sundog

The new 5.1.0 update should improve performance with non-volumetric clouds. For volumetric, our advice remains to adjust your AA settings to find a good compromise between visual quality and performance for your system.

Neither SkyMaxx Pro nor Real Weather Connector adjust X-Plane's wind at all; they are only concerned with the clouds, and, depending on your settings, precipitation. Probably best to raise this with the FSGRW developers.

Try the new 5.1.0 release; it should improve performance with the non-volumetric cloud types. If you want to use volumetric, adjusting your anti-aliasing settings is probably the best way to improve their performance. If you are using a super-sampled AA approach, it multiplies the number of pixel fragments we have to compute for volumetric clouds, and multiplies how much time it takes to draw them as a result.

Try the new 5.1.0 release. It should fix that issue with textures going away on storm clouds, and improve performance. Sorry I went dark for a few days there; for some reason I stopped receiving email notifications of new posts here.

The performance improvements in 5.1.0 are more about CPU usage, and mainly for non-volumetric clouds. There's not a lot we can do to reduce the GPU overhead of supersampled anti-aliasing with high resolutions when fragment shaders as complex as volumetric rendering are involved.

If anyone runs into this again, it would be really helpful if you could capture your metar.rwx file (if using ASXP) or your fsgrwsmp.rwx file (if using FSGRW) and post it here, along with the nearest airport to where you saw the problem. That'll give us something to dig into. It sounds as though an overcast cloud layer was supposed to be present, but wasn't for some reason. Remember again that if you are switching between ASXP and FSGRW it is essential that you manually remove any fsgrwsmp.rwx file left behind by FSGRW before using ASXP. If you don't it would totally explain this sort of behavior. Knowing what your SkyMaxx Pro setting for overcast clouds is would be important as well (and changing that setting would be something to try)

I don't use XEnviro, so I don't know to be honest. I don't see why they wouldn't; from what I know our approaches to seasonal variations are completely different. We swap in an entirely different set of textures, while I think they modify them via shaders. But I can't make any promises.

We are still going back and forth with our corporate clients testing the improvements in our underlying cloud engine slated for our next revision. These are companies who produce training simulators for air forces, navies, airlines, and military organizations around the world, as well as air traffic controller trainers. Our thinking is that if it's good enough for them, it'll be good enough for you. As Cameron said we're not making any effort to time this next update with the discount period, and I don't anticipate it being ready for another week or two assuming no new issues arise in testing. This update will be provided free of charge to existing SMP 5 customers when it's ready.

They do work, so I'm wondering if the modifications you tried to make inadvertently broke something. They can be hard to see under some conditions. As a test, try flying over water, just above a broken cloud layer, with the shadow intensity all the way up in the SkyMaxx Pro settings. You should see them. Note that if it is foggy or hazy, which is often the case near the ground, cloud shadows won't appear. You have to get above the haze.

It may just be an isolated incident where something was missing or wrong with the METAR data downloaded by X-Plane, then. If it looks like this every time you fly though, there's something more we'll have to figure out. Also, if you have stopped using FSGRW, it's a good idea to manually delete the fsgrwsmp.rwx file it may have left behind in your X-Plane folder. Its presence can cause problems when FSGRW is not in use in some situations.

You need to make sure the SkyMaxx Pro and Real Weather Connector settings are identical on each channel, and that you are running the same versions on each channel. They do not sync up their settings automatically. As for the hard edges, increasing the setting for cloud/terrain blending should help.

I assume you have RWC set to FSGRW mode... Looks like there isn't any weather data being provided to us beyond the coastline for some reason. If there's an unnatural hard cutoff in clouds presented us, that's what we represent. Might be more of an FSGRW issue, assuming everything is configured properly. When things look weird, it's often a good idea to select the "force weather update" option in the SMP menu. It's possible things are just out of sync in an odd way. Might help.

It looks like (and this is an educated guess, as the log doesn't include the info we need) you probably ran out of memory while SkyMaxx Pro was recreating the clouds as you passed over a tile boundary. I'm sure this is frustrating after such a long flight, but the only real solution is to reduce your memory usage somehow. You have a fair amount of custom and seasonal scenery installed (including ours,) but you might try flying without it as a test. You could also reduce SkyMaxx Pro's "cloud draw area" setting in order to reduce its memory footprint. We do have some improvements to SkyMaxx Pro coded up here that will reduce its memory usage a bit, so our next release might help too. We think we'll have it ready for testing next week but I can't make any promises about when it will be released to the public yet.

You are most likely running out of video memory; volumetric clouds use a lot of it. Try reducing the "cloud draw area" setting in SkyMaxx Pro and turning off anti-aliasing, and see if that helps. If so, you can start turning settings back up until you find a good balance between visual quality and memory usage.

I vaguely remember fixing a bug for the 5.0 release that would result in the solid & broken stratiform options not working. Upgrading to SMP 5 may clear this up.

Those cloud options do not make use of textures, and so there are none present there. It's as expected.

Assuming you were using the new volumetric clouds, try lowering your anti-aliasing settings. Maybe that will free up enough performance overhead to help.

I can't think of anything that happens every minute. But, in general performance with volumetric clouds will improve if you lower your anti-aliasing setting.

What procedure did you use to uninstall Maxx-FX? It sounds like the Gizmo plugin still thinks it is there.

Sounds like you uncovered the logic of how latitude and the month plays a role in addition to temperature. If your latitude and month maps to winter, then the decision between "mild" and "deep" winter is a simple comparison; if the current temperature (C) is greater than the cutoff temperature, we choose mild winter (assuming you are set to "auto" mode.) We obtain the current temperature via the dataref sim/weather/temperature_sealevel_c - so one possibility is that this is not in sync with your METAR data for some reason. It's possible some other addon is modifying it, or even that X-Plane itself isn't setting it to match what's in your METAR.

That's bizarre. Maybe your settings are somehow corrupt; try deleting the settings.dat file in Resources/plugins/TerraMaxx and see if that helps. If not, it may be time to re-install.

Weird. All I can do is guess as I haven't heard of that happening before... make sure your video drivers are up to date, and you might want to experiment with your HDR and anti-aliasing settings. Some drivers have trouble with certain combinations of HDR and AA. Of course a plugin conflict is always a possibility as well.

Could be cloud shadows affecting the cockpit... have you tried setting cloud shadows to zero?

We are working on it... so far we haven't found any explanation for crashes other than running out of memory, but we do have several bug fixes and performance improvements that may help. Right now we're testing them with our corporate clients before unleashing them on the much larger X-Plane community.

On a Mac, it's usually not RAM that is the issue but video memory. I don't see any indication of you flying through storms in the log, so I think you're just exhausting video memory. That's very common on Macs as they typically don't have much of it. And when X-Plane crashes due to running out of video memory, it typically does so in this fashion where it just stops without writing any diagnostic information into the log first. If you're flying through custom scenery, that's likely consuming quite a bit of it. Disabling HDR can also help. Or, you can lower SkyMaxx Pro's cloud draw area setting. The new volumetric clouds in SkyMaxx Pro 5 also use more video memory than the non-volumetric options do.