sundog

Change the simulated date to a night that has a new moon, or to a time where then moon isn't out, and you'll be much happier.

Keep in mind the brightness of the clouds at night also has to do with the phase and location of the moon. If you want darker clouds, try experimenting with different dates and times in X-Plane. A new moon or a time where the moon has not risen will result in much darker clouds.

That's not the "coordinate system limitation". That's just normal operation; you have RWC set to "always" and it downloaded some new weather information which is proceeded to display. It will only do that once per hour. The "coordinate system" thing would result in lines like "coordinate system changed" in your log. If you see that, then yes you're crossing a tile boundary and that's what's causing the weather to reload. If these reloads take too long for you, try reducing your cloud draw area a bit in your SMP configuration. That can help a lot.

Our updates are generally driven by what customers are asking for, but I don't want to go into details at such an early stage! I do have a couple of new features in mind for a future update already, though.

Back to the original topic, neither SkyMaxx Pro nor RWC have any affect on weather radar displays. The radars will display whatever they would display without SMP or RWC installed.

We check specifically for whether the X-Plane dataref sim/cockpit/electrical/landing_lights_on is on or not. So I would guess that the IXEG is not setting that with the inboard landing lights. Probably best to take this to the IXEG forums.

> XPL rend. settings shows VRAM usage around 600-800MB, SkyMaxx shows around 100MB free. How is this possible? XPlane's rendering settings info only displays VRAM consumed by X-Plane's textures - there are lots of other things that consume video memory. The amount of VRAM displayed in Skymaxx Pro is far more accurate, and should agree with what you would see with a utility such as GPU-Z. So, if Skymaxx Pro says you're down to 100MB of VRAM, then you are indeed running out of VRAM, and that is the most likely cause of your crash. A 2GB card isn't really enough to run X-Plane with lots of add-on scenery, planes, and add-ons such as ours. You're going to have to make some compromises with your settings or the amount of custom scenery you are using in order to fit within your VRAM budget.

Maybe I didn't word that well. Real Weather Connector lets you fly into different weather systems in real time. But if brand-new global weather conditions are received, then of course we have to represent that new, different weather where you are somehow. METAR data only gets refreshed once per hour by X-Plane, so at most this would happen once every hour using X-Plane's built-in weather system (or if you have RWC set to "always").

I think Cameron will need to reset something on the licensing system for you. Please file a ticket with X-Aviation to make sure that gets done.

When you "checked your settings", that was SkyMaxx Pro's settings screen, right? The VRAM usage displayed in X-Plane itself only reflects texture usage and nothing else. If Skymaxx Pro says you have 400MB free, then I don't think VRAM is the problem. Are you overclocking your CPU or GPU by any chance? If that's not it, please post your log.txt and we'll see if there is anything that might give us a clue in there.

Looks like you have some sort of file system problem going on there; might want to run some diagnostics on your hard drive. I'll let the folks more familiar with the installer chime in, though.

You are probably running out of video memory, causing your video driver to start swapping memory (which kills performance.). Are you running with a lot of custom scenery and other add-ons? If you check the SkyMaxx Pro configuration screen, it will tell you how much free VRAM you have. If it's less than a few hundred megabytes, you need to reduce some settings or reduce some add-ons to free some more up. Installing a fresh copy of X-Plane and only adding in the scenery and add-ons you need usually helps people.

Start by completely un-installing your video drivers, and re-installing them. Are you overclocking your CPU or GPU? If so, try disabling that. If you increased the default settings in SMP, try deleting the resources/plugins/silverlining/settings.dat file, which will put you back to defaults. You may have set things too high for your system to handle. Beyond that, I'm afraid you are probably asking too much of your GTX560 video card. I believe that is a one gigabyte card, and in addition to X-Plane you are running a lot of custom scenery and aircraft. You're almost certainly running out of video memory which is probably the root cause of your crashes. A 1GB video card is the minimum system requirement for X-Plane, as soon as you start installing add-ons, you're pretty much guaranteed to run out of memory. If you want to run X-Plane with lots of add-ons, you should consider purchasing a video card with more memory (8GB would be my recommendation.)

