sundog

It depends on how far away the camera is from the plane, but you'll see puffs of clouds flying by your plane if you set your settings to something other than solid or broken stratiform.

This actually looks like a video driver issue or even an issue with your video hardware. If you can remove and re-install your video driver with the latest version, it may help. On MacOS there may be little you can do however; your image does look symptomatic of a known hardware issue on some Mac models.

Are you using "solid stratiform" or "broken stratiform" clouds? If so you might want to try the other settings for different effects.

Cameron's right. It's just trying to install some XP10-specific sounds into XP10 paths in case you're running XP10 still. The errors in the log are safe to ignore.

Just to follow up, we spoke with Laminar about VR. X-Plane at present does not support third party plugins that do 3D in VR at all. It's expected that SkyMaxx Pro would not work in the current VR betas of X-Plane, and there's nothing we can really do about it until a future X-Plane update that is planned. Remember VR is a BETA feature in X-Plane right now. It's still in development, and it doesn't work with plugins yet - including ours. As things stand, we can't support it yet even if we wanted to. The good news is that we have a very good idea of what needs to be done once Laminar rolls out plugin integration support for VR, and it shouldn't be too hard.

I guess it depends on the scenery you're using and how it differs from what you consider "realistic", so there's no real answer to that. I'd recommend opening up the power user setting and just start fiddling with minor adjustments to saturation and gamma until you like what you see. That seems to be what other users looking for a more subtle change end up focusing on.

Hi, You should probably switch to default clouds when using VR for now. We don't even own a VR headset so we can't debug what's going on here. Our plan is to pick up an HTC Vive Pro once they go on sale, and then dig into what's going on. But that will obviously take time.

Your setup is almost identical to mine, so it's not that your PC is underpowered for sure. But what you're describing sounds like the symptoms of a memory leak somewhere, probably specifically related to video memory. If memory consumption increases over time, eventually your FPS will tank because your computer needs to swap that memory out which takes a lot of time. When you disable SkyMaxx Pro, it frees up all the memory associated with our clouds, which is what gives you enough memory back to keep going again. But the underlying leak is probably still there, and we've taken great care to ensure SMP itself does not leak. I see you have lots of other third-party plugins installed. Did you install something new before this started happening? If so it may be the real culprit. You also have a lot of custom scenery installed, which is also putting pressure on your memory. Even though your video card likely has 8 GB of memory, custom scenery can chew through that pretty quickly, especially if you're running at a high resolution that ends up using a lot of that video memory for your frame buffers. As an experiment, if you disable all other plugins and fly in a region with default scenery, I'm willing to bet you don't experience this problem even with SMP active.

I spent some time looking into these issues more deeply this morning. The transparency of solid overcast layers is indeed too much when viewing them from above. I've fixed this for our next release, as well as a fix for the weird effects on very thick overcast clouds. Apologies for misunderstanding what was being said here.

Look, it's just business. As things stand the cost of an HTC Vive is unlikely to be recouped anytime soon by new sales of SMP to VR users (bear in mind I only get a relatively small percentage of SMP's list price). Without a VR headset to test with, it's not something I can tune our products for. If you're flying in VR, you're probably better off switching to default clouds for now. I'm tempted to bite the bullet and just buy one anyhow, but resolution and screen door effects are still distracting to me - and something better is right around the corner. When I finally cave in though, I'll see what's going on.

We don't claim to do anything with visibility. SMP just draws clouds and the sky; visibility effects remain managed by X-Plane itself or whatever other weather add-ons you might be using.

Well, that's my theory. I think it's a little more complicated than that and there may be certain video drivers out there - specifically on Macs - that have more trouble than others with this particular cloud type. But any thickness that's consistent with nature - say, between 1000 and 5000 meters - should work fine.

Next time you see this, please post your log.txt following the flight so I can see what's going on under the hood. Also make sure your video drivers are up to date.

My guess is that the stratus layer you set up was very thin - if you make it thicker, say at least 1000 meters, it would probably look more realistic.

Real Weather Connector has absolutely nothing to do with the temperature data. All it does is translate X-Plane's METAR data into cloud placements in SkyMaxx Pro.

