sundog

It's working as intended. Cirrus clouds have distinct edges, so we can't really tile them indefinitely. Instead we have a really big cirrus cloud that remains over the camera position, and since it's usually viewed from far away, its lack of actual motion relative to the camera generally isn't noticeable. In fact you're the first to notice.

Not directly, but your eye is very sensitive to contrast. So, brighter sky colors will make the clouds seem less bright.

Motion of the clouds due to wind might explain that. I'll take a closer look though next time I'm flying with it.

God rays will only appear in specific situations - you need to be looking at the sun through an opening in a thick cloud layer. It's not random, but just like in real life, they don't appear often. Darkening clouds viewed from the bottom in bad weather is on my radar for a future update. X-Plane doesn't really give us the information needed to do this properly, but there may be reasonable ways to infer when to apply this effect using other data.

tonywob, you may be on to something with the case sensitive idea. Try renaming the Resources/plugins/SilverLining/Resources folder to Resources/plugins/SilverLining/resources (make the second resources directory lower case.) That might do the job... please let us know if so.

Well, the people reporting things like crashes and framerate dropping to near-zero have all ended up having other issues going on that were unrelated to SkyMaxx Pro. What you're reporting is expected - when a very large number of clouds need to be generated, such as upon entering stormy conditions, you will see a small pause in framerate while SkyMaxx Pro "grows" those clouds. It shouldn't be much however. And, the more clouds you have in the scene, the more they will impact performance. Our clouds are very efficient compared to X-Plane's default clouds, but they still don't come for free. John wrote up a guide for tuning SkyMaxx Pro's performance further that you may want to check out: http://forums.x-pilot.com/topic/7093-adjusting-skymaxx-pro-for-better-performance/#entry77614 In your case, the first thing I'd try is reducing the cloud draw distance setting, especially if you've adjusted it upwards at all.

There was a bug in an older version of XSquawkBox that could be triggered by any other plugin. Do a Google search for "XSquawkBox crash" and you'll see what I mean. You need to make sure you're running the latest version of XSB - it's not a Skymaxx Pro issue. Several of our beta testers flew regularly with the FF 757.

My guess is that the visibility limiter depends on X-Plane's "white out" effect, which we explicitly disable when you're near a cloud layer in order to avoid the "gray wall of death". SkyMaxx Pro has always done that. Once 10.30 goes final, there may be a better approach for this we can explore.

Yup, that one slipped by us. Good catch. If all of the following are true: You have cloud shadows onYou have X-Plane's shadows onYou are looking at your plane from an external viewYour plane is on the groundYour plane is actually underneath a cloud shadowHDR is on ...and you move the camera around, the shadows from the plane won't be quite right. So far I haven't found a workaround, but we'll address it in our next release if we can.

Well one bit of interesting information in this case is that his graphics card only has 512MB of VRAM. That probably doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for SMP2. However, it's a similar setup to my own iMac that I've been developing and testing the Mac version of SMP2 on, and it runs fine on it. However again, my iMac is running X-Plane 10.25 (not the beta 10.30) and Mavericks, which is different from this configuration. My iMac also has no other plugins or custom scenery, other than Maxx-FX of course Nano - it's not clear to me if you already tried my earlier suggestion of configuring SkyMaxx Pro 2.0 to have a similar memory footprint to SkyMaxx Pro 1.3. If you disable the cloud shadows, lens flare, and hi-res cloud puffs options in SkyMaxx Pro 2.0 - then exit and restart X-Plane - does it run better?

Well I do appreciate your being constructive, mat18590. That is a good find. The problem is that commercial add-ons are not allowed to depend on private art controls, since they may change without notice at any time - unless you get some sort of special permission from Laminar. I'll have to think on the best way to approach that.

There are rare cases (specifically if the weather tries to send us more than one cirrus layer) where we'll subsitute a cirrocumulus layer for one of them so you don't see two of the same clouds on top of each other. That cirrocumulus cloud might be what you're seeing. I only see one layer in Tom's screenshots however, so not sure it's the same thing.

