sundog

The installer for 5.0.5 should install no files at all into skyColor/Default Sky Colors. @Cameroncan you confirm?

What resolution are you running at? Volumetric clouds do heavy computations for every pixel fragment, so high resolutions and/or high antialiasing settings can really affect performance with them.

I'm targeting 5.1 for that (again, to be clear, the performance improvements would be for non-volumetric clouds.)

Yes, if you change the overcast and cumulus representation settings to something other than volumetric you'll basically be back at 4.9.6 plus a few small bug fixes.

Looks like a depth buffer precision issue. Are you running with Vulkan or OpenGL? HDR on or off? Those both can affect things like this.

I think what's causing confusion is some logic where if an overcast layer is very low, and you do not have Real Weather Connector running, we substitute in a non-volumetric overcast layer even if you've specified volumetric because it avoids some artifacts that happen if the clouds are actually on the ground with volumetric clouds. 5.0.5 runs well on my own system (GTX1080) for what it's worth. Can you tell us more about your system specs, and other add-ons or custom scenery that might be competing for resources on your system?

@CameronThe 5.0.5 package I handed off to you had no files at all in the skyColors/Default Sky Colors folder. Can you double check that is how it was distributed? @maksimus1650The way it's supposed to work is that SkyMaxx Pro makes a copy of the default sky colors installed by X-Plane when you start it, it substitutes its own, and then restores the ones that were saved when you shut down. I'm thinking that X-Plane crashed on you for some other reason and left these files in a corrupt state. If you delete the contents of skyColors/Default Sky Colors and re-run the X-Plane installer I think that will get version 5.0.5 back in a good state for you.

They are just really huge clouds that are composed of a large number of individual cloud billboards. They result in a lot of depth complexity which taxes the fill rate of your GPU.

The fix to prevent mountains from drawing through volumetric clouds comes at a performance cost, but it shouldn't be that big. You may have to tweak your settings a bit to get things back to where they were in earlier versions.

Sounds like you're running out of memory; volumetric clouds use a lot of it. Try reducing your cloud draw area setting, or freeing up memory in other ways (reducing your anti-aliasing, turning off HDR, lower resolution, removing ortho scenery, etc)

Landing lights don't illuminate volumetric clouds. The "cloud/terrain blending" slider does not affect them. Nor does the cloud puff rotation setting, as they have no puffs. Those are the only differences in terms of functionality I can think of. I wouldn't worry about ways around the 500m limit as I've already disabled it in the code here. In the next update it'll be gone. But to answer your question it currently applies to both overcast and cumulus volumetric clouds.

Performance can vary greatly depending on the weather conditions, the location of the camera relative to the clouds, the cloud draw area setting in SMP, your resolution, and your anti-aliasing settings. You'll probably want to tweak some of those to find the sweet spot for your system. That said we do expect the fix in 5.0.4 that resolved the issue of mountains drawing on top of the clouds to come with a slight performance cost. But I wouldn't expect it to cut your performance in half. Might just be that the weather was different when you flew most recently.

You can simply switch the overcast and cumulus representation settings in SkyMaxx Pro to something other than volumetric when running VR on your GTX1080. We do have some performance improvements for non-volumetric clouds in the works for the 5.x run, so you can still benefit from that.

Yes, it's 500 meters AGL. I can probably remove that as well in a future update...

One thing that's different about our rain effect is that it only occurs when you are actually underneath a cloud. So even if it's reported as rainy at your location, if you happen to be in between clouds it won't be raining where you are. Just did a test and the rain effect does seem to be working... it's probably just that.

How METAR is handled hasn't changed... any chance you crossed a one-degree tile boundary? That can also trigger the clouds to reload, as we have to adjust to X-Plane's new coordinate system when that happens.

The 500m lower limit is only applied to volumetric clouds. Non-volumetric clouds work as they did in version 4. It's possible you just picked up newer weather conditions when you switched, especially if you had "never change visible weather" active in Real Weather Connector.

You have a pretty good understanding of how it works TBH!

We don't actually control ground visibility at all through SkyMaxx Pro; it's entirely done by X-Plane itself. In real life however, lights do "punch through" haze and fog to some degree and can be seen further out.

He's saying that instead of downgrading, you can select non-volumetric clouds in SkyMaxx Pro's overcast and cumulus cloud representation settings. That basically puts you back at how 4.9.6 worked.

You'll find it happens less often if you are also using Real Weather Connector. If you want to go back to the non-volumetric clouds for now though, you can simply select them in the Overcast and Cumulus settings of SkyMaxx Pro instead of downgrading. There are further improvements to non-volumetric clouds coming soon in the 5.x run as well.

It's because we actually have to shoot the ray pretty far before its opacity reaches the point where we can actually stop it early, especially if there are gaps in the clouds. Shooting through a cloud layer from above or below is a much shorter distance to traverse.

"Black lightning" - I think we found a new band name. Looking into it, but so far I'm having trouble getting it to happen (or finding an obvious explanation for why it might). Thanks for the report.

If you fly with Real Weather Connector also installed, it results in fewer artifacts along the edges. (It's because we draw lots of small areas of localized cloud conditions instead of one big one in that case.)

Excellent! I've made some improvements here that should remove the need to delete or move cloud layers at all, so watch for that in a future update.