sundog

Oh, that I don't know. That's an X-Plane issue if anything; Real Weather Connector doesn't do anything to how X-Plane downloads its own weather data. You could however set RWC to "always" mode as a partial solution - that way, at least the cloud conditions will be updated over time.

If you leave the RWC setting "never change visible weather" on, then the clouds will not change in your immediate area if new weather is downloaded. Maybe that's what you're seeing?

If turning off shadows don't help, try changing the cloud puff style from "crisp" to "fast". Also make sure your video drivers are up to date.

That is strange; your settings aren't too high, and you've got a decent system. The only thought I have is to try disabling cloud shadows; they might be responsible for some stutter. Or, perhaps you flew into an area of thunderstorms - those are currently rather demanding on performance. There's a free update for SMP coming out soon as well that may improve performance for you.

It's a bug caused by lightning strikes under certain situations; it will be fixed in our next update, which is currently in beta testing.

If you haven't already, please submit a ticket via X-Aviation's support link so you'll get a ticket number that you can track for this issue. I can't help with licensing issues; only X-Aviation support can.

There's a whole new set of cloud textures in place for our next update already. Stay tuned.

Yes, but it's too soon for dates or details! Stay tuned.

Any plugin that does its own OpenGL drawing could cause something like this. Unfortunately there's no easy way to know if a given plugin does that or not.

I've actually been looking into this more lately. On a Mac I've been able to reproduce something like this if I write code that changes the currently active texture in OpenGL without telling X-Plane about it, or without putting it back to what it was. Our next release will have additional protection to make sure SMP cannot do this, but interactions with other plugins or add-ons could also cause this sort of thing.

Oh, got it. That setting should have no effect when SMP is active. At any rate, I'm glad you got it sorted out!

Your rig is pretty close to state of the art. I don't think there's anything more you can do worth doing - you just need to dial down the settings a bit. X-Plane and SMP aren't like games where turning up the settings all the way are intended to perform smoothly under all conditions on high end machines. They're built with some future-proofing in mind, so as new technologies emerge they can take full advantage of them. The only thing that sticks out to me is that your video driver is pretty far out of date. Updating it may be worth doing.

It looks like you've got the cloud draw area setting in SMP cranked up really far, and you're flying in a stormy area. And it's not just a stormy area; it's a worst case scenario from a weather and performance standpoint, with lots of cumulonimbus, towering cumulus, and multiple layers of cumulus congestus clouds all at once. Even a Titan has its limits (especially with HD Mesh installed.) Dialing back the cloud draw area setting in SMP should help you regain some FPS in these sorts of unusual situations.

If you're seeing a "cloud detail" setting, that suggests you're using a rather old version of SMP. Updating to the latest (4.0.1) will allow you to pick up a lot of performance improvements we've implemented since then!

Not a lot to go on there, but if I'm reading your log right it looks like you're running with HD Mesh installed. That could be causing you to run out of memory on your GPU, which in turn could cause SMP to crash when trying to allocate new clouds. You've also got a somewhat out of date SASL plugin installed which can cause trouble - if you can update to a newer version of your MD-80, it certainly couldn't hurt.

What version of SkyMaxx Pro are you using (it should be in the upper-left corner of your SMP configuration screen)? This looks like a bug I thought we fixed awhile ago.

Well, this is a puzzling one. Your log does not actually implicate SkyMaxx Pro or RWC as causing your crash. Usually this sort of thing indicates a system that's low on resources, or some other plugin that's corrupting memory. But you have plenty of memory and disk space available, your CPU and video card are certainly good enough, and you don't have a ton of wacky add-ons or custom scenery installed. Are you overclocking your CPU or GPU? Sometimes that can cause oddness such as this.

Please open a ticket with X-Aviation with these details of your system upgrade, and they should be able to help you after investigating it. They can't correspond about licensing issues in the public forum here.

Try deleting your MAXX_METAR.rwx file, and launch X-Plane again. If that doesn't work, try deleting your resources/plugins/silverlining/settings.data file, and launch X-Plane again (this will reset your SkyMaxx Pro and Real Weather Connector settings to default settings.) Also, make sure you've got the latest version of SkyMaxx Pro (4.01) installed. I tried loading up your metar file but couldn't reproduce the issue, so it may be a bug we already fixed.

Thanks! Oddly I can't seem to get X-Plane to crash myself with either of these, but I'll keep trying. What version of SMP are you using? I wonder if it's a bug we already fixed.

There may have been a corrupt METAR.rwx file being served by NOAA six hours ago, as I saw another similar report at the same exact time. It seems to be OK now - if you're still having trouble, delete your METAR.rwx and MAXX_METAR.rwx file (if it exists) and you should be fine.

Whatever happened seems to have passed - I have no trouble starting up right now. Unfortunately nobody seemed to have captured the metar.rwx file that was in place at the time, so I don't have anything to go on in terms of root cause this time.

Even a clean install with clean installations of the add-ons you care about the most would be worth trying. It may just be some out of date software or something improperly installed.

The METAR.rwx file you provided doesn't look like a standard one. Are you using some third-party weather addon? I couldn't find an indication of one in your log, but that METAR came from someplace. If you're using NOAA, perhaps it's not the latest version or it's not installed properly. However, I was able to load that METAR.rwx in SMP/RWC just fine, so the problem's not the METAR file itself (assuming you're using SMP 4.0.1). As far as I know, you're the only person experiencing this sort of thing. Re-installing X-Plane from a clean installation might be a good idea, to rule out some unique quirk of how your many add-ons are installed.

Those messages are normal. If the "sudden change in weather" is related to visibility, remember SMP/RWC only draws clouds. Sudden changes in visibility is an issue in XP11. If the clouds seem to be changing, make sure "never change visible weather" is enabled in your RWC settings. They may also shift slightly when crossing one-degree tile boundaries in some cases, but that should be infrequent unless you're at extreme latitudes.