sundog

X-Aviation promises a 3 business day response time, but every time you submit a new ticket the clock gets reset. If you've sent 14 tickets within 10 days, that's probably the problem. Just be patient. If you have a specific ticket number, please post it so they can look into it.

In XP11, SoundMaxx replaces the "generic" aircraft sounds for a given engine type that are used when no specific sounds for a given aircraft's engine are provided. In XP11, the C172 has its own specialized sound effects, and SoundMaxx won't replace them. In XP10, SoundMaxx does upgrade some of the specific sound effects for the default C172, B737, Bell 206 and Robinson R22 helos. Most of the other default aircraft in XP10 rely on the default sound effects that SoundMaxx also upgrades. In both XP10 and XP11, SoundMaxx provides ambient outdoor sounds that are sensitive to the season and location, airport sounds, weather sound effects, turbulence sounds, cabin sounds, landing & takeoff sound effects, etc. 1.01 will be provided as a free update to 1.0 customers. It will be a complete installer for new users - I don't know if the update for existing users will be a patch or a full reinstallation. Only a couple of files have actually changed.

I think either you ran out of memory, or some other add-on or even X-Plane itself corrupted memory SkyMaxx Pro was using. Although your computer is awesome, using HD Mesh with as many add-ons as you have can push the boundaries of even your rig. Try reducing the load on X-Plane; it's up to you what trade-offs you're willing to make with rendering settings, SMP's settings, add-ons, and scenery. I'd also try flying with a different aircraft. I've never seen that warning about being in trimmed, level flight before, and it's possible it's related somehow.

I think you posted similar questions in a couple of other discussions here, but to recap: - X-Plane 11's built-in lightning effect doesn't look right yet (it's too dark). There's nothing SMP4 can do about that; we'll have to wait for Laminar to fix that in a future beta release or update. SMP4's own lightning effects look as they should, though. In X-Plane you see both, as long as you're in an area reporting thunderstorms. - There's nothing special you need to do other than run the installers for SMP4 and SoundMaxx. SoundMaxx replaces X-Plane's lightning sound files with its own when it runs. If SoundMaxx doesn't seem to be working at all, check your log.txt file and make sure there isn't some issue with its license check. - We did find a bug yesterday where lightning created by SMP4 wasn't sending messages to SoundMaxx to accompany these lightning strikes with sound. We've delivered a SoundMaxx 1.01 patch to X-Aviation to fix this, so it should be available in the near future.

"Solid" will generally be the least taxing, but it's more of a 2D style of effect. A lot of people seem to like that, though. On most systems, "dense particles" will be the most demanding, with HD Puffs performing much better in comparison.

Ah, I looked into this more deeply, and there is a problem with thunder messages getting sent between SMP4 and SoundMaxx. We'll have to issue a patch to SoundMaxx for this. Watch your email for an announcement when it's ready.

You'll only hear it if a cumulonimbus cloud is nearby. Can you see a thunderhead near your plane? EDIT: I did indeed find a bug where some lightning from thunderstorms created by SMP3 or SMP4 would not get sent to SoundMaxx. Watch for SoundMaxx 1.01 soon to fix this.

I don't think this is an XP11 beta issue - if it were, thousands of SMP4 customers would be screaming at us about real weather not working. We probably do need to dig into the specifics of your situation; it's likely some subtle setup or configuration problem.

It wasn't my intent to be rude; we're just handling a lot of customer contacts so being terse is a bit of a survival mechanism! We're not aware of any issues specific to XP11 or SMP4, but if you can post your log.txt, metar.rwx, and maxx_metar.rwx files (any or all that exist) along with where you were flying and the result you saw and were expecting, we can dig into it further. A shot of your SMP and RWC settings would also help us track things down. The product is "ready" - we're not aware of anything but minor issues in SMP 4.0.1 or RWC 1.1. If you can provide us with those details, we can figure out what's going on in your specific case.

- Yes, that looks like broken coverage to me. If you don't like the look of the clouds, try setting the "crisp" setting in SMP to "fast" instead. - With RWC in "always" mode, it will represent weather based on METAR downloaded directly from NOAA's web servers. This may not agree with what the NOAA plugin is showing you. - Precipitation only occurs if you are actually underneath a cloud in an area where the METAR is reporting rain or snow.

