sundog

It has to do with HDR mode. If you lower your graphics settings to a non-HDR setting, cloud shadows will appear darker. They way X-Plane's lighting system works internally in HDR mode doesn't allow us complete control over how dark the cloud shadows are, but we make them as dark as we possibly can. There are also some special cases, such as if haze is present, where we intentionally make the shadows less prominent. But it looks like visibility is good in your screen shot, so I don't think it's that.

Think I found the issue - it seems sensitive to the time of day more than anything else (dusk or dawn makes this more likely to happen), combined with the type of terrain and weather conditions. I have a fix for the underlying issue ready to go for our next update. In the meantime, if you're encountering this, the best workaround would be to disable cloud shadows, or change the time of day. It's also more likely to happen with low "cloud draw area" settings, but that's not the case for you.

OK, so I was able to get this to happen by flying in that area, in OpenGL and your graphics settings, with overcast clouds. Definitely something wrong there. I'm looking into it.

It looks to me as though SkyMaxx Pro is not getting a valid depth buffer for the scene back from X-Plane here for some reason. This would cause it to not be able to properly drape the cloud shadows over the terrain. Where you you flying when you saw this? I can take a look and see if I can reproduce it. It's possible the issue is specific to your rendering settings in X-Plane. Try different graphic quality settings (specifically toggling HDR) and different AA settings. It's also possible that it has to do with custom scenery. It would also be a good idea to update your video drivers and the version of SMP you are using. The odds are low it will fix this but it's worth a shot.

The sharp edges where the shadows fall off may be caused by having the "cloud draw area" setting set too low in the SkyMaxx Pro configuration. If you can increase that, it may help.

Yup, I just heard back from Laminar and they confirmed this is an open driver bug with AMD.

Going through my older notes from Laminar, it sounds like there is a known driver bug with AMD that would be specific to MSAA under Vulkan. Might be interesting to see if lowering your anti-aliasing settings fixes this.

Any chance you have an AMD video card? If so, do you have the very latest drivers installed? I assume this only happens in Vulkan mode, right? I've got a note out to Laminar to see if it's what I think it is...

Hm. We're querying the AMD driver directly for your total video memory and DirectX for the amount of memory used. I'm guessing AMD's tools must have access to better data that isn't exposed to us for some reason. I suspect you are in fact using up your physical video memory on the card, but there is also some shared memory in the picture that we don't know about but the AMD tool does. It's probably tight, but if you're not seeing any performance issues, it's safe to ignore I'd say.

The most recent log.txt I see posted in this thread does not indicate that SkyMaxx Pro caused your crash. It appears to have happened within X-Plane itself. What's most likely is that SkyMaxx Pro just pushed your setup over the edge in terms of how much memory it had to work with. It was just one plugin too many.

My guess would be that there is some sort of geometry outside of these third-party planes, perhaps transparent geometry, that is polluting the depth buffer. Only the makers of the 3rd party aircraft in question could address that. You might be able to work around it by setting the cloud/terrain blending to zero in the SkyMaxx Pro configuration, and maybe also cloud shadows. Both of those features rely on reading back the depth buffer, and could create anomalies if the depth buffer isn't right.

I'll just reinforce John's suggestion here - set up a new installation of X-Plane in a new installer, install SkyMaxx Pro into the clean installation, and see if that works. I think this is either: - Some sort of corrupted installation (which this would fix) - Some conflict with some other third party add-on that we haven't encountered before (which this would also fix) - Some incompatibility with your specific system configuration that we haven't encountered before (which this wouldn't fix) We have checked this update on several Mac's and it works without issue. I realize it's frustrating, but you seem to have encountered a unique issue and the only way to figure it out is if we work together on narrowing it down.

If you have a chance, please file this as a bug with Laminar with details about the multi-monitor behavior - I think it's an issue with their plugin UI widgets and not something we can fix on our end.

I think you found some bad information on the Internet - "Saved Settings" should be empty unless you have explicitly saved settings files for later use. Are you using real-world weather, or setting up cloud conditions manually? If you set up an overcast layer in the weather settings manually, do you still see no clouds? Just trying to understand the nature of the problem; I have in fact not seen this before.

Your SkyMaxx Pro settings file might be corrupt for some reason. Try deleting the settings.dat file in your resources/plugins/silverlining directory, and set up your preferences again. You're not missing any resources, it's just that your setting isn't "sticking" for some reason.

This is totally a guess, but is the scale in your Windows display settings set to something other than 100%? The issue might be something along those lines. We just use the UI widgets provided by X-Plane for addons to use, so you may have stumbled across a bug in X-Plane itself.

Your log indicates that X-Plane is telling SkyMaxx Pro that the weather conditions are clear. Whatever's wrong seems to be upstream of us. I noticed a plugin called "GoodWay" in your log that appears to be doing something with X-Plane's weather files. I'm not familiar with GoodWay, but you might want to try disabling it to see if it's somehow interfering with things. Using Real Weather Connector would also give you more flexibility in how SkyMaxx Pro gets its weather information.

Laminar is being extremely good about communicating with add-on developers when they do something like that, so even if they do change something we should be on top of it!

Those aren't just very few clouds, it's no clouds. It may indicate an issue of some sort with your software license. If you can post your log.txt file from your X-Plane folder, it might tell us what's going on.

Keep in mind that the true FPS cost of SkyMaxx Pro is its FPS cost MINUS the FPS cost of the default clouds that it disabled. The FPS number in the plugin admin window is a bit misleading in our case. Yes, we consume resources to draw clouds - but this is taking the place of the resources X-Plane was using with its default clouds.

That's weird; it seems to work fine here. If you can give us a screenshot of your SMP setting screen and your log.txt it might help us understand what's going on.

I don't have a similar system, but my advice would be to keep HDR on, but turn down any other graphics settings (such as AA) you can. Setting the cloud draw distance in SkyMaxx Pro as low as you can tolerate will also help performance.

Please provide your log.txt following the crash, so we can see if it was caused by SMP or not.

I think I saw something in your log about the SMP config file being horked. You might want to delete your settings.dat from the SilverLining plugin folder to clear that up; it may be behind the cumulus setting not "sticking." Tested it here and it seems to work OK. Performance issues won't have a quick fix, so I'm going to push to get the fixes we have out in 4.9.2. There was also a bug with lens flare in Vulkan that this will clear up.

Thanks for your help; I think I managed to track this down and implement a fix for it. Stay tuned for 4.9.2.