sundog

According to your log.txt, there is a problem with your license for TerraMaxx: License challenge failed; TerraMaxx disabled. So, that's probably why it's not behaving as expected. You'll have to open a ticket with X-Aviation to see why your license doesn't seem to be valid.

Pretty sure that haze isn't coming from SkyMaxx Pro. We don't interfere with X-Plane's haze or fog effects, unless you have a stratus layer on the ground - but even then, with the settings you have, it wouldn't look like that. Perhaps the real issue is the contrast between the haze and the sky, in which case your choice of sky colors might be the actual problem. Try setting it back to default or our Hosek-Wilkie sky model.

Thanks, looking forward to checking it out!

I don't know anything about this particular product, but in general TerraMaxx will replace any default scenery, leaving photoscenery you may have installed intact. So I would expect that TerraMaxx would not overwrite this custom scenery package, but it also would not create seasonal variations of your photoscenery automatically. If True Earth has its own seasons system, TerraMaxx shouldn't interfere with it. But we don't really know how these two products might interact until someone tries it.

I don't work for X-Aviation and can't do anything about your license, but I think the short answer here is that because you were caught violating X-Aviation's license terms by using a stolen copy of their software, they are under no obligation to help you at this point.

SkyMaxx Pro is not compatible with VR. We've tried, but we're pretty sure there's a bug within X-Plane itself that prevents 3D plugins such as ours from working properly in VR. I talked to Laminar about it yesterday and we're going to keep working on figuring it out. If there's something we can do to work around it, we should have a patch out in a reasonable amount of time. But if it's something Laminar has to fix on their end, it's out of our hands. We just don't know for sure yet, but I plan on spending time next week tracking it down.

Did someone auto-schedule a post a year in advance by mistake?

All I can add is that the sky colors near the horizon are actually coming from X-Plane, not from us. We blend towards X-Plane's sky at the horizon to ensure the sky blends properly with the distant fog on the terrain. And, rain above clouds may be due to another cloud layer above you. We'd have to see a log.txt after you experience that to figure out the details. Thanks for the feedback.

Just to follow up, I heard back from Laminar, and as I thought the only thing that's breaking in 11.30 is add-ons that modify X-Plane's built-in shaders. No Maxx-XP products do that, and so they should continue to work through version 12.

From what I've been able to gather so far, what's breaking in 11.30 is add-ons that modify X-Plane's built-in shaders. SkyMaxx Pro doesn't do that, because that's never been something you're supposed to do in the first place. This very well may break other weather add-ons, though. I have a question in with Laminar for clarification, but my understanding is that SkyMaxx Pro should continue to run in its current form at least until X-Plane 12.

Re-writing SkyMaxx Pro to use Vulkan is a massive undertaking. I haven't seen this live stream nor heard anything about Laminar deprecating its existing OpenGL support for plugins in the immediate future. As of now we have not received any betas to test with, so I simply don't know yet. I'll have to ask them directly what's going on as imminent deprecation of the API's we rely on is news to me. Real Weather Connector itself should be unaffected, but it requires SkyMaxx Pro to work.

New seasonal textures do take some time to load, but 15-30 minutes is unusually excessive. Providing your log.txt file might provide us with some insight. Your PC's specs look as though they should be able to handle this package just fine, unless your hard drive is underpowered or excessively fragmented. It's also possible WIndows 7 is a factor as we've only tested on Windows 10.

I don't own those particular add-ons, but I haven't heard of them causing problems with SkyMaxxPro. However, anything they do to affect the default clouds in X-Plane will not affect SkyMaxx Pro's clouds. If you're using them to make the clouds look better, then you might gain some performance back by disabling them while using SkyMaxx Pro. SkyMaxx Pro can be used without Real Weather Connector, but you need RWC in order for SkyMaxx Pro to depict more complex weather conditions. Without RWC, SkyMaxx Pro is limited to representing X-Plane's default 3 layers of clouds that are uniform in every direction. If anyone reading this does own these add-ons as well as SMP, please chime in!

