click to see large view): Showing the new, doubled maximum cloud draw distance (both images above 30,000 ft) with the new overcast! The all-new SkyMaxx Pro Precipitation Settings Window and showing off some SkyMaxx Pro 3D snow getting lit up by aircraft lights! As explained above, SkyMaxx Pro now has 3D rain, sleet, wet & dry snow! Showing the new HD Clouds Some 3D rain effects shown. Precipitation stops if you are not under a cloud! Showing some gorgeous clouds generated by SkyMaxx Pro 4 as we coast into the sunset. We're excited to show you more! Information on upgrade eligibility: SkyMaxx Pro v4 will be a paid upgrade for all current SkyMaxx Pro v3 owners. Those of you who qualify will receive a 50% off ($19.95 instead of $39.95) upgrade discount which will be valid for 60 days from the time SkyMaxx Pro v4 goes on sale. After this, the product will go to full price for all customers. Information on release: SkyMaxx Pro v4 will be released in as short order as possible. We currently have a beta team being assembled and about to go through Release Candidate builds. Once that is done it's on to packaging and release. We will keep everyone updated as we get closer to the release. It would be safe to say you can see SkyMaxx Pro v4 hit the store this USA holiday season! X-Plane 10 & 11: We will support both X-Plane 10 and 11. There will not be a separate cost for these products. If you purchase SkyMaxx Pro v4 you are assured compatibility with both (keep in mind if adjustments need to be made for X-Plane 11 it may not work on day one, but it will be as quickly as possible after as we will have early access copies to work with. Therefore, it is possible we have SkyMaxx Pro working on the first day of release for X-Plane 11 as well should changes really be necessary). Thanks to everyone for their continued support in this amazing product! See you in the skies!

Sorry for the delayed answer. The project is definitely not dead it's just progressing at a slower pace at the moment. The reason for that is my newly born daughter who takes up nearly all of my and my wife's time. For those of you still interested in the project I attached a picture showing the current status of the overhead panel. Please feel free to leave a comment if you like. Take care Martin

I tested this yesterday and as it looks very impressing from 0 to ~15000 feet, once you get above 20000 feet the colors of the ground haze, the sky and the clouds look somewhat off. At least for the weather yesterday around LSZH when I did my test flight. Like the clouds have a warmer "whitebalance" than the grey horizon and the haze on the ground looks colder. I need to do more flying to figure out an opinion. First impression was: Pretty good! I think the only real issue there is for me is that I need a GTX 1070 because my 970 is running out of VRAM

Today I did some specific tests regarding a feature I never told you about: I planned a function in order to automatically update the plane when the plugin find a newer version, in this way you shouldn't worry about missing and/or manual updates and theoretically you could update every single component of the plane (the code allow this), no matter if the update is about a script, a texture, a sound, an object or anything else... the only possible issue is about the generated data traffic when transferring big files such textures or objects, that's something I need to analyze carefully. In short when an update is available you'll see this sequence: You'll decide to accept the update or not, it's up to you. Let's say that you have accepted the update, so let's stop the main script engine: starting to get the updated files and apply them: Finally, you'll be prompted to reload the plane: If something goes wrong during the update process another window will tell you that, the only issues I found during this process are about internet connection and/or server availability, nothing else, in this case you can reload the plane and then choose to try again or decline the update in order to try later.

Hello friends. I introduced a major change in the formula that determines the App Speed. That approach speed setting must have a relative speed headwind/side, as the impact angle with respect to the aircraft. It is 0º to an impact of wind on the aircraft directly on the side thereof; and is 90º, that such an impact is totally opposite. When the impact is full front (90º), the wind speed decreases by 50% to effect the formula Speed App. When the impact is 45 °, the wind speed decreases by 35% to effect the formula Speed App. However, it can be seen that the rate of wind correction to consider, not uniform growth. Therefore, the origin formula was modified to approximate a reasonable estimate regarding the wind speed to be considered in the formula App Speed. It is really wonderful as the B733-IXEG behaves when it is flown with values that are present aerodynamics. Try it and am at Your disposal for anything. IXEG_Spreadsheet_v1.2.xlsx

I think I caught the effect quite well here -

Few updates lately as I'm very busy with the holdings management so lot of coding activity, here are two screenshot of actual work in progress: Actually I plan it to be a simple management, probably limited to no more than two, three holdings due the complexity of the system, but I’ll try to improve it in subsequent updates.

New ways of representing stratiform / overcast is definitely on my radar. Thanks for the feedback!