sundog

Updating your video driver would also be worth a shot. Offhand, it looks as though our cloud puff shader isn't working at all on your system - that could be due to an installation issue, or a driver issue.

The draw area setting does adjust the cloud draw distance, not the density. You may be seeing the clouds getting cut off due to visibility effects. Often if you climb higher, X-Plane will indicate higher visibility to us as you gain altitude, and we'll draw clouds further. If you have SMP set to draw clouds 100km out but X-Plane tells us there is only 50km of visibility, we only draw to 50km. Bear in mind SMP has no impact on X-Plane's fog and haze; we only draw clouds. I don't think those are necessarily shadows, but perhaps artifacts from the clouds intersecting the ground. Try increasing the cloud/terrain blending setting.

So far I can't get this to happen here. Re-installing is worth trying. I'd also put your overcast setting to "HD Cloud Puffs". We've seen a couple of reports of this come in, so we'll definitely investigate more deeply. Can we get a shot of your rendering settings and your log.txt file? My first suspect would be a conflict with some other plugin, but your log.txt should tell us what we're up against.

It's certainly a milestone! And I certainly appreciate the support of our customers as well. It all started with me saying "sure, why not" to John over 3 years ago. I had never met him before, and it was a big leap of faith. Never dreamed SkyMaxx Pro would end up as popular as it has become! We have a lot planned for SkyMaxx Pro's v4 run, so this isn't the end of the story. I really hope you all enjoy it. -Frank

At least we're on the same page. As you descend into areas with reduced visibility, yes SMP will start fading away distant clouds that shouldn't be visible. We allow X-Plane, or whatever other addons you've chosen to install, to take control of visibility effects. Our clouds just try to honor the visibility we're given, and that's a conceptual choice as you said - not a defect in the software. Ventura sky is great, but it does depend on many private art controls in X-Plane for its visibility effects. We've made the choice to play by the rules, for better or worse, and leave art control tinkering to others.

I'm honestly not sure what you're talking about. If RWC is properly installed and set to "never change visible weather," the clouds should never just suddenly and abruptly change around you. Are you saying weather fronts and cloud banks just seem too defined for your tastes, and you'd rather see cloud coverage increase more gradually as you approach them? Or are you talking about things like fog and haze, which SMP/RWC doesn't claim to touch at all?

Perhaps I wasn't clear. When you cross a one degree line (and yes, if you're flying at high speed at high latitudes I suppose that could be just several minutes apart), we don't just trash everything and recreate the weather from scratch. X-Plane shifts into a new frame of reference when this happens, and we must re-calculate the internal positions of every cloud. Many times, you don't see this happen at all - the goal of the math is to leave the clouds exactly where they were relative to your plane. xplana's video shows there may be some cases where a few clouds don't survive this operation, which was news to me and something I've added to the list of things to investigate for future revisions.

To be clear - those are photos posted by someone not affiliated with SMP, not screenshots. Don't hold us to quite those standards! (Although I am pretty happy with the lightning effect in SMP4.)

It will work in that clouds will appear and it won't crash, but the lighting and blending of the clouds will be wrong in XP11. I'd recommend holding off until SMP4 is available (soon.)

I think what you're seeing is your plane crossing 1-degree tile boundaries within X-Plane. When that happens, we must reposition our clouds within a new frame of reference, and sometimes that results in a few clouds appearing to move. We handle it the best we can at present. You should be seeing this happen only very infrequently - when you cross one degree of latitude or longitude. That said there are also some rather alarming memory-related errors in your log.txt that may indicate some file corruption, so there may be some larger issue going on that's making it worse. I would recommend re-installing a clean X-Plane and then add in the the latest versions of the add-ons you use. If you want to continue this discussion, please create a new thread for it. This isn't the place for it.

xplana, honestly I've never seen that happen. If you'd like to start a support thread and post your log.txt after experiencing this, I'd be curious to try and understand what's going on there.