In this particular case, you're inside fog it seems. Visibility according to your log is less than 1 km. So, I think that's causing our clouds, which are on the ground in this case, to be faded out due to the fog. What I'm seeing in your screenshots is no clouds in either day or night; there is only a fog effect, which is separate from SMP's clouds. The real issue is that the runway lights are punching through the fog, I think. As an experiment, you might try modifying your weather conditions to have higher visibility, and see if the clouds re-appear.

metar.rwx is in the top-level directory you installed X-Plane into, but it will only appear if you've selected real world weather in X-Plane. I don't think you'll have any conflicts using NOAA weather. Lots of people use it with SkyMaxx Pro.

I don't own Pilot2ATC so I don't know for sure, but Real Weather Connector works through the standard metar.rwx file that X-Plane uses for default weather. So I would think that Pilot2ATC would work with X-Plane as it would normally; both Pilot2ATC and Real Weather Connector / SkyMaxx Pro should be getting their weather data from the same source, so it should "just work" without any special configuration. We don't bypass any of X-Plane's built-in channels for reading weather data. If it isn't, that's probably a question for the Pilot2ATC authors.

Could you provide a shot of your SkyMaxx Pro settings while you're experiencing the problem, as well as a copy of your log.txt? I think this may be a matter of choosing the best settings for overcast representation for you, and/or a subtle difference between where SMP is positioning the clouds compared to the default weather. You might want to just try experimenting with different overcast representation settings, such as solid stratiform, to see what works best for you.

Glad you're enjoying it! We've been waiting for summer to come along so people could start enjoying our cumulonimbus and towering cumulus effects. We do have a few performance enhancements and minor bug fixes queued up here for the next release of SMP. The main thing we're waiting on is for Laminar to make some fixes to how VR works with 3D plugins such as ours - we'd like our next update to be VR-ready, but we're dependent on some changes in X-Plane itself before we can do that.

Glad you're enjoying it! As you've surmised, the color of the clouds is driven by a lot of factors and it's complicated. Notably, if you're in truly overcast conditions where the coverage is 100% everywhere, things get a lot darker. If you're a tinkerer, it is possible to make the cumulus clouds appear darker as they increase in density. If you open up the file plugins/silverlining/resources/SilverLining.override in a text editor, you'll see this line: cumulus-density-darkening = 0.01 Increasing that value will make the clouds darker. Ironically, it's set to be too bright in response to feedback from other people who thought the clouds were too dark in earlier versions of SMP. Its "normal" value is 0.10. Be sure you have a copy of your original SMP installer, so you can re-install if something goes wrong. Once you start editing our files, we can't make any promises that things will work or provide support.

Glad you're enjoying it A few of the built-in effects, including "Mojave Desert", involve specialized shader code and can't be replicated just through presets. That particular effect does some fancy stuff to play games with the saturation of the colors in both HSV and RGB color spaces.

Try reducing the text size option in Windows. I think there's supposed to be a password field below the email address field, but it's not showing up because the text size has been increased and it no longer fits in the window.

This message means that the folder containing SkyMaxx Pro's resources is missing or was moved someplace. Try un-installing and re-installing SkyMaxx Pro, and check for a corrupt file system on your PC.

Storms require us to draw many more clouds and larger clouds, and this taxes your CPU more, impacting performance.

Yes, when there are lots of clouds present SkyMaxx Pro will demand a lot from the CPU and not just the GPU. So that would definitely be a factor.

Storms involve rendering a very large number of clouds, including some very large cumulonimbus and towering cumulus clouds. Accurately depicting these sorts of conditions will consume extra resources on your system; there's just no avoiding it. All I can suggest is reducing your "cloud area covered" setting further if you plan on flying into stormy areas, and making sure your X-Plane graphics options are tuned properly for your system.