sundog

I think we're representing the conditions given to us accurately in both cases. I have no way of knowing what NOAA or IVAO is specifying for the weather compared to what you're setting by hand. There may be a language barrier thing going on here as you said. Perhaps you're speaking toward the difference between our solid and particle-based overcast representations. You might want to change the "overcast representation" in the SMP configuration to "dense particles" if that's what you're pointing out.

I haven't seen this "famous video", but I would guess that the cloud draw distance is being limited by the actual visibility in the weather settings. Clouds will draw to the extent of the cloud draw area set, or to the visibility distance specified by X-Plane, whichever is lower. That's not a bug. As for performance issues - if you've increased the default cloud draw area setting, you need to find a balance for your system and the weather you're flying in vs. the performance you want. SkyMaxx Pro 3.2 is the fastest, most efficient version we've released. We hear you that you want even more, and are always looking for ways to push current hardware even harder.

I believe you would see the same effect even with SkyMaxx Pro un-installed. When you are inside rain, X-Plane reduces visibility and makes the surrounding fog gray. But once you fly out of the rain, the fog goes back to clear blue skies. It's not a SkyMaxx Pro bug, it's just a limitation in how X-Plane represents fog effects.

Great! You'll want to set the cloud draw area as high as you can without impacting performance for the most immersive experience. As for the weather updating - I think I read that the latest version of FSGRW allows you to configure how often it drops new weather conditions. If the either/or state of our "never change visible weather" option isn't meeting your needs, you might try experimenting with longer update times from the FSGRW side.

Well, with RWC you can end up with a lot more clouds than with SMP alone. So I don't think it's really accurate to say that RWC is causing a performance problem; rather, RWC is causing more clouds to be drawn, which consumes more resources. Sounds like you might just have to back down on your cloud draw area setting until you reach a performance level that meets your expectations.

Hm, sounds like you don't have the latest SkyMaxx Pro 3.2 version installed. Check your email - you should have received a link for a free update about a month ago.

Fill rate is how fast your video card can draw individual pixels on the screen. Since the clouds have some "overdraw" associated with them due to their overlapping cloud puffs, and have complex pixel shaders, they can be particularly taxing if you're in a situation where fill rate is your bottleneck. 1980x1024 isn't a particularly demanding resolution, so I suspect you have some video driver options enabled for really high anti-aliasing settings. I bet if you restore your driver settings to default, things will improve. For example, if you have 4x MSAA anti-aliasing, you're asking your video card to draw four times as many pixels as it would normally need to.

I don't see any obvious issues indicated in your files, but a couple of things to check: - What is your cloud draw area set to? You may need to increase it; FSGRW is reporting conditions at the nearest airport, and perhaps that's just a bit outside of that area. - You might try turning off the "never change visible weather" setting in RWC. If FSGRW dropped a new METAR file with these conditions that was different than the previous conditions, SMP would not represent this new data if that option is checked.

What is your screen resolution set to? Sounds like you're fill-rate bound to me.

Looks to me as though you flew into the scud layer just inside a stratus cloud. As you enter a solid stratiform cloud, the ground below you starts to fog out as you get deeper inside of it. That's how it's supposed to work. If you find this distracting, you can set your overcast representation setting to sparse or dense particles instead.

Mat, if you want a constructive conversation, let us know what SMP reports for free VRAM and system memory while you are experiencing poor performance. I can assure you that it's not normal for cloud shadows to give you a 50% framerate hit, nor is it normal for SMP to have a negative impact on framerates unless you've cranked up all of its settings on a video card that can't handle it. Even on your GTX980Ti, it's very easy to consume all of your available VRAM if you've installed too much custom scenery or other add-ons. If you temporarily remove all custom scenery and third-party addons except SMP, I think you'll find that SMP 3.2 is not the root cause of your performance issues. Going around calling SMP a "framerate killer" because you've loaded up more add-ons than your system can handle really isn't fair.

How are you measuring your VRAM usage? Make sure you're looking at what the SMP configuration screen reports, not what X-Plane's rendering option screen reports. GPU-Z can also give you an accurate measurement. Make sure you have the option to "never change weather" active in RWC. And, double check that your SMP configuration screen indicates version 3.2 - you may need to re-install if not. If trouble persists, please post your log.txt file following the crash so we can get a better idea of what's going on with your system and setup.

I think the installer places it in the resources/plugin/silverlining folder. The X-Aviation guys would know for sure, but they're busy at FlightSimCon. For now, I've uploaded it here in case you can't find it: http://media.sundog-soft.com/SMP3/SMP_Doc.pdf

Different issue I think. If it were bad METAR data, it would crash for everyone at startup regardless of where they are flying, and the log would indicate clearly that the crash happened in the SkyMaxx Pro plugin. What you're describing sounds more like you're running out of memory. Try turning down your cloud draw area, or if you can trim some of your custom scenery or dial down some rendering options, that can help too.

Well, there was a one-hour window a few days ago where some unexpected METAR data was being published by NOAA that resulted in SMP + RWC crashing on startup. I wonder if you just ran into that by chance.

I don't see any outright known conflicts indicated in your log, but I do see you've got a bunch of custom scenery and a third party plane going on. I wonder if your system was just running out of VRAM when flying into bad weather; that's the most common situation that leads to a crash. You might want to check your free VRAM reported in the SMP configuration screen, and turn down SMP's cloud draw area setting if necessary. Anything less than a few hundred MB of free VRAM can be cutting it too close.

You should find the metar.rwx file alongside your log.txt file, in the directory you installed X-Plane into. So, if you encounter clear conditions again where you think there should be clouds, capture both the metar.rwx and log.txt files for us and let us know where you were.

Denco, I have to admit I don't see a stutter in the video you provided. Maybe it's my browser but I see one frame that just goes totally black, but I'm pretty sure that's not us. If you're entering very cloudy conditions for the first time, I'd expect maybe a few very small stutters as new clouds get loaded up (but subsequent clouds should be created very fast once those new clouds are cached.) In the end you have to find the right balance between appearance and performance for your system and your personal preferences. The cloud draw area slider is the easiest way to strike that balance. And we're always working to find ways to push the envelope on performance further. Some stuff's already in the works for SMP4 in that regard.

Yes, the upcoming 3.2.1 update should fix this. It's been handed off to X-Aviation so should be soon.

If this is still happening, please send us your log.txt so we can see what happened on your system.

Denco & gpb500 - how much free memory is reported in the SMP configuration screen when this happens?

Your log has a lot of unusual messages in it I haven't seen before, but I don't see any problems reported with Skymaxx Pro or RWC. My best guess would be that you are in an area of low visibility, and this is causing clouds to disappear unless they are close to you. Do clouds appear if fly to a higher altitude where visibility is better? If trouble persists, please capture your metar.rwx file for us and let you know where you were flying at the time.

OK; the bug inside the METAR parsing library we are using that led to a crash in the 2PM EDT METAR data has been identified and fixed. With a future update to SMP, this particular case won't happen again. It had to do with how somebody entered remarks indicating tornadic activity, if you're curious.

That is exactly what happened. The current data seems OK though.

It should be OK now. There was some bad data in the METAR.RWX file provided by NOAA for the previous hour that seems to have been corrected in the latest weather data. Start with real weather off, then go to the weather screen and download fresh METAR data, and it should work OK. Looking into why the previous hour's weather caused a crash though. Even bad data shouldn't cause that to happen. It appears to be a bug in the METAR parsing library we use, but haven't tracked it down yet.