sundog

You have a lot of hi-res scenery installed. What I think happened is that when you entered stormy conditions, loading up those clouds consumed more memory than what your system had left over after loading all of your custom scenery and other add-ons. Once your PC runs out of memory, it starts swapping to disk, and that means a dramatic reduction in frame rate. I know you have a good PC, but custom scenery can eat RAM and VRAM alive. It's not really a problem with SMP, it's just a matter of pushing your system too hard. Your log shows that you were flying over several ortho scenery and custom scenery tiles. If you were to fly through similar conditions using a default aircraft and default scenery, you might compare performance in a situation where SMP isn't competing for scarce resources.

Most people choose a slider value for the cloud coverage that provides acceptable performance on their system and leave it there. You don't need to fiddle with it during a flight; we're just saying that if you tend to only fly GA then you might want to consider a lower setting, as it will result in faster performance and more detailed clouds. But if you are flying an airliner, you'll want to set it as high as your system can manage.

X-Plane's weather screen should reflect what you see. We use the same METAR mechanism X-Plane uses, so it will be consistent.

SkyMaxx honestly has no interaction with your scenery loading. The sky colors may affect the color of distant, fogged scenery, but will not affect the loading of the scenery itself. You might want to go back to its default "Hosek Wilkie" sky colors, as that leaves X-Plane's default colors intact near and below the horizon - it would rule us out completely. Or you could set it to use X-Plane's default sky colors as a test. However i suspect this has more to do with changes in the new X-Plane beta releases and not with your installation of SkyMaxx Pro.

Can you give us a screenshot of the exact error message you're seeing? There's nothing about 11.10 that would be incompatible with Maxx-FX to our knowledge, so I think something else is going on that we need narrow down.

That's odd, and no I haven't seen that before. I would suggest switching your SMP settings from "solid overcast" to "HD cloud puffs" - that might help if it happens again. And make sure you're on the latest version of SMP (4.6.)

Might want to check your spam folder for a reply. I don't have access to the ticket system myself. However, I think I've heard of some MacOS versions where decompressing the installer is problematic. I've heard that running "stuffit expander" on it clears it up. Mac isn't my primary OS so hopefully someone else with more details can chime in here.

I think so - the only case where SkyMaxx pro would attempt to depict "fog" would be if you're in the middle of a "solid stratiform" cloud layer, which you would only see if you changed SMP's settings and configured a stratus cloud layer to be at ground level. In the general case, visibility effects are managed by X-Plane, not us.

SkyMaxx Pro doesn't actually affect X-Plane's visibility effects in any way. All it does is draw the sky and clouds. So yes, I would guess there was some sort of update in the visibility in the underlying weather data there.

carthorse, you'll want to experiment with the overcast representation setting in SkyMaxx Pro. If you're using real weather and Real Weather Connector, "HD Cloud Puffs" is probably best. Otherwise "solid stratiform" is probably the one you want. Make sure you're using the latest release (SkyMaxx Pro 4.6) as it has evolved quite a bit over time.

You might be too far from the VOR beacon at DFW; that's how SoundMaxx determines if you're near a "big" airport.

It's an issue with X-Plane itself that you can see runway lights through the clouds. This happens with SkyMaxx Pro, default clouds, X-Enviro, and every other cloud package. All we can do is wait for Laminar to address it in a future update.

When did you contact support, Ingrid? I don't have access to the licensing system myself, but hopefully this thread will get some attention from those who do.

It's just a matter of settings. Set the cumulus clouds to "fast" and the stratiform clouds to "dense particles" and you'll get the cloud style you prefer back. We changed the default representation because a lot of customers were telling us how much better a more 2D approach is! We can't make everyone happy out of the box, but we do provide settings that let you make the product your own.

No, there's no way to adjust this as a user. My only advice would be to use Real Weather Connector when possible, as it does provide lower cloud densities for few, broken, and scattered conditions compared to custom weather mode (but only when real-world weather is active.) I have adjusted the custom weather settings to be consistent with RWC and real-world weather for our next release, however.

Your log doesn't actually show a crash of X-Plane, 777-300. I don't see how SkyMaxx Pro could cause an issue with your aircraft. I'd suggest installing the latest update to your 767 if you don't have the most recent version. Sometimes old versions of SASL (which is probably part of your aircraft package) can cause trouble.

Sorry for the confusion; I was answering branislavmilic's posts. By "checked off" I mean the never change visible weather option should be activated. Guess I should edit the post to be more clear.

Nothing changed in 4.6 with regards to cloud formations, unless it's a storm system. I suspect you're flying around a corner of one of X-Plane's one-degree tile boundaries. When you cross one of the boundaries, X-Plane changes its internal coordinate system and we need to re-generate the clouds that surround you. Also, make sure "never change visible weather" is activated in RWC if you're using it and flying with real world weather. Otherwise, the culprit may be some third-party weather injector you're using that's updating the weather too frequently. SMP provides a variety of sky color sets if the one you're using isn't to your liking. Our Hosek-Wilkie model is the most accurate, but we're forced to blend it with X-Plane's own sky near the horizon in order to smoothly blend into X-Plane's haze and fog effects. I would imagine this could lead to some inconsistencies in some situations. If that's a deal-breaker for you, try one of the other sky color sets or the default setting.

Did you try the settings I suggested?

We don't own a VR headset so it's not something we specifically develop for. However, I'd recommend setting your overcast representation in SMP to solid stratiform if you're not using Real Weather Connector, or Dense Particles if you are using Real Weather Connector, to minimize the usage of billboards which I think is what you're talking about. That should help. For perfect VR, you need GPU ray-casted 3D clouds, and that just isn't practical yet on modern hardware at the scale and quality expected by flight simmers.

It looks like maybe you have the time of day set to dawn or dusk, which is increasing the contrast between the clouds and the sky. Choosing a brighter sky color set would help to reduce that contrast and make the clouds appear less bright. Your scene shows some scattered cumulus congestus clouds with a cumulonimbus or towering cumulus cloud developing amongst them. I'm not sure how you're generating your weather, but if you were in an area that was reporting overcast conditions with rain I think the scene would look more like what you want. Conditions like this do indeed happen. For example here's a reference shot I took while developing these clouds.

Many users have reported performance gains with SMP 4.6. But as Cameron said, every system is different. If you've exhausted your RAM or VRAM from installing too many other add-ons or custom scenery, or if you've set your X-Plane rendering settings or SMP settings higher than your system can handle, then SMP may not have enough resources to perform well. I talk about this a bit at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pl4j855W40 Just give it a try; it's easy enough to temporarily enable and disable plugins via the X-Plane Plugin Admin menu.

Change "solid stratiform" to "HD Cloud Puffs" and you should get much better results. This particular issue happens with unusually thick stratus clouds when "solid stratiform" is on.

My guess would be that you ran out of RAM or VRAM due to custom scenery, and the weather SMP was trying to load pushed things over the edge. It looks like it crashed when you crossed a one-degree tile boundary and SMP had to create new cloud layers in response. I think your SASL plugin is also a little out of date, but I'm not aware of any conflicts with the specific version you're running. My advice would be to see if you still see crashes without custom scenery or third party aircraft in the mix - or just turn down the cloud draw area in SMP to reduce its memory requirements.

"Fast" uses the least amount of VRAM, followed by "soft", and "crisp" takes the most. If you have sufficient VRAM, it's really more a matter of personal preference than performance.