sundog

We've seen this occasionally in the past, and it does seem specific to the system and video card you happen to have. We've found some anecodotal evidence online of this being a subtle hardware failure of the card itself. I think it's more of a driver issue, but Apple doesn't allow you to mess with your drivers really to try and fix it. My advice would be to try different graphics quality settings in X-Plane to see if that clears it up. It may be specific to HDR usage.

Thanks - I think that's a separate thing. Been flying all morning here and I just can't make the original issue happen. If you do encounter it, please note any details you can (where you were, what altitude it happened at, graphics settings, log.txt) I'm hoping I accidentally fixed this in 4.9.1.

Just want to start a separate thread on this issue to keep track of it for @seth and @thomascats1. When the cloud/terrain softness setting in SMP is set to something other than zero, it seems that clouds above the horizon are not being drawn sometimes at high altitudes. I'm going to start looking into this now. I suspect it's specific to a certain combination of graphics quality and AA settings, so if either of you happen to know what yours is set to that would be helpful. Once I can reproduce this, I have a pretty good idea of what's causing it - but so far I can't get it to happen reliably. If you have a log.txt it would help me see if it's maybe something related to a specific system configuration.

According to your log, X-Plane is having problems because your video drivers are out of date: 0:00:48.783 E/SYS: +------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0:00:48.783 E/SYS: | X-Plane was not able to start using the Vulkan driver, and is now using the OpenGL driver. Update your drivers and then re-enable the Vulkan driver in the graphics settings to try again. 0:00:48.783 E/SYS: | 0:00:48.783 E/SYS: | 0:00:48.783 E/SYS: | 0:00:48.783 E/SYS: | (ui_screen_main_menu.cpp:464) 0:00:48.783 E/SYS: +------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Try resolving that issue first. Beyond that, make sure you have downloaded the latest installer for SkyMaxx Pro and are installing using it.

Yes, I think it's the same thing. X-Plane seems to switch how their depth buffer works at a certain viewpoint or something. You might try switching to the default sky color set instead of our Hosek-Wilkie model; I don't think it will help, but if there's any setting that might affect this it's that.

I think that's an artifact resulting from a bug in X-Plane itself; I've noticed similar things with the trees even with SMP disabled when using Vulkan. But I'll look at it more closely to be sure.

Fixed the overcast issues @Asgarmagol for 4.9.1; thanks for catching that.

What's wrong with them?

Thanks for testing @Asgarmagol. I just fixed the rain issues here and will look into your other reports now. When SkyMaxx Pro 4.9.1 comes out, it should be even faster - I also found an optimization problem that's been fixed.

Thanks for reporting that; I'll look into it today.

It will work exactly as you describe. What changed is that in previous versions of SMP/RWC, if a METAR report was affecting our representation of weather some distance away from the reporting airport, we would use the elevation of the local terrain to determine MSL instead of the elevation of the airport that reported the conditions. It could lead to discrepancies around airports in mountainous terrain, which we fixed.

The installer is made and maintained by X-Aviation; I don't really have any information on how it works. You should file a support ticket at X-Aviation's website. @Cameron if you know offhand how this is supposed to work please chime in.

Like I said, it would be helpful to know your settings for Real Weather Connector, and if you have a log.txt and metar.rwx file you can post after you've experienced the problem it may help us to figure out what's going on.

What are your settings for Real Weather Connector, and are you using it in conjunction with any other weather add-ons (such as FSGRW or ActiveSky XP?) Normally Real Weather Connector does not actually download weather conditions itself, it just translates the weather conditions given to it by X-Plane or these other add-ons to SkyMaxx Pro. So the issue probably lies with X-Plane or one of these other add-ons. It might also be an issue with the source of the weather data itself. Any additional info you can give us, such as your log.txt and metar.rwx files and where you were flying, would be helpful. As a quick test I just sparked up Seattle with real-world weather here and it seemed to work (just using X-Plane's weather, and RWC set to "automatic" mode.)

It sounds like perhaps you put the installer files in your X-Plane plugins folder, instead of running them. If you just run the installers you received from X-Aviation, it will install everything you need into X-Plane in the proper places.

Yes, I believe so, but beta testing will tell us for sure. In the meantime, try disabling cloud shadows in the SMP config screen, and turning cloud/terrain blending to 0 - that may clear up the issue (as well as improve performance)

@Cameron ?

I think maybe there are some misconceptions going on here - our clouds are not just 2D textures. They are 3D objects that use use a texture-based volumetric rendering technique, but they are still 3D objects. You can fly around and through them, which you wouldn't be able to do if they were just flat pictures.

SMP actually has a volumetric cloud engine (the more precise term is GPU ray-casting) within it that we haven't exposed. Even today's GPU's struggle to make this technique perform well at large scale, and look good up close - and so we use particle-based volumetric rendering instead. You can make GPU ray-casting look good at a distance, or good up close over a small area, but not both. Competing products suffer from the same challenge. Our stance is that particle-based clouds both look and perform better given current technology. Even if we were to support Vulkan, it wouldn't help volumetric rendering to be any faster. Vulkan frees up CPU resources, and rendering these types of clouds is bound by GPU performance.

It's expected behavior for the file size of moon.dds to change while booting. SkyMaxx Pro replaces it with its own moon texture at startup, then restores the original when you exit X-Plane.

My guess would be it's one of 3 things: Your default moon.dds file somehow became corrupt, perhaps due to a crash at just the wrong time. Try running the X-Plane installer and allow it to overwrite this file with a clean version, then delete our potentially bad copy of the file by deleting the contents of Resources/plugins/SilverLining/skyColors/Default Sky Colors There is some sort of file permission issue on your resources/bitmaps/world folder and/or Resources/plugins/SilverLining/skyColors folder. Some other plugin is also trying to control this texture. I noticed an error in your log about an AOS Seasons extension that failed to install. I don't know what that is, but if it affects the sky at all it may be in conflict with SMP.

My guess would be it's one of 2 things: The wind is too slow to move the clouds noticeably. They are very far away and it takes a fast wind for you to see motion in them. The wind was not set up at an altitude that includes the cloud layer I'd have to see the details of your weather settings to speculate further.

Tagging @Cameron

I can't explain exactly why that workaround works or is necessary, but it makes sense. We're actually working with Laminar now on some other issues surrounding how plugin dialog boxes work, so it's possible we'll uncover the root cause of what you're seeing in the process.

That's really weird. All I can tell you is that it works for me on the latest update of Windows 10, and the latest X-Plane and SkyMaxx Pro versions - and I haven't heard of anyone else experiencing this. My guess is that something else installed on your system is interfering with X-Plane's UI in some weird way. Did you install any other plugins around the time when this started happening? It might be possible for another add-on to corrupt the coordinate system we're assuming in that dialog box. If not, my best advice would be to install a fresh copy of X-Plane into a new folder, install nothing but SkyMaxx Pro into it, and see if it works then.