They are pretty backed up so please be patient. However be aware you can't use your friend's license on your computer; I'm not sure if that's the case as the English translation of your question wasn't very clear. If two different people are using our products on two different computers, you need to buy two different licenses.

- Do I need to install RWC on the server PC as well? No. Do me a favor - set up your server for real world weather. Does it look like the metar.rwx file on the clients are now identical sizes and have a file modification time from when you set up real weather on the server? I don't have a multi-PC setup to test with, but if you can give me that information I can answer your other questions.

There are two things that will cause weather to completely reload even with RWC: - If you cross a boundary in X-Plane where X-Plane's internal coordinate system changes in order to re-align itself with a round Earth, then we re-create our clouds to ensure they are in the proper locations. I believe this happens whenever you cross a one degree tile boundary. If this is happening, you should see some messages in your log.txt from Skymaxx Pro indicating a coordinate system change. - If a new metar.rwx file is found, we parse it an recreate the clouds. So if you've set your METAR to automatically update every 10 minutes, you'll see the clouds reload every 10 minutes.

What is your cloud/terrain softness setting at? Turning it up might help.

3.1.2 could in fact be a bit faster in terms of FPS when Real Weather Connector is used with it. The "more natural shapes" of cloud formations means a few less clouds need to be drawn than before. So, you might not be imagining it, Tony!

If you just delete the settings.dat file, SMP will rewrite a new one with default settings when it starts up. No need to dredge up a backup copy.

It's normal if you're on the verge of running out of memory, either on your video card or your system memory. While the GTX980 is an awesome card, it's still pretty easy to fill it up with custom scenery, third party aircraft, and/or HD mesh stuff. Basically anything you can adjust in your configuration to conserve memory will help performance; reducing the cloud draw area is just one possibility. If you can lower some rendering settings, or eliminate scenery and add-ons you don't need, that can help a lot.

Hi peasmarsh - if you look at the posts on this thread that happened while you were away, you'll see that this issue is well understood now. This behavior will be changed in our next update.

Well, a few people have been confused by this behavior. I looked at the code, and RWC sets up cirrus cloud layers that have a "thickness" to them. Inside, visibility gets reduced. This is different than how SMP worked without RWC, where cirrus layers were just flat planes you could fly right through. In hindsight I think that was a mistake. I've made a change for a future update that will make these clouds thin and flat again.

There were many code and config changes in 3.1.1. The change relative to this thread affected an offset applied to the solar altitude when computing lighting on the clouds. But, I don't encourage tinkering with our configuration settings, as they can have unexpected effects - or even no effect in many cases. Most people who have tried don't even modify the correct file!

Maybe another way to explain this is that it's possible to just have one too many add-ons. If you have a plugin conflict that's corrupted memory somewhere, *any* new plugin has the potential to cause a crash if it needs to access that corrupt memory. But the crash isn't the fault of that plugin. That's what your report seems like is happening. Similarly, if you're on the verge of running out of memory - one more plugin, *any* plugin, can push you over the edge and lead to a crash. But that's not a problem with the plugin that pushed you over the edge - the problem is that you were on the edge to begin with. So fundamentally, you have a bad plugin somewhere, or a plugin conflict, or maybe you're running out of memory. But because SkyMaxx Pro was the "straw that broke the camel's back" doesn't mean it is the root cause. Ben's point is that our massive install base means that if there were a defect of this magnitude in SkyMaxx Pro, we likely would have heard about it a long time ago. To isolate the root cause, you need to follow Ben's advice above. Let us know what you find and we'll continue to assist.

Once you're above a cirrus layer, it will obscure your visibility below you. They are very thin so they might appear as little more than a line before you hit them, but they do have some thickness to them. As you said, turning off "force cirrus layer" is one way to avoid these clouds if you wish. Different cirrus textures might provide more empty space than others, as well.