sundog

Lights do have a tendency to "punch through" haze and fog; it looks like you're just near the bottom of the cloud layer there. I'm afraid there's nothing you can do to change this behavior.

It may be some object specific to that view is triggering the fault. Every time we've seen this sort of thing, it's turned out to be a hardware failure. Apple has quietly recalled some GPU models that are prone to this; you may want to do a Google search for your video card model and the word "recall" to see if it's on the list. (If you don't know your video card model, it will be listed near the top of X-Plane's log.txt file.)

Try switching from "solid stratiform" to "dense particles" for SMP's overcast representation. I think what you're seeing is just a limitation of how X-Plane draws lights relative to the fog effect inside "solid stratiform" clouds.

Well, I love it when problems get worked out while I'm not looking! It does look like you were starting to run low on video memory there, so some trade-offs on cloud coverage or rendering settings would be necessary. To answer your other questions, though - if you don't have RWC, SMP will honor X-Plane's real world weather or whatever other plugins may be sending in, but it will be limited to 3 layers of uniform cloud conditions surrounding you at all times. RWC is the only way for SMP to represent distinct weather systems that you can fly into and out of. Without RWC, all the clouds around you will change at once when you enter new weather conditions. If you like flying in real-world weather, it's worth it.

What I need is a shot of your SkyMaxx Pro settings, not your rendering settings. The texture memory reported in X-Plane's rendering settings doesn't include SMP's usage at all. The VRAM and RAM usage reported in SMP's configuration screen is much more accurate, and it will also let us know what changes you've made (if any) to our default settings that may be impacting performance. You should however expect some framerate hit when flying in an area with lots of cumulonimbus clouds. These are large clouds that X-Plane's default weather doesn't represent at all, so there will be some performance hit to them - you can't get something for nothing!

XPFW has forums of their own; I don't think anyone here on X-Pilot can help you with download issues on another site.

Show us a screenshot of your SMP settings while you're experiencing this, and we can offer some advice on things to tweak for your system. Attaching your log.txt would help too.

What's probably happening is that poor visibility is causing the clouds to fade away, since the visibility distance we're receiving from X-Plane is closer than the distance to the clouds. SMP processes changes in visibility smoothed out over a few seconds, so that would explain why the clouds were visible at first and then disappeared. If you increase the visibility, or fly above the clouds where visibility is better, they will probably re-appear.

What's going on in this situation is a bit more complicated. According to your logs, SMP/RWC did pick up the correct cloud conditions, but it received a visibility distance of only 100 meters. So, the clouds were all washed out and invisible due to very low visibility. 100 meters is different from what FSGRW is indicating and also from what the METAR data is indicating (3400 m). My guess would be that X-Plane itself is seeing the report of light snow, and forcing lower visibility as a result. It's also possible this is some sort of issue with FSGRW, if it's directly setting visibility data via X-Plane's API. SMP and RWC only deal with clouds, not visibility. For visibility, we just honor whatever X-Plane is telling us. My guess would be that if you raised the camera above the clouds and snow, the clouds would become visible in this particular scenario as visibility improved.

Well, that's expected - if you go to very high altitudes in space, SMP does in fact shut itself off as it cannot represent weather systems at such large scales.

Sounds like new METAR data got downloaded and applied. Perhaps what you're seeing on badbadweather.com and what NOAA is serving is a bit out of sync. If you set RWC to "never change visible weather," you shouldn't see things change suddenly like this no matter what though. Another possibility is some sort of license issue. If you post your log.txt we can check for that.

When using FSGRW, you should set RWC to "automatic", not "always" (this is spelled out in the RWC documentation.) Because RWC was on "always," it was ignoring what FSGRW was saying, and instead was using raw METAR data from NOAA (in your MAXX_METAR.rwx file): ESNU 021050Z 32009KT 9999 BKN029 M04/M07 Q1004 R14/75//45 That data only specifies broken clouds, so RWC / SMP was working properly there. Hope this helps.

Some languages do have the concept of exceptions that the application can "catch," but this METAR code is written in C where that's not an option.

Try quitting X-Plane, delete your MAXX_METAR.rwx file, and restart it.

Afraid it doesn't work that way! Fundamentally they are bugs in NOAA's METAR parsing library that I'm fixing.

To follow up, the culprit was whoever's reporting the weather at MMMT (in Veracruz, Mexico): MMMT 011510Z 00000KT 5SM VCFG FEW020 22/19 A2986 RMK 8/100 FG LYR SFC The code we use from NOAA to parse METAR data can't handle the case of SFC being the last thing in the METAR report. It doesn't make sense; SFC should be followed by VIS and a visibility distance (SFC VIS indicates surface visibility) I've coded up a fix so RWC will just ignore this case instead of crashing for our next release, in case it happens again.

If you fly again now, things should be OK. There was one hour of METAR data from NOAA that seems to have contained some sort of invalid data that caused RWC to crash. But it's since been removed it seems. I'm looking into why it caused a crash so we can prevent that from happening again.

It seems there was one hour of METAR data from NOAA that contained some sort of invalid data. It seems to have cleared up on its own, so if you fly again things should be OK now. I'm looking into why that hour's data caused a crash.

That is strange; we tested with HDR both on and off in XP11. I'll double check though; perhaps something changed in pb3 or something.

A fresh install couldn't hurt. My understanding is that activation slots are only tied to individual PC's; you shouldn't run out by re-installing on the same system. If you're low on memory, I would expect things to run fine until you actually ran out. Again there may be things running in the background on your system that is consuming it all. I do agree that the way MacOS reports VRAM usage is complex, but it's reporting low system RAM in your case.

Your log suggests you're running out of memory - but it looks like you've got 16GB installed. Are you running anything else at the same time as X-Plane? Perhaps a reboot would help to clear things out?

Don't think so. What if you disable RWC and set up cloudy conditions manually? Still nothing? If so, then perhaps it is some system-specific issue - or it could be a license issue. SMP won't render cumulus or overcast clouds if the license check fails. Although there's no indication of that in your log that you sent.

Do you see any clouds at all in XP11? Or is it specific to this scenario at KSEA?

I don't think so; the Mac I develop on has a Radeon card and it seems OK. Try un-installing SMP and re-install SMP4. Could be a missing file or something in your XP11 installation.

I loaded up your MAXX_METAR.rwx file in XP11, and it worked here. So at least whatever is going on isn't something systemic: A couple of ideas: It looks like you have one sim set to "Solid Stratiform" and the other set to "HD Cloud Puffs". If you set XP11 to "HD Cloud Puffs", does it look as you'd expect? Your log looks like you were switching RWC on and off, or turning real world weather on or off, during your flight. If you have "never change visible weather" on in your RWC settings, perhaps some weather state from your manual weather settings was kept in place as a result? Disabling "never change visible weather" would be something to try if this happens again.