sundog

Can you confirm what version of SkyMaxx Pro you are using? You said you're using "the latest beta," but we haven't released any beta versions. In addition to HDR being required in VR for cloud shadows to work, you also have to be in an external view. I *think* you are based on that screenshot but it's something worth asking.

Shadows in VR only work if HDR is active in your X-Plane graphics settings. We're not able to read the information needed from X-Plane to draw shadows in VR unless HDR is on.

It displays stratus clouds already. There's a whole configuration screen for how you want overcast clouds to appear.

You still need to restart X-Plane for sky color changes to take effect. Although it may look like you can switch between Hosek-Wilkie and Default immediately, it won't be right until you restart. This is explained right above the settings, although in English! I think I have found a bug in how cloud texture configuration changes are applied; we will fix that in our next release. Thank you for letting me know.

"Export settings" only saves your setting for SkyMaxx Pro that you see in the configuration screen. It does not save your clouds in the scene or the weather itself. You need to restart X-Plane for sky color set changes to take effect. This is noted in the configuration screen.

Yeah, that all makes sense. It's almost certainly just doing texture replacement, and it your understanding of it all sounds spot on. Turning off Vulkan mode is always an option for now. SkyMaxx Pro is still very much in active development, so if it becomes possible to draw reflections under Vulkan in the future we'll be on it.

I don't know what product this is, but if this is under Vulkan then it probably works by just modifying X-Plane's built-in clouds rather than replacing them entirely. That would result in reflections still working. In contrast, SkyMaxx Pro disables X-Plane's built in clouds completely and renders its own in 3D in their place. If you're doing your own 3D drawing in a plugin, you don't have access to the reflection pass under Vulkan.

Using OpenGL to Vulkan is the only way to do 3D rendering in X-Plane 11.50 in Vulkan mode. They do not expose a way to write native Vulkan code in plugins. I'm not sure who's promising what in the competition, but don't believe everything you see / hear until it's released. I've seen at least one developer making a lot of claims that are flat out impossible.

I actually don't receive any of the installers myself, but if you contact X-Aviation support they may be able to help.

I just reviewed all the changes between 4.9.4 and 4.9.6 and I don't see anything that might explain a change in how propellers appear in X-Plane 10. Most of the changes involved support for X-Plane 11.50, so if 4.9.4 is working well for you you're probably best advised to stick with it for now.

Does it make a difference if your landing lights are on or off? And out of curiosity, why are you still on X-Plane 10.51? This may have more to do with a bug in X-Plane itself that has long since been fixed. X-Plane 11 doesn't come with a Dash 8, but I tried the King Air which also has dual props, and couldn't get this to happen with it using X-Plane 11.50r2.

Hard to say. If the brighter one is the one with SMP, my guess would be that the crepuscular rays feature in SMP is kicking in because you're looking toward the sun. You can disable that in SMP's configuration settings. If the darker one is SMP, then I would suspect a cloud shadow covered the plane. You can also adjust the cloud shadow intensity in SMP's settings.

That metar does not indicate storms, just light rain with at most "broken" clouds. Sometimes you need to force ASXP and SMP to sync with each other; there's a debug menu in ASXP that lets you immediately publish new data, and SMP has a "force weather reload" menu option you can use. Especially if you have "never change visible weather" enabled in RWC, they can get out of sync in some situations. Also make sure you have ASXP properly configured for use with SMP; this is described in the RWC manual.

I just spent an hour or so making sure that SkyMaxx Pro is not leaking memory itself, and I'm fairly certain it isn't. I can observe memory use rising slowly over time in X-Plane as a whole, but it happens at the same rate even if I modify SkyMaxx Pro's plugin to literally do nothing and execute no code at all while flying. Ben Supnik from Laminar has confirmed that rc1 can crash under random circumstances, and my money's still on that. Maybe SMP is just stressing your system enough to make it more likely to be triggered. I'm also tagging @Ben Russell as your error message seems to be coming from Gizmo, and there's a small chance that Gizmo is leaking memory that he might want to investigate.

I just checked in with Laminar and yes, there is a bug in RC1 that will lead to random crashes if you are using orthophotos. It's likely that's what you're experiencing.

I really can't say; it might not be SkyMaxx Pro that is really your bottleneck, but your graphics settings or some other add-on. There are just too many variables.

It might just be something specific to the weather conditions at KPNS at the time you were flying; perhaps visibility was too low for the clouds to appear. Can you try some other locations, or see if setting up weather manually works? I don't see any indication of a problem in your log. SkyMaxx Pro does not work with Metal, but you said you had Metal disabled (note you have to restart X-Plane for changing your Metal setting to take effect)

I don't think SkyMaxx Pro is directly causing your issue, but it uses additional memory and may just be pushing your system over the edge. I see you're running with a lot of custom scenery, and even with an awesome video card and lots of RAM it might be tight. Your log states pretty clearly that the crash originated from some aircraft trying to draw guages and running out of memory. I just ran a test to make sure SMP itself is not leaking memory, and it doesn't appear to be. However it's possible that X-Plane's OpenGL bridge for Vulkan has a memory leak, which we make use of. If this doesn't happen with Vulkan disabled, then I think you did the right thing by reporting it to Laminar. You might try flying with a different aircraft, or without custom scenery, or turning off HDR - I suspect any action you take that reduces memory usage, which includes disabling SMP, would "fix" things for you.

It sounds like a license issue; if your license doesn't check out for some reason then SkyMaxx Pro will not display any clouds. If you can post your log.txt it might tell us if that's what's going on.

In general, a faster CPU should allow you to draw more clouds further out.

Another workaround would be to choose a sky color option in SMP other than Hosek-Wilkie - it seems that is also required to trigger this odd issue. It's starting to look like a driver bug as I'm debugging the issue, so not sure I can fix this case on my end. For others reading this - garbage being rendered on the screen seems to be specific to using X-Plane 11.50 with Vulkan, on an ATI card, with HDR off, anti-aliasing on, and with the Hosek-Wilkie sky colors selected. If you're seeing this, changing any of those things should fix it.

For more realistic clouds in the distance, you'll want to pair SkyMaxx Pro with Real Weather Connector, and turn up SkyMaxx Pro's "cloud area covered" setting. I haven't seen performance drop to that extent in storms myself. It might suggest that you're tight on memory.

I think you'll find that if you either enable HDR, or disable anti-aliasing, this will go away. I see the issue and am working on a fix (it is specfific to AMD + Windows + no-HDR + AA + 11.50)

A screenshot and log.txt might help me understand what you're seeing. Does this happen when you are flying inside a solid or broken overcast cloud? That's the only situation where we would try to apply our own fog.

Fyi, we increased the time between lighting strikes by 50% in the new 4.9.6 release.