sundog

Cool, you certainly present X-Plane at its finest!

Glad you got the results you wanted. That's not the default setting, because not all objects are close to the camera.

Like I said, all I can suggest is trying different settings between crisp / soft / fast for different looks of the cumulus clouds. Our clouds are created in a variety of sizes and shapes as they are nature (this is very carefully modeled using real meteorological research), and so you won't see a direct relationship between cloud size and distance. But this setting will affect how much detail is in each cloud puff. I'm not sure what's causing that clipped texture you found. That's not something I've seen myself. It may be due to a clipping plane introduced by X-Plane itself, which would explain why you're seeing something similar in the default clouds. You might check to see if one of the textures in CloudAtlas.tga is very slightly overstepping its bounds, which would also explain it. Apart from that I don't think there's anything you can do as a user about it.

I'm not really a Mac guy, so I'm not sure what might have gone wrong there. My guess is that whatever editor you used didn't really preserve the text file format. Even text files are different between Mac and PC, and this file was created on a PC. You'd probably have to edit it on a Windows system (right click / open with... wordpad would do the job) or find a text editor app on MacOS that promises not to ruin Windows-style text files when saving them.

I would first try switching SMP from "Crisp" to "Soft" and see if that gives you what you want. To answer your question, it's resources/plugins/silverlining/resources/CloudAtlas.tga - but once you start modifying our underlying files, we can't provide support. What you're seeing are broken up edges of a large cloud near the camera, not small individual clouds. I don't see a problem with it myself.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. I see a cutoff on the third arrow but I don't see anything wrong with the first two from the left. You could try changing SMP's cumulus representation from "crisp" to "soft" and see if that provides results closer to what you want. Honestly if you're trying to achieve cinematic CG quality from a real-time simulator designed to run at 30-60 frames per second, you need to reset your expectations. The clouds you see in movies require several minutes per frame to render.

Yes, this is an algorithmic limitation of how "god rays" work. They are a screen-space effect, so they must assume some constant depth relative to the camera. It's just yet another trade-off we have to make in real-time computer graphics to get the performance we need. By default, the rays are configured to just draw over everything in the scene. As Cameron pointed out, depending on the angle of the sun and how much atmosphere is between you and a given object, that's not necessarily wrong. But it is possible to adjust the depth of the rays, by editing the resources/plugins/silverlining/resources/silverlining.config file in a text editor. Look for the crepuscular-rays-depth setting. Please note that we can't provide support once you start messing around with config settings, however - be sure to save a backup of the original config file so you can restore it if things go horribly wrong.

Also keep in mind "texture sets" only affect the look of individual cloud puffs, not clouds as a whole. If you're used to weather add-ons from other simulators where entire clouds are a single texture - SMP doesn't work that way! Each cloud is a 3D object composed of many individual puffs, and changing the puff textures won't change the shapes of the clouds, or their positions.

The stratiform selection won't always affect the scene when RWC is in use. For example, "solid stratiform" can only be used if the entire surrounding area is reporting stratus clouds at the same alititude, so it may not be used even if it's selected. You should definitely be seeing a difference in cumulus clouds between "fast", "soft", and "crisp", but again it's complicated - the clouds surrounding you may be stratus or stratocumulus, in which case this setting wouldn't affect the clouds in your scene. Then there's the cirrus settings - these only affect the high, wispy clouds you might not even see from lower altitudes. Short story: it's complicated. The settings only affect specific cloud types, which may or may not be in your scene - and there are weather scenarios where certain cloud representations just can't be used.

I'm not sure I understand the issue. For a given set of weather conditions, you should get exactly the same cloud layout every time. That way, if you have multiple simulators in a virtual cockpit, you can be sure it all syncs up properly. Perhaps the issue is that your weather conditions weren't updating - that may be an issue related to your installation of FSGRW. You might want to try running without FSGRW as a test, or put RWC in "always" mode in order to bypass it. As for your specific question, there is a "reset" button in the SMP configuration screen. But if you suspect an installation issue, only a re-installation can clear that up.

I think you'll find that clouds cause an FPS hit even with default clouds. On your system and settings, I'd expect the FPS hit to be about the same between SkyMaxx Pro and X-Plane's default clouds.

We actually do get the rain amount from sim/weather/rain_percent. Perhaps something else is going on? We only render precipitation if the camera is actually underneath a cloud, which may be causing some confusion. But I don't think there's a case where we would draw precipitation if rain_percent is zero. Perhaps X-Plane is setting this dataref back to what it thinks it should be as soon as you're trying to override it.

