sundog

strider, are those two screenshots taken over the same location and same exact time and date? I just double checked our settings for this effect and they are identical between SMP 1.1 and 1.3. Your latitude / longitude, the phase and position of the moon, and the amount of twilight all play a role in cloud lighting just after sunset, and even minor changes in location or time can make a big difference. That's not to say there isn't further room for improvement. The real issue here is that we basically need to reverse-engineer X-Plane's lighting and ephemeris model in order to try and light our clouds consistently with X-Plane's sky. Sometimes X-Plane's model and ours differ by a few minutes, and that leads to small windows of mismatched lighting.

Creating cloud shadows from a plugin just isn't technically foreseeable now or in the near future from what we've been told. There are lots of other new features we're looking at however...

Brenchen, please post your log file so we can have a look at it. My only guess at this point is that some other add-on is placing a cumulus or overcast cloud layer at or below ground layer which SMP then honors, and visibility is set to be very low therefore making those clouds mostly transparent. If you can post a screenshot of your SMP settings that might also be useful (restoring them to defaults is worth a shot as well.)

We talked to Laminar about this - it's not something currently possible for a plugin to do in X-Plane I'm afraid.

Our initial thought when developing MaxxFX was to leave the cockpit untouched, and we did have that up and running at one point. I can confirm what John said - it looked goofy to have different color palettes on the cockpit and the scenery. We were also unable to figure out how to get it working in HDR mode - adjusting the color of the entire scene was the only way to get MaxxFX to work in both the HDR and non-HDR cases. I understand your trepidation however, as most of the videos and screenshots of MaxxFX out there don't have a cockpit view. Here's what it looks like with the "Extra Normal" preset as an example: (I also uploaded a view of a 3D cockpit at http://media.sundog-soft.com/c4_2.png ). As you can see, it's generally a non-issue. MaxxFX gives you complete control of the colors, and it's certainly possible to set up bad-looking cockpits with the power user settings and some of the more extreme presets. But, for the settings you'd actually want to fly with long-term, it's generally a subtle enough enhancement that the cockpit still looks good too.

This is a known issue. The X-Plane SDK doesn't give plugins the ability to sort their own transparent objects (like SkyMaxx's clouds) with other transparent objects in the scene (like rotor blades.) So, transparent parts of planes can sometimes draw over our clouds when clouds are behind the plane. Unless the SDK changes at some point to somehow permit this, there's not much we can do about it I'm afraid. Fortunately, these situations are pretty rare. Thank you for using SkyMaxx Pro, 3saul.

We are working on releasing a patch for this issue; it seems to happen in rare situations and only on MacOS. Meanwhile, you may find that unchecking the SMP option for forcing a cirrus cloud layer may reduce the likelihood of it happening. Stay tuned...

Nothing too telling in your logs, although your B58 and a couple of your add-on sceneries appear to have issues. I do suspect this is an issue related to using such an old version of XSquawkBox with the newer Gizmo installed with SkyMaxx Pro, but as this doesn't look like a problem with SkyMaxx Pro itself I'm out of my depth. My best advice would be to try updating to the newest version of XSB and see if that clears it up, just to narrow it down. Ben or Cameron - any opinion?

What? The P3D academic license clearly states it is only for use in K-12 and college settings. Source: http://www.prepar3d.com/product-overview/prepar3d-license-comparison/ Where has Lockheed Martin said otherwise?

SkyMaxx Pro is 64-bit only, so I too can't understand how it would affect 32-bit X-Plane at all. If you could post your log file following your lockup in 32 bit perhaps we can spot what the real issue is.

My money's on lots of highly specialized devices in the home, as opposed to accessing any content from any device. Play games on your Steambox / XBox / whatever. Read books on your Kindle. Watch TV on your Roku. Check the web and messages on your phablet. Heck, my house is mostly there already. Consumers who need a traditional PC, such as developers and content creators, will become increasingly niche. Hard to see the PC leaving the office, but given that office PC's need to be usable by non-technical people, it's hard to see Linux gaining traction there. In these specialized devices however, Linux and its variants is the obvious choice due to cost and the lack of any need to expose the actual OS to the end user. How many people know or care that their Kindle Fire is running a branched version of Android? To them it's just a UI for consuming content.

Thanks dpny. Mostly I'm interested in whether you can get it to crash if there are no cirrus layers in the scene at all. If you have time to try it out, it would be helpful in narrowing down what's going on.

dpny - I haven't experienced the crash you're seeing, but I have a couple of theories. One is that this is a symptom of running out of memory. The other is more involved, but would be a problem specific to MacOS involving cirrus cloud layers. Any chance you had more than one cirrus layer active when this happened? Does the problem persist if you have the new "force cirrus" option off in 1.3? Thanks, Frank

There's a link to the documentation on the product page; or just click here.