RWC and SMP work fine with X-Plane 11. RWC uses real METAR information downloaded from NOAA's servers. If you're seeing problems, we'll need more details - please post exactly where you're flying, along with your log.txt and metar.rwx files and we can tell you what's going on. One thing to try is turning off RWC's "never change visible weather" option. It's possible that updated weather information was received after X-Plane started up, and was suppressed due to this option being on. You might also try setting RWC to "always" mode. XP11 is still in beta, so if there are issues with how it downloads METAR data itself, this setting will bypass it and use our own downloaded data instead.

Skymaxx Pro has no control over plane shadows and lighting I'm afraid. This is something Laminar would have to address.

First I've seen of this particular issue, but you're right that the fog effect had been tuned for the particle overcast choices and not the new HD puffs. I've changed the code to push these clouds up more in our next release in this case, which should make them look more dense.

It's a known issue; we only sort the individual clouds coarsely in order to maximize performance, and in some cases it can lead to things like this. It's something we hope to refine in future updates.

Looks like the sun *is* down there - or at most a minute away from being fully out of twilight. If the moon hasn't yet risen, then yes the clouds are expected to be black.

I think your precipitation settings aren't what you want them to be. If you are using Real Weather Connector and have "sync to RWC" checked, then the rain or snow intensity indicated in the METAR data will be honored. If light or heavy precipitation is indicated, the amount of particles will change. If you set it to "streaks," their angle will change with the motion of the camera like you want. With Real Weather Connector properly set up, rain or snow will be honored from the nearest METAR report. If you're not using RWC, the decision of rain vs. snow is based on the ambient temperature, which you can adjust in the weather settings (although there seems to be a bug in XP11 where you can't change that successfully in the UI)

Looking at the code, the only explanation I can think of is that the terrain in this brighter area is above the stated base of the cloud layer (or 2000 meters if no broken or scattered layers are present). We remove shadows in that case. This should be a fairly rare situation that's existed since the beginning with SMP - but the right thing to do is the remove shadows if the terrain is above the top of the clouds, not the bottom. I'll code up a fix for our next release. Thanks for the report.

Hm. Does sound like an XP issue - to be honest, I think I've seen this happen in XP10 as well. Do you have any other weather-related plugins installed, including things like IVAO or XSB? I think they can mess with the real world weather setting.

Around LFKC I saw some rather odd reflections or shadows on the cockpit window (canopy? I don't know all my aviation terms!) but they weren't associated with cloud shadows - rather shadows in general. Souf, do you remember where you were flying there? Does it happen in external views as well?

OK, I'll poke around LKFC and see what's going on. I don't have an obvious explanation for what it might be, yet.

That looks more to me like an anomaly from XP11's haze system than cloud shadows. If it happens again, try disabling the Skymaxx Pro plugin and see if it goes away or not.

Glad y'all are enjoying it overall! The way Apple reports video memory is weird; it's not a terribly useful measurement really. I will however say that 1GB of onboard VRAM isn't much by today's standards, so it doesn't surprise me that you start running into performance challenges when turning up the cloud draw area on this system. 1GB is the bare minimum system requirement for X-Plane 10, without add-ons in the mix. Perhaps there are other trade-offs you can make for performance without compromising cloud draw area, such as your rendering settings, extended DSF's, or your choice of aircraft.

SMP only uses Gizmo for checking your license, so I'm pretty puzzled on how it could be the culprit here - or affect performance. Still, if you can provide your Gizmo log to Ben perhaps he can see something.

Unfortunately we don't have FlyInside or a VR rig to test with here. It sounds like something's a bit off with the view frusta we're receiving from X-Plane in this setup. If you have any contact with the developers of FlyInside, it might be worth asking if they are setting sim/graphics/view/world_matrix and sim/graphics/view/projection_matrix as each eye's view is drawn. That's how we get the view frusta that we draw and cull the clouds against.

For now, my best advice is to lower SkyMaxx Pro's cloud draw area setting if you've turned it up. You may have it so high that what you're seeing in the distance are the 2D "imposters" we use to preserve performance. Lower draw area settings will also result in more individual cloud puffs up close, which will make the clouds more volumetric and VR-friendly. You might also consider changing SMP's overcast setting from "HD Cloud Puffs" to "dense particles" - these too would be more VR-friendly because they use smaller particles.