Some say it looks better with HDR off, but SMP 3 is not compatible with XP11 for this reason - the lighting and blending of the clouds do not work properly with it. Skymaxx Pro 4 will be tuned to work with either XP10 or XP11.

We focus on what our customers tell us, not on competitors.

We can't provide support on x-plane.org (most of us are banned there as we compete with their products.) Your last comment there however suggests that you ended up with smooth, stable performance. If you're having new problems, feel free to open up a thread here on X-Pilot in the SkyMaxx Pro support forum.

Joomie, we're going off topic here. If you want to dig deeper into the issues you're having with FSGRW let's open up a support thread on it. We'll need to see your log.txt. I did just run a test with the latest version of FSGRW here with XP10, SMP4, and RWC. It only took between 1/10 and 2/10 of a second to parse the new metar files when FSGRW dropped them for me. With "never change visible weather" on, you shouldn't be seeing any redrawing of the clouds when that happens. If you do, then something else is going on that we need to identify.

You're right, it could be worded more clearly. But it's certainly not our intent to misrepresent anything. The area covered by clouds has doubled, not the radius of the coverage. SMP4 covers an square area surrounding you (although we round off the corners when drawing it) of 320km on each side if you crank up our cloud draw area slider all the way. The maximum area covered is therefore about 100,000 square kilometers. We think more about area because that's what impacts the number of clouds we have to draw, and therefore drives performance. Doubling the area means we've figured out how to draw twice as many clouds as before. If I really wanted to make it sound big, I could say it covers 100 billion square meters! At the end of the day, it looks pretty expansive at 30,000 feet, which is what matters. And it's not trickery - you'll see individual clouds form at the horizon that you can fly toward seamlessly.

The first beta of SMP4 did have issues with the lighting of rain / sleet / snow, and that's what you're seeing there. They've since been fixed.

I just ran some tests and performance seems fine here under 10.51. There were no changes in 10.51r2 that would affect SkyMaxx Pro, although it may use slightly more system resources such as RAM and video RAM. So, my guess would be that when coupled with SMP's clouds, you're running out of resources. Start by hitting "reset" on SkyMaxx Pro's configuration panel. Or turn down some rendering settings in X-Plane. Or try using a different aircraft, or removing custom scenery. Basically you have to decide what tradeoffs to make for performance - you can't turn up settings and install add-ons without affecting performance at some point. It's not an issue with SkyMaxx Pro itself, so no we are not planning to fix something that is outside of our control. However, Skymaxx Pro 4 will offer some additional performance enhancements and may help you once it's available.

The weather information we receive from X-Plane or METAR is not detailed enough to tell us about these specific cloud types. But we do offer a variety of high-altitude cloud textures to choose from in SMP4. The UI calls them cirrus textures, but some are definitely closer to altocumulus.

Games often use the trick of focusing a lot of detail into a small area surrounding the player. It looks like that's the case here - the clouds aren't drawn very far from the plane from what I can see, and that allows them to pour lots of detail and quality into a small number of clouds. The number of clouds you have to draw increases with the square of the distance you want to see them at, so you quickly have to start making compromises in a flight simulator that requires realistic representation of distant clouds.

I should have said distance, not area. It's an area with a diameter of 320km.

SkyMaxx Pro 3 is not compatible with X-Plane 11. You need to wait for SkyMaxx 4 to come out.

Um, OK. Like I said, what's probably happening is that some weather report within the area covered by SMP's cloud area is not reporting overcast today, and so it's not representing overcast to the horizon. If you're having trouble, post your log.txt and we'll be happy to help. No need to uninstall over a single issue you can't explain.

I don't know. RWC only looks at METAR information; it doesn't get involved with ATIS in any way.

As far as overcast goes - RWC won't show the horizon-to-horizon overcast effect unless *all* weather stations within view are report overcast at a similar altitude (and you have set SMP to use solid overcast). Otherwise, it shows localized overcast conditions using really thick cumuloform clouds. SkyMaxx Pro 4 will introduce a new overcast representation that can represent localized effects with RWC as well.