Not a whole lot to go on in your log - all I can do is offer an educated guess. It doesn't indicate that Skymaxx Pro or any other plugin caused the crash, so the crash itself happened inside of X-Plane. You are running a beta version of X-Plane, and you're flying in really stormy conditions as well which will put the most pressure on your available memory due to the large number of clouds involved. Plus you may be flying over photoscenery which also stresses your available memory. I suspect the problem is the combination of the three - you ran out of memory, and the beta version of X-Plane didn't handle it well. (Be sure to send in a crash report to Laminar if prompted! Only they can tell for sure.) I would start by configuring SkyMaxx Pro to use less memory; the best way to do this is reducing the "cloud draw distance" and/or "cloud detail" settings in SkyMaxx Pro's configuration panel. If you're running with SkyMaxx Pro, you may as well set your "cloud detail" setting in X-Plane's render settings dialog to 0 as well. That also might conserve some extra memory that's going to waste. Going back to 10.25 until 10.30 is final might not be bad advice either - if you run beta software, you're kind of agreeing to the risk of crashes. Removing the photoscenery or buying more RAM may also help, but of course those are last resorts.

Yes; they won't handle license issues over the forums for security reasons.

Here's what the default, medium resolution cirrus clouds in SkyMaxx Pro look like. I guess people can judge for themselves. (Image credit: Wycliffe Barrett)

For others' benefit - we've taken this troubleshooting offline. It looks like a corrupt installation or corrupt filesystem so far. If we figure it out we'll post it.

If the settings don't help, it probably means you were almost out of memory before installing SkyMaxx Pro 2.0, and it pushed it over the edge. You should probably temporarily remove custom scenery and plugins other than SilverLining and Gizmo, and see if that clears it up. If so, start adding the other stuff back in until you run out of resources again.

Did you change any settings in SkyMaxx Pro's configuration? If so, start by deleting the resources/plugins/silverlining/settings.dat file prior to starting X-Plane in order to get back to the default settings. If you crank up the cloud draw distance all the way up for example and you don't have enough free VRAM to support it, this could happen. If you didn't change any settings, you can configure SkyMaxx Pro 2.0 to behave exactly as SkyMaxx Pro 1.3 by disabling the hi-res cloud puffs, cloud shadows, and lens flare options.

Put your cirrus preferences back to what they were by default - texture set 1, medium quality or better. We offer lower-resolution cirrus textures for customers who are low on VRAM, and it looks like you selected one of them.

Very cool. We should probably add a "reset" button to the configuration screen in a future update. It's too easy to end up making unwanted tradeoffs between quality and performance in there, and forget how to get back to where you started from.

We render the clouds with whatever thread (and core) X-Plane calls us from. You can't render to the same OpenGL surface from multiple cores / threads at the same time - only things like physics can be spread out in that way. But I have no idea how X-Plane uses or doesn't use threads internally.

I don't know how Laminar comes up with that number. If they are tracking their own resource usage internally, then I would think SkyMaxx's VRAM usage would not be part of it. If they are querying the graphics driver for it then it would - but knowing how hard it is to reliably query the driver across all kinds of cards, I suspect the former case. If you've increased the cloud draw distance setting in the SkyMaxx Pro configuration, that will consume additional VRAM - so if you've messed with that, try turning it back down.

OK, I'll have to check what X-Plane is reporting to us in beta 8. If it's off I'll let the good folks at Laminar know.

Search your entire log for "SkyMaxx Pro" - there should at least be another line saying it was initialized, and if there was an issue with the license check (which would result in no clouds) that would also appear. Clouds also might not appear in low visibility situations if you're on the ground (this is by design), so if that's not it try cranking up the visibility in your weather settings.

What version of X-Plane are you running, SkyCaptainA320? Just noticed this in the release notes for 10.30 beta 8: Cloud bases now should match weather settings for stratus bottoms of clouds.