sundog

There is a 4.0.1 version of SkyMaxx Pro that fixes the Sierra installation issue; it was released yesterday as well.

My guess would be that the aircraft isn't setting the textures it needs properly; there is no direct interaction between our cloud shadows and your aircraft. We just draw them over the scene as a whole. I'm not sure if this is an issue related to these third party aircraft or an XP11 issue, but given that the XP11 default aircraft don't seem to have this problem I suspect the former. I would contact the authors of these aircraft to see if they have any ideas.

Using the same time and location with FSGRW, my results look quite different: I think something's wrong with your FSGRW installation. The METAR.rwx file you sent is very different from the one FSGRW wrote for me. In particular, I don't see any entries near EGLL at all in yours, while mine has one at its exact location: MDEG -0.461395 51.4775 24 11006KT 9000 OVC036 05/03 Q1022 Perhaps FSGRW is writing METAR into the wrong X-Plane installation if you have more than one, or something prevented it from writing it. At any rate, it's pretty clearly an issue related to your FSGRW setup and not SMP/RWC. However, if you set RWC to "always", it will basically bypass what FSGRW is telling it for clouds and use raw METAR data instead.

Are you running X-Plane 10 or 11? My understanding is that FSGRW is not yet compatible with XP11.

No, it doesn't I'm afraid.

Your log says SMP didn't cause the crash, at least not directly. Are your VRAM and RAM measurements coming from our configuration panel? It's consistent with what I'd expect to see from either a system that's running low on resources, or another plugin corrupting memory. You have several add-ons I don't recognize. Try disabling everything *but* SMP/RWC (including all that custom scenery, which seems to have some issues of its own) - does it run more reliably then?

The individual particles in HD cloud puffs are larger, so the anomalies that can happen when you look at them from the wrong angles are worse than in sparse or dense particles, where the puffs are smaller. The idea was to trade off the puff size and some volumetric feel for the ability to have photographic cloud textures and higher performance, which a lot of FSX refugees have made pretty clear is what they want. That said I do have some ideas on making what you're talking about less apparent.

There are a lot of things that affect how far the clouds are drawn - visibility, the cloud draw area setting, your altitude, whether you're entering or exiting another cloud layer, and even performance. If SMP detects that your framerates are too low, it will start to pull in the cloud draw distance to try and help. That might be what you're seeing. If your system can't handle our maximum draw distance for whatever reason, we dial it back automatically. When using Real Weather Connector, also bear in mind that you could just be seeing the edge of a cloud system and there are in fact clear skies ahead. In short - it's complicated, but we tested it extensively and I think it's working the way it should.

Possibly, but for now just don't turn up the crepuscular rays setting to 1.0. That sliders' there so you can tone it down to look more natural.

Thanks for making me smile, Tony

SkyMaxx Pro 4 works with X-Plane 10 and X-Plane 11. To eliminate "sudden weather changes," you'll also want to get the Real Weather Connector product. That will help with either SMP3 or SMP4.

OK, I looked into this. Short story: the issue with with X-Plane 11's own built-in lightning effect, not ours. In stormy conditions, you'll still see X-Plane's own lightning effects in addition to ours. Lightning that appears attached to one of our cumulonimbus clouds is lightning drawn by SkyMaxx Pro. Lightning that just appears out of the blue is drawn by X-Plane. You can also spot our lightning because it illuminates the cloud around it. I found that our lightning draws white as it should - it's actually X-Plane's own lightning that appears dark in X-Plane 11. I'll file a bug with Laminar on this.

Yes, it's triggered by nearby storms appearing. Hold tight; a fix is on the way.

That's how SMP3 worked, but in SMP4 it will always use maxx_metar.rwx if "always" mode is on.

It is normal behavior. We have to strike a delicate balance between performance, visual detail, and "popping." We will probably refine this further as the SMP 4.x run progresses.

The blowing snow on the tarmac is a feature of X-Plane, not SkyMaxx Pro.

It's a problem with how the current beta version of X-Plane 11 handles the blend pass. We've opened an issue with Laminar to change how this works if possible, so hopefully a future beta release of X-Plane 11 will resolve this.

This is a known issue and we already have a fix for it. We've delivered SkyMaxx Pro 4.0.1 to X-Aviation for distribution and it should be available soon.

We didn't make any changes in SMP4 with multi-PC sync in mind, and we don't have such a setup here to test with. It *should* sync if every PC is receiving exactly the same weather conditions, and every PC has exactly the same SMP and RWC settings in place. Many commercial customers of SMP's underlying cloud engine use it in multi-channel simulators all the time without issue. Also keep in mind that a license issue on one PC will result in that channel displaying clear skies. Now, there were a couple of changes in SMP4 that *might* affect sync, so if you already bought the upgrade it's worth a shot. It uses a new pseudo-random number generator internally, and fixes a bug that might cause individual cloud puffs to rotate differently based on how long the PC has been on.

We're not aware of any cases that would cause SMP to crash, but if you can provide us with your log.txt and METAR.rwx files if this happens again, we should be able to figure out what happened. SMP/RWC does not load weather data for regions as you approach them; a fault there would result in SMP crashing as soon as you started your flight. So I think something else is going on. Check your free RAM and VRAM in the SMP config screen too - perhaps you just ran out of memory due to the incoming scenery or weather being too much for your system to handle.

A direct comparison of performance of SMP3 vs SMP4 is difficult to do. You need to ensure the weather conditions are identical, you're in the same version of X-Plane, and all of the settings in SMP are the same. Even then, there are some changes in SMP4 that might result in more clouds being created for a given set of weather conditions in order to produce more accurate results. But if you can eliminate all of those variables, you should see that SMP4's performance is considerably higher than SMP3. Especially when comparing the new "HD puffs" overcast option to sparse or dense particles from SMP3. If, however, your system is tight on VRAM, it may struggle with the higher-resolution textures included with SMP4. If you think this might be the case on your system, try changing SMP's "crisp" option to "fast" and see if that helps.

Could be. Will investigate. Thanks for the report.

Depends what you want. If it's injecting weather via datarefs, "automatic" will honor what FSRealWX is sending to X-Plane, but datarefs can only represent 3 layers of cloud conditions that are uniform around the plane. I'd rather run in "always" mode in that case, so SMP can use METAR data to place more complex cloud formations that you can fly into without any sudden changes. So in that mode, you'd be using raw METAR for the clouds through RWC, and FSrealWX for other aspects of weather.

It is exactly the same GPU as you have, though. If this is in fact a 2013-model Mac Pro I think you probably should contact Apple to see if there's a known issue and potential warranty fix.

I'm not an expert on Mac models, but does this sound like your system? http://hothardware.com/news/apple-quietly-recalls-2013-mac-pros-due-to-defective-amd-firepro-gpus