We are testing a fix now and hope to have it out soon.

It seems that by updating our Mac development system to Mavericks (10.9.1), we inadvertently made the 1.3 build of SkyMaxxPro require MacOS 10.9. We're working on figuring out how to support earlier OS's. For now - if you are running an older version of MacOS, you'll need to either stick with SMP 1.2 or update your OS. If you're running Windows or MacOS 10.9 or newer however, you should be good.

Another possibility is that the plane is making some invalid assumptions about the OpenGL rendering state prior to drawing the cockpit. I'd recommend taking this up with X-Hangar as well if you haven't already, as it's probably something they can work around on their end, assuming it's reproducible.

I think that looks like illumination from lightning inside a cumulonimbus cloud. Normally that would just flash on and off at random times - are you saying it's lit up constantly like that?

The simulated time and location of your flight may be relevant if you could provide that for us.

I took the risk and downloaded it. Here's cram20's log file. Looks like there are improperly installed add-ons and other potential conflicts - or it may just be out of memory from too much custom scenery. But I'll leave diagnosis to the pros. Log (10).txt

To be constructive, it's most likely that you are running out of memory on your video card if you're experiencing a performance loss with SkyMaxx Pro relative to running with equivalent default cloud settings. SkyMaxx Pro uploads new cirrus textures and the geometry for all those clouds to your video card, and if you were already running close to the limit due to other add-ons and custom scenery, it's always possible that SkyMaxx Pro's resources is just the straw that breaks the camel's back on some systems. The very small percentage of users reporting this sort of thing is consistent with this theory. If you start off with your VRAM almost exhausted, install SkyMaxx Pro, and that pushes your system over the edge - there's not a whole lot we can do about that. You might try reducing the settings in Skymaxx Pro for cloud draw distance and detail, and selecting the low resolution cirrus texture, to reduce its memory footprint and reduce the amount of work SMP needs to do each frame. I feel the need to respond to some of the other statements in this thread.... SkyMaxx Pro is in fact stable as a rock. It is not some buggy piece of software released prematurely. SkyMaxx Pro involves close to 100,000 lines of C++ code, and it did undergo beta testing over a lengthy period on multiple systems and platforms prior to its 1.0 release. The fact that you don't see lots of complaints about SMP crashing, despite the huge variety of systems running it in the wild, speaks to the QA that was done. Instead, the feedback you do see is largely aesthetic and related to performance on a handful of systems. We've been extremely responsive to feedback from the community. SkyMaxx Pro 1.0 did in fact perform better than default clouds on most systems we tested it on, as the product description claims, but user feedback was that it still wasn't fast enough for some of our customers. So, we hunkered down, got some help from Laminar, and issued version 1.1 within a couple of weeks which pretty much doubled performance. Then, we started seeing a few complaints about the slight delay that happens when new weather conditions come in from X-Plane while running with real weather on. So, we hunkered down and found a way to make handling weather updates four times faster in version 1.2. User feedback on 1.2 indicated that it made the delay almost un-noticable for most users, which is pretty remarkable considering SMP needs to re-generate thousands of new clouds when new cloud conditions come in. If this is still unacceptable to you as a user, you can reduce the cloud draw distance and detail settings to make this delay smaller. We also got some reports of a slow memory leak (which is outside of SMP itself) affecting long-haul flights on some systems, and a fix for that is imminent in 1.3. I think perhaps we've been TOO responsive with updates to SMP, as it seems to create the impression that there have been lots of bugs that we needed to urgently address. Rather, we've just been eager to implement improvements suggested by the community. So, if you're reading this thread trying to make a purchase decision about SMP - know that it's providing an upgraded visual representation of the sky and clouds in X-Plane with increased performance and great stability for the vast majority of our customers. In the unlikely event that you run into trouble, the developers are here and act in response to any problems we see reported.

Thank you Mat. We have been trying to isolate this issue this whole time but it is proving elusive, even after engaging Laminar on it. Having an easier-to-find test case will help however.

A lot of what I'm reading in this thread sounds like memory thrashing, either on the CPU or GPU. Too many add-ons can lead to this condition. You can reduce SkyMaxx's memory footprint, if necessary, by reducing the cloud layer size setting, and selecting lower resolution cirrus textures. This isn't an issue with SkyMaxx Pro per se, it's just that there's only so much you can throw at a given system, and for some very small percentage of users SkyMaxx Pro is the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Thank you! And a great 2014 to you.

(Deleted suggestions for hackery...)