sundog

FOR GOD'S SAKE JUST STOP. ALL OF YOU.

My understanding is that installing SMP 4 on more than one X-Plane installation on the same machine is totally fine.

Please submit a support ticket - I think there are some MacOS versions where you need to uncompress the installer using stuffit expander or something like that. I'm not a Mac guy so I don't know the details myself.

The upcoming SMP 4.6 release will address performance in stormy conditions in other ways, too.

Try changing your HDR setting (graphics quality.) This issue seems to happen on some Mac models if HDR is not on.

That said it's something we're definitely interested in improving as much as we can. Stay tuned.

No, it shouldn't affect any custom sounds that come from third-party aircraft.

Puzzling. The next time your frame-rate drops, can you open up your SMP settings window and take a screenshot of it? That will give us more information about the state of your VRAM usage etc. at that point. Posting your log.txt might also turn something up - again after you've experienced this problem so we can see what was going on under the hood.

When you adjust SkyMaxx's settings, it deletes all of the existing visible and cached clouds and recreates them. This both frees up a lot of video memory and clears up some memory fragmentation that may have piled up. So it may be that you have a more general problem of memory running low or becoming fragmented on your video card, due to the pressure of that ortho scenery. When you change SMP's settings, it clears up enough memory to get you going again for awhile. Video memory is a shared resource, so just because changing SMP's settings clears things up, it doesn't mean SMP is the culprit for using too much of it. I'd try flying without that ortho scenery and see if that helps.

Any custom scenery in the mix here? The main thing that changes when you do this is that very little terrain and scenery is drawn.

Could it be you were flying into an area with thunderstorms? Those are heavy on performance, although they should be much faster in our upcoming SMP 4.6 release.

Do you have the most recent version available to you of SkyMaxx Pro? Make sure you re-install the latest version using the latest installer provided by X-Aviation; it should be available in your X-Aviation account. If you're still having trouble, you'll have to open a ticket with X-Aviation support; as the plugin author, I don't have anything to do with X-Aviation's license management system nor any control over it.

I've started seeing this myself with the X-Plane 11.02 update. In my case it only happens when thunderstorms are around, and I don't see any in your screenshot, so I'm not sure it's the same thing. However I do have a fix for the issue I'm seeing here queued up for the upcoming 4.6 release. If you are flying over custom scenery, that is another possible explanation if something in that scenery causes state issues in X-Plane 11.02.

My guess would be that all the clouds that are coming and going are causing memory fragmentation or paging within your video driver. Normally I'd advise lowering your cloud draw area setting, but it's already quite low in your settings - so I'd make sure you have the latest video driver for your video card installed as a next step.

We use the same METAR source as X-Plane itself, so I do think it's probably just the delay in METAR data that you're seeing. Typically there is a 1-2 hour delay, so what you see out the window may not match what's in the sim when we're dealing with quickly-forming summer storms. There are products such as FSGRW that provide an alternate weather source - SMP/RWC will work with it when set to "automatic" mode.

Try setting your strauts representation to "HD Cloud Puffs", and if you always run with real weather enabled, you can set RWC to "Always" to avoid any potential conflicts with other weather add-ons you may have installed.

Your log is inconclusive; it looks like you are loading lots of new scenery at the same time that SMP is loading up new weather conditions for some reason. So I'm not sure if the short freeze is due to scenery loading or SMP rebuilding its clouds in response to new weather data. To minimize the hit from SMP, you can do the following: - Make sure "never change visible weather" is selected in the RWC settings - If you have RWC set to "always", try "automatic" instead - this lets X-Plane manage when new weather is downloaded - Make sure SMP's cloud draw area setting isn't set higher than you need. - If you're not running SMP 4.5, every update has included performance improvements, so you would benefit by getting the latest version.

That might suggest that some object in your scenery is corrupting X-Plane's graphic state. Does this only occur when you're over some specific custom scenery package or custom airport?

You might try re-installing SMP, in case some resource it needs got corrupted on your drive somehow.

SkyMaxx Pro has nothing to do at all with traffic. I think something more complex is going on. Do you have any other plugins or add-ons in the mix?

Never seen or heard about anything like that. Are you sure it's SMP that's causing that? If so, seeing your log.txt file might shed some light on what's going on - or start by making sure your video drivers are up to date. If you're running with HDR off, try putting HDR on by increasing the graphics quality setting in X-Plane.

With FSGRW you can run RWC in either automatic or always mode. Those are indeed cloud shadows you're seeing on top of the haze. Apart from that, we don't touch haze on the ground at all - honest. Is it possible the discrepancy you're seeing in cloud heights is due to ground level vs. sea level? Also we simulate a "scud" layer beneath the clouds - it's never exact in nature.

Thanks! http://sundog-soft.com/2017/07/check-video-made-skymaxx-pro-silverlining/

Dang, that looks great. Would you mind if I shared this video on my company's blog? I'd give it proper attribution of course.

Sorry but I've watched your videos about ten times and I really don't see what the issue is. The sun does not have to be visible to cast "god rays", and it seems to be getting properly occluded by clouds passing in front of it. The sun gets dimmed by how much of it is occluded. We can't do this on a pixel-by-pixel basis for performance reasons. Maybe that's what you're expecting? If so that's very unlikely to change in any upcoming release. EDIT: nevermind; after re-reading Cameron's reply I think he figured out what you were talking about.