Sorry to hear you're disappointed. X-Plane add-ons and settings are however a game of tradeoffs - it does sound like you're simply pushing your rig too hard with too many addons. There are no ways to adjust SMP's resolution apart from what you see in our settings. The root of the problem, assuming you are using SMP's default settings apart from the cloud coverage, is likely that RWC creates many more cloud layers than X-Plane's default weather will, which means many more clouds to draw compared to the system you're used to tuning. You might consider adding something like FSGRW into the mix which will limit the number of cloud layers being fed in through the METAR data. Making sure SMP is still set to "fast" cumulus clouds and "HD Puffs" for overcast will also help. Shadows, soft clouds, reflections, and lens flare can also impact performance if they are enabled in SMP - reflections especially.

Not really - it just means that unnatural cloud thickness values for overcast clouds are being received via X-Plane's METAR data as opposed to some other engine. Anecdotally this seems to happen more often when NOAA is in the mix, but it's still possible with X-Plane's default weather engine too. My recommendation is still to switch SMP's stratiform setting to HD puffs from solid overcast if this is happening often for you. Using RWC should also prevent this from happening.

There are many ways in which you might "overload" your video card, and I don't know what test app you installed and what precisely you were looking for. Your log does indicate you've loaded up a large amount of ortho scenery and other add-ons that are probably causing you to run low on video memory, if not system memory as well. It's also possible that one of the many other add-ons you have installed is corrupting memory that's causing SkyMaxx Pro to crash. As we're not seeing crashes from others being reported, I have to think the real issue is one of the other add-ons you have installed. SMP does not do anything special upon seeing an upgrade of X-Plane, so the underlying issue must be something larger or external to us. I know you probably don't believe me, but X-Plane with add-ons is a complex system and all the parts interact with each other in complex ways. If you really want to test if it's us, you can install a clean X-Plane into a new directory, install no add-ons other than SMP and RWC, and see if the problems persist.

We haven't received anything, and honestly your note is the first I've heard of it. Have you tried SMP in 11.20b? Are there specific problems with it? I don't own a VR headset so I have no way of knowing myself.

Or, I could say it's a Christmas easter egg that makes the clouds look like patterns reminiscent of snowflakes...

This happens if SMP is told to create unnaturally thick stratus clouds, and you've set SMP's stratiform representation setting to solid overcast. From what I gather, this tends to happen with the NOAA weather plugin. So - you can switch to a different weather source, or switch to a different stratiform setting in SMP to avoid this.

Glad you got it working. The licensing is managed by Gizmo, not us, but your feedback should get back to its author as well.

This is probably an issue with the NOAA weather plugin creating an unrealistically thick stratus cloud layer, which can result in graphical anomalies if solid or broken overcast is selected. I don't think there's really much reason to use the NOAA plugin in X-Plane 11 from what I understand - its built in real world weather works quite well. But another workaround would be to use HD Cloud Puffs instead (or use Real Weather Connector which won't do that.)

I'm really not sure what's going on there, but try setting the overcast representation in your SkyMaxx Pro configuration to "HD puffs", and I think that might clear it up.

Rain is generally associated with stratiform clouds. Setting your overcast setting in SMP to "solid stratiform" will produce more natural looking stratus clouds from the ground, but it's rare for FSGRW to generate the conditions that would result in these cloud types being shown. As for cumulus congestus clouds that may be generating rain, it gets tricky because although they may appear dark from below, generally speaking they are still white from above. Earlier versions of SMP would darken the clouds based on how dense they were, but this resulted in a lot of complaints from people who still wanted them to appear white. So I guess that's a long winded way of saying - it's complicated, but setting overcast to solid stratiform may help in some situations. Regarding the lone towering cumulus clouds you're seeing - I'd recommend experimenting with not running FSGRW, but just letting SMP and RWC do its thing. We just place clouds where the weather data tells us to, so we rely on the fact that it's unusual for towering cumulus clouds to appear in areas where there are not other cumulus clouds present in nature. If you're seeing otherwise, it suggests a problem in the incoming weather data. Glad you're enjoying SMP/RWC overall!