sundog

Personally I haven't seen any hit (or improvement) with beta 11 or 12. But if the beta versions of X-Plane and your driver versions are changing, and SMP is not, I think I'd first point the finger of blame at one of them for performance changes. The weather conditions that happen to be in place when you fly can cause a lot of variation in performance as well. Your system is pretty much identical to mine, by the way - but I'm not overclocking. I've always encountered weird stability problems when doing so.

My Oculus Rift is on loan to some contractors, but if I get it back I'll take a look. I suspect the cloud rendering technique we and P3D use has some smoke and mirrors that VR exposes a bit more. There is a longer-term effort to produce a new option for cloud rendering in SMP that may be more VR-friendly, but it's too soon to really talk about it.

No, just because we were the last thing to write a log entry does not mean we caused the crash. If we did, your log would say the crash was caused by SkyMaxx Pro. Your log looks more like some sort of memory exhaustion or corruption issue, as it happened within X-Plane itself from the looks of it. So it's consistent with SkyMaxx Pro either pushing your system over the edge due to too many other add-ons being present, or some other add-on corrupting memory that SkyMaxx Pro is using.

Your log does not indicate that SkyMaxx Pro caused your crash. Try temporarily removing your add-on scenery (including HD mesh) and third party aircraft. Can you fly reliably then?

Getting back on topic - the issue where MontanaAP was losing his clouds whenever switching to a non-HDR mode. I installed SMP on an iMac with the following specs: macOS: Version 10.12.1 (Build 16B2555) CPU type: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz CPU speed (mhz): 4000 Bus speed (mhz): 100 RAM (MB): 16384 X-System folder:'/Users/Frank/Desktop/X-Plane 11/', case sensitive=0 OpenGL Vendor : ATI Technologies Inc. OpenGL Render : AMD Radeon R9 M395X OpenGL Engine Clouds appeared upon starting, and after switching HDR off by selecting "medium" graphics, the clouds remained: I remain at a loss as to what might be going on with your system. The strange link to Gizmo may suggest some odd licensing issue, still. The only thing left that I can suggest is to install a fresh X-Plane 11 demo in a clean folder, install the latest SMP version to it, and see if the problem persists (using nothing but default scenery and aircraft). If so, make sure all updates to your system from Apple have been applied via the app store. If anyone else is experiencing this, please let us know.

How about posting a ticket number so someone can look into this for you, and turn this into a productive conversation.

Your log already indicates that SMP *thinks* it is drawing clouds. But for some unknown reason, they are not getting through X-Plane's rendering process when HDR is off on your system. I don't think any additional logging on our end would throw any additional light on the problem. I have a second Mac here at the office that I can try - perhaps I can reproduce it there. For now, keep HDR on if you can.

Oh, well that's interesting. Maybe it is connected to Gizmo after all; cirrus appearing but no cumulus would be consistent with a failed license check. Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling SMP using its latest installer? That should ensure you have a complete and current installation of Gizmo as well as SMP. This could very well be the sort of thing where a reinstall clears it up.

It sounds like a software license issue. If you search your log.txt file for "SkyMaxx Pro", do you see anything about a license check failing? If so, you'll need to contact X-Aviation support for further assistance. I think removing the Gizmo plugin would also lead to this behavior (don't do that.)

Your log doesn't provide any clues as to why disabling Gizmo caused the clouds to re-appear momentarily, but you definitely shouldn't disable Gizmo while using SMP (or any X-Aviation product.) Did you try the experiment of setting graphics to medium, exiting X-Plane, and then restarting? I'm wondering if the issue has to do with switching it mid-flight.

Can you tell me some more specifics about your hardware and software setup? I don't use VR so I really have no idea what you're seeing or what might be causing it. But I'm open to trying it and seeing what's going on.

Well, HD mesh is the most likely the main thing that's consuming memory on your system. So I don't think you'd see much of a difference in memory until you remove it. Your A320 is probably also using a fair amount of resources, but it probably pales in comparison to HD mesh. There's no such thing as an optimal setting for a specific computer. It depends just as much on what your other settings are in X-Plane, your monitor resolution, your FOV, and what other add-ons you have. All I can recommend is setting up some stormy conditions, and experiment with increasing SMP's cloud draw area setting until you find FPS unacceptable. That slider is the main thing that can affect performance.

You have a lot of custom scenery installed, and a third party aircraft. Both can consume memory quickly. Perhaps you also had some other applications opened in the background?

There's a line in your log that points to the issue: SkyMaxx Pro: WARNING! CPU free memory at 97504 KB. X-Plane may crash due to lack of memory. Close other applications, reset your settings, or remove memory-intensive add-ons such as photo-scenery. Basically you are running out of memory. You'll have to reduce your graphics settings or cloud draw area, or remove add-ons or custom scenery you don't need. You're pushing your system beyond its limits.