I wouldn't expect any benefits directly arising from Vulkan and Metal as far as SkyMaxx Pro goes. It may result in slightly better performance, but it doesn't open up any exciting new possibilities in terms of features. We will need to pretty much completely rewrite SkyMaxx Pro to support Vulkan, and again to support Metal. The objective is simply to maintain compatibility as X-Plane transitions to these new technologies.

I don't think so - the post that kicked off this thread was a 2015 model. FWIW our iMac here is a 2016. We'll do some additional testing prior to releasing our next version to see if we can manage to replicate this somehow. But for now, run with HDR on if you're experiencing this.

Laminar needs to create an astronomical model that simulates some known time before we can match it exactly.

It's hard to say without knowing what other add-ons you have installed; if X-Plane is CPU-bound, then the new card won't help much. But if you were CPU bound, I would have expected lowering SMP's cloud draw area settings to help. If the new card is on its way, there's certainly no harm in trying it! I have a somewhat similar setup here and can hold around 30 FPS with high graphic quality settings and SMP's cloud area maxed out, but I don't have any add-ons other than SMP/RWC and other Maxx-XP products. I don't know for sure if your video card is part of your machine ID from a licensing standpoint. I kind of doubt it, but I'd have to defer to X-Aviation staff to answer that definitively. At any rate, the new licensing mechanism should allow you to release your older license on your own if necessary to free up a new slot.

I honestly don't know; the installer is written and maintained by X-Aviation and I don't know much about how it works. I would imagine it might leave your settings and Gizmo installed, however, which is another plugin all X-Aviation products depend on. You could try completely deleting your resources/plugins/SilverLining folder after un-installing; that's where SkyMaxx Pro itself resides. But I suspect it's still something specific to where your other two installations are located, or the file permissions on them.

If it were me, I'd install a clean X-Plane 11 in a new folder, re-download the SMP 4.5 installer, and run it to install into your new installation - just as a sanity check. Like Cameron, I've never heard of this happening either - it's something really weird going on, but I'm not sure what.

I'm not really a Mac expert but I think it's unusual for your Desktop folder to be under Users/user. I think maybe the installer is getting confused about where your X-Plane installation is for some reason. Are you sure you specified the correct location for it when installing? Moving your X-Plane installation somewhere else may be worth a shot, too.

Currently there is no way for X-Plane to communicate with add-ons like SMP in order to synchronize the precise placement of thunderstorm cells. So you may see mismatches between where SMP draws thunderheads, and where X-Plane thinks there is wind associated with them. If you enable SMP's precipitation synchronization with RWC, then the rain should at least be consistent. We've talked to Laminar about ways to make this happen in a future version of X-Plane, and already have some code ready to go for it on our end. As for performance of storm clouds, we're working to improve that too. For now, the best way to improve performance in stormy conditions is to lower your "cloud area covered" setting.

It's odd; some Mac users report clouds don't appear at all with HDR off, and some report graphical artifacts. Naturally, it works perfectly here with HDR on or off, so I'm really not sure what's different about the Mac models that have trouble with it. However - with XP 11, you should be able to run with HDR on without a problem. So for now I'd stick with that as a workaround if this is affecting you.

Could we also see a screenshot of your SMP and RWC settings?

Yeah, I know who you're talking about there. SkyMaxx Pro combined with Real Weather Connector is not limited to 3 or 6 cloud layers - I forget the exact number, but last time I did the math the upper limit was in the thousands. Our approach is to completely disable X-Plane's cloud drawing and take complete control of it ourselves, so we aren't limited by anything. Normally I'd say more, but I don't want to enable any competitors who are about to realize how hard this really is! Wind layers might be a different story, but SMP/RWC only concerns itself with clouds. Actually, I can think of a workaround for wind layers as well without trying too hard.

Cloud shadows depend on a few things with SMP - the cloud coverage of course, and also the visibility conditions. In the screenshots you posted, the clouds are more sparse than in the default clouds scene, and so I wouldn't expect as much darkening underneath them. But it probably has more to do with the reduced visibility at the altitude you're at - we fade away cloud shadows as visibility gets worse, as cloud shadows don't look right on top of fog. If you were to gain some altitude and get above the haze, the shadows would become more clear with SMP, I'm guessing.

I think this means the activation system does not recognize your copy of SkyMaxx pro as a legitimate copy. Try re-installing SkyMaxx Pro 4.5 (the newest version) using the installer from X-Aviation.