sundog

It might help to set RWC to "always" mode on all of the PC's (and make sure they all have access to the Internet.)

JeffLeh, it's your log.txt we asked to see - but there's good info in the screenshots you provided too. You are in fact perilously low on VRAM (only about 200MB left), and some of your rendering settings are probably to blame. I don't think you can expect a GTX 765M to run reliably with "extreme" settings and also a cranked up cloud area. If you have custom scenery or HD mesh installed as well, that's making thing even worse. In short, I'm pretty sure your crashes are due to running out of memory. You're going to have to dial back your settings until you can run reliably.

That's just the way SkyMaxx is. It's an optimization to let us draw distant clouds more efficiently; without it, your framerate would suffer. Clouds closer to the plane move smoothly, however.

Those are towering cumulus clouds. They do reflect light differently than other clouds at sunset, which is something we can tweak for a future release. As for the cloud darkness, the clouds appear darker as the cloud coverage gets higher. So, scattered clouds will appear lighter than broken clouds for example. We've been dialing that effect down over the past couple of releases, but it could probably stand to be dialed down even further.

If you have a log that indicates SMP was responsible for a crash we definitely want to see it. But in either case, we will need to see your complete log.txt to understand what's going on. How are you measuring your free VRAM? You should be looking at what the SMP config screen displays, or GPU-Z if you don't trust it.

WR269, try setting SMP's stratiform representation to sparse or dense particles. Your log indicates that a lot of intersecting cloud layers of different types are being received, which is forcing SMP / RWC to move around your stratus layers to avoid the collisions. I think that's what's causing the confusion, but setting SMP to sparse or dense particles will remove the need for SMP to reposition the layers.

You may find that the cloud lighting is more to your liking when Real Weather Connector is on, too.

Yup, I just installed 10.50b5 here and SkyMaxx Pro seems to work fine with it. What WR269 is describing sounds like a license activation issue to me. If so, that will be indicated inside the log.txt file.

Send us your log.txt please.

What if you fly a little higher? There is an area of a few hundred feet of "scud" at the top and bottom of stratus clouds; you might just be flying in and out of it.

In newer versions of SMP, it seems the Plugin Admin menu labels it as SkyMaxx Pro and not SilverLining (just to avoid any confusion.) Disabling it there will in fact disable SMP.

You can also just use X-Plane's plugin admin menu to disable the "SilverLining" plugin.

Lighting of distant clouds is spread out over several frames in order to avoid stutters. So, if you suddenly change the time of day, it may take a few seconds for the cloud lighting to catch up.

If you compare your two log files, you'll see that the 10.50b5 one indicates it "raised stratus layer to avoid a collision" while the 10.45 one did not. SMP takes steps to avoid cumulus clouds from intersecting with stratus clouds, because it looks unnatural to see puffy cumulus clouds sticking out of a flat stratus cloud. So, I think it's not really a 10.45 vs. 10.50 thing, but rather a case where the cloud draw area or weather conditions in the distance were different in the two cases. In your 10.50 screenshot, I can see a distant cumulus cloud on the horizon that could very well be what forced SMP to push up the stratus layer (which I can see above you) to avoid intersecting with it. SMP 3.2.1 handles this a bit more aggressively than 3.2, so it may also be the case that you have 3.2.1 installed on your 10.50 installation and 3.2 on 10.45. If you want to avoid this, you can set SMP's stratiform representation to sparse or dense particles, which will disable the cloud collision prevention code. In this mode, cumulus and stratus clouds are represented in similar ways, and they look OK when they intersect.

The first thing that jumps out to me is that you're pretty low on VRAM. What you're probably seeing is memory starting to swap as VRAM gets low on your system. The short story is you are probably simply asking X-Plane to do more than your rig is capable of. You'll have to dial back on your installed custom scenery, cloud area setting, anti-aliasing, and/or texture resolution to get consistently good performance.

Actually I think there about 50 different problems being discussed in this thread now, some of which don't even involve SMP/RWC at all You're talking about occasional CPU spikes when using RWC if I understand correctly. I think I'd expect that while RWC is parsing new METAR data. How often do these spikes occur? If you're using default weather, it should only be once an hour. But, if you're using a third party weather add-on that updates METAR.rwx more frequently, that could be causing it to happen more often.