That's not quite how it works. It's complicated - bear with me. The visibility distance we use for the clouds does increase with altitude. We just read whatever cloud visibility distance X-Plane computes for itself, and honor that distance. As a test, I just set up a scene here (in XP11 pb10) with the visibility slider at 5 nm and a couple of cloud layers above it. On the runway, clouds were drawn out to 9km (which is 5 nm.) But as I climbed above the clouds, the cloud visibility limit increased to around 98km, and this was continuing to increase as I gained altitude. It's not "unlimited," but we're just honoring X-Plane's internal calculations of how far clouds should be seen based on where you are relative to the clouds and haze. Increasing the visibility slider does seem to extend this range, even when you're above the clouds. So it seems X-Plane is modeling some of the fog and haze below the cloud layer extending above it to some extent. I don't think this is necessarily unrealistic. There are some other effects you might be seeing, as well. When you are inside a cloud layer, we restrict the cloud draw range in order to preserve performance as you pass through the clouds. If you haven't yet cleared the tops of the tallest clouds of the layer, some of that may still be in effect. So you may just need to climb a bit higher to reveal all of the clouds. SMP will also pull in the cloud visibility distance automatically if your performance starts to become unacceptable. If you're consistently dropping below 20 FPS, then that too may be limiting the clouds you see. That all said - in XP10 we used to increase the cloud visibility given to us by X-Plane by 50% just so you'd see more clouds. We removed that for XP11, since XP11's fog and haze seemed more aggressive at first and we wanted the cloud visibility to better match the rest of the scene. But I think I will increase it a tad for the SMP 4.1 release.

Well, your log indicates a lot of conflicts and problems with your custom scenery and other add-ons, but I have no reason to think it might be affecting this particular issue with clouds disappearing when you switch HDR off. I tried again, just using SMP without RWC to get closer to your setup, and I still can't reproduce this behavior here. I suspect it's specific to certain Mac models. I have a couple of suspicions of what might be going on, though. If you slightly change SMP's cloud draw area setting after switching into medium or low graphics and hit "apply", do the clouds return? If you set the graphics to medium or low, leave it there, and then quit and restart X-Plane, do the clouds appear? As for Gizmo - that behavior is expected. SkyMaxx Pro relies on Gizmo for checking its license status. If you remove Gizmo, then SkyMaxx Pro believes it is unlicensed, and removes the clouds.

No, it's not a known issue - clouds appear just fine at lower visual effects settings here. It might help if you post your log.txt after experiencing the problem; it may help us figure out what's happening with your system. X-Plane re-loads everything when you change the visual effects setting, so it's possible new, clear weather conditions got loaded at the same time due to a METAR update.

This happened once to me as well. I found that after qutiting X-Plane and restarting it, it appeared again - and I never had it happen again. I think it's some sort of issue with the working directory of X-Plane getting changed by something under the hood, probably by some other plug-in or add-on. If it continues, try temporarily removing your other plugins (except Gizmo) and see if that clears it up. If so, add them back in one at a time until you find the culprit. There's a possibility that X-Plane 11 beta 9 itself is doing this for some reason too, in which case we just have to chalk it up to the instability you'd expect while running beta software.

You can reduce SMP's resource consumption further by using "fast" cloud puffs, disabling shadows, and setting the cloud/terrain blend to zero. But I think re-evaluating all the add-ons and scenery you have installed, or lowering your rendering settings, would have a larger impact.

Your log does not indicate that SMP caused the crash (just because it's the last thing to write to your log doesn't mean it caused the crash - if it did, there would be a line at the end saying the crash was caused by Skymaxx Pro.) You have a *lot* of custom scenery and add-ons installed, plus a third-party aircraft, and it could be anything. I suspect you're just pushing your system too hard from too many add-ons. If there are things you can remove, it may help.

Turning down your cloud draw area should also help with this. Sounds like you're just pushing your system too hard, and the cost of regenerating the cloud shadow maps is pushing it over the edge.

Glad you're enjoying it! It makes a huge difference - it kind of pains me that people use SMP without it. Be sure to turn up the cloud draw area in SMP as high as your system can handle, too.

SMP does not interact with your weather radar in any way; what it shows is based on X-Plane's internal weather, which should be consistent with the clouds we display. SMP also does nothing with visibility effects; we only draw clouds. So I think you're just seeing whatever X-Plane itself does there. I think you may want to consider purchasing Real Weather Connector; it exists to remove the sudden transitions when the weather changes, and allows you to see new cloud fronts ahead of you and fly into them naturally. That should solve what you're describing in #2.

Thanks. We're working on a new release, and tracking down those occasional texture artifacts is on my list already. Cloud shadows should work, however. I'll double check using your specific settings. *EDIT* - There was indeed a problem with shadows being cast from overcast cloud layers with "HD puffs" enabled. I've fixed this for our upcoming 4.1 release. I think I found the issue with the texture artifact you found as well.

Just to remind everyone, if you turn up the cloud draw area setting in SMP, the maximum view distance is actually quite far in SMP 4. In fact it's equal to the stated draw distance of a certain competing product. As others have said, we don't publish our roadmap as it would just tip off our competitors. But I'm really, really excited over the in-development SMP 4.1 I'm flying with now. Y'all are in for a treat.