Well, I can speculate as to things that may have happened: - METAR reports cloud altitudes as AGL, not MSL. So when you cross a tile boundary or otherwise cause clouds to be re-positioned, the altitude may change to reflect the new ground altitude. - When you change SMP settings, it causes the local weather conditions to be re-evaluated and all clouds to be re-generated. This could result in visual changes, especially if you have the "never change visible weather" checkbox on in RWC - that setting could cause what you see to diverge from what's being reported, but changing settings recreates clouds regardless of this setting. - Particle-based stratiform clouds do not have a distinct upper boundary or the ability to portray cloud layers of arbitrary thickness, while "solid" and "broken" do. So you'll find the altitude of stratus cloud tops will be more accurate with "solid" or "broken." In short, I think things are behaving as designed - you're just running into some edge cases we had to deal with.

Jose, as I explained earlier, I don't think your occasional crashes are actually caused by RWC: " So, to make a long story short: make sure you have the latest versions of all of your add-ons installed. Are you using the latest XSB for example? And if there are unusual add-ons that you don't really need, try removing them. "

Not quite sure I follow what you experienced there. Your "2" scenario sounds like X-Plane reduced the visibility in some layer you flew into that caused the clouds to fade away while you were in it. "sparse" or "dense" particles represents stratus clouds using really dense cloud puffs jammed together, instead of as a solid, bumpy slab. Since it's the same technique used to represent cumulus clouds, we don't have to take steps to avoid collisions between the two different cloud types - they look fine when they intersect. So that's why it behaves differently in that case.

I oversimplified things a bit previously (usually people use 'always' in situations where the default METAR data isn't being updated at all.) I don't use the NOAA plugin myself, but if it has an option to disable writing the metar.rwx file that may be what you want.

The real issue is this: SkyMaxx Pro: Raised stratus layer to avoid a layer collision. Basically some new localized cumulus clouds came into your view area that were at the same altitude range as the stratus clouds. Because cumulus clouds and stratus clouds don't intersect in nature, and they look terrible visually when they do, we adjust the cloud altitudes to avoid an intersection when this happens. Otherwise we just get a different set of complaints. To avoid this issue, you can set SMP's stratiform representation setting to sparse or dense particles.

Thanks; I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened there. Taken at face value, the log implies that parsing your METAR data somehow resulted in memory corruption and a subsequent crash. However I haven't been able to reproduce it, even after carefully testing the parsing of the METAR.rwx file you provided and looking for memory errors. To get a little bit technical, I think the crash actually happened while Real Weather Connector was trying to send a message to SkyMaxx Pro via X-Plane's built-in messaging system for plugins. So, this implies that something corrupted the shared memory that X-Plane uses for plugins to communicate with each other. The last time I saw something like this, it was due to an old version of SASL that was overwriting memory. They later released a new version of SASL that cleared it up. But you don't seem to be using SASL. You are, however, using a lot of other add-ons, some of which I haven't seen before. I think one of them is corrupting memory and leading to this sporadic crash you're getting. So, to make a long story short: make sure you have the latest versions of all of your add-ons installed. Are you using the latest XSB for example? And if there are unusual add-ons that you don't really need, try removing them. > Since I had RWC set to "Always", why is it looking for METAR.rwx and not MAXX_METAR.rwx? It reads whichever file was updated most recently, regardless of your setting. "Always" just means we download our own copy of METAR.rwx (named MAXX_METAR.rwx) to fall back on, in case X-Plane's built-in one isn't getting updated.

Thomas, is it the cumulus (puffy) clouds that seem to be moving? The 3.2.1 fix was specifically for stratus, cirrus, and cirrocumulus clouds. I suspect you're crossing a tile boundary which can result in some small differences in cumulus cloud altitudes just due to how the math works (but it shouldn't happen often). If we could see your log.txt following this, I could confirm if that's the case or not.

Please go to X-Aviation.com and file a support request; they cannot address individual account issues via this forum.

Well, I don't see any obvious errors or signs of trouble in there - but you do have a lot of custom scenery + HD mesh installed, and a lot of add-ons. My best guess is that you're still just overloading your system, and SMP is pushing you over the edge on some resource that's in short supply - although I can only speculate on what. I know you said you experimented with disabling some things, but have you tried disabling absolutely everything but SMP/RWC and putting SMP on default settings? No custom scenery, HD Mesh, X-Life, EFASS, 3rd party plane, SoundMaxx, etc? If you experience this with a plain vanilla X-Plane installation with nothing but SMP, RWC (and Gizmo) installed, that at least means there's hope of us reproducing what you're seeing on a similar PC. If not, it may point to a bad interaction with SMP and one or more of your other add-ons.