sundog

The only instance in which SMP/RWC will mess with visibility is if you're inside of a stratus cloud. Any chance you flew into one during this time? If not, we'd have to see your log.txt after experiencing this to get more information as to what was going on.

Just FYI, SMP 3.1's slightly increased VRAM demands exist in order to let us reduce the "stutters" that happened in 3.0 when new weather conditions were loaded. So by going back to 3.0, you're choosing to live with those stutters in exchange for getting a little more VRAM headroom back.

Thank you! Glad you enjoyed the product. What RWC does can be difficult to explain, but you captured it well.

That's right. At default settings, our clouds' memory consumption is minimal, but it gets into hundreds of megabytes if you crank up the draw area all the way. Normally a 4GB card is sufficient even then, but if you start adding in stuff like HD mesh, memory-hungry third party planes, photoscenery, etc., you can eat it up quickly, leaving nothing left over for our clouds. Our existing imposter scheme keeps the cost of actually drawing the clouds pretty low, regardless of the draw distance. When your driver starts swapping memory is when performance goes someplace bad, and when customers start complaining really loudly. That's the main challenge we face right now. We're damned if we do, and damned if we don't - if we dynamically allocate clouds to minimize memory use, we get stutters. If we don't dynamically allocate clouds to minimize stutters, we use more memory, pushing some customers over the edge. Right now we're going with the lesser of two evils - every customer suffers from stutters in the former approach, but only the relatively few customers who were running right on the edge of their cards' memory and aren't willing to lower their settings have issues in the latter.

gcharrie - it should already be doing that, if you're not flying with Real Weather Connector. With RWC, we need to "tile" cloud layers together so that gets more tricky. Thanks for the other thoughts, folks. I will noodle on them. My experiments in the past with more complicated level of detail schemes is that they caused more problems than they solved - even more memory consumption, or stutters as clouds switch between different representations. The main challenge I'm facing is really one of memory management; in order to avoid "stutters" caused by creating new clouds while you're flying, I must pre-create everything you might need at startup. Most performance issues being reported are from people who were on the edge of running out of memory, and got pushed over that edge by SMP pre-allocating its clouds for large cloud draw areas set by the user. So - adjusting the draw area as a function of altitude wouldn't really help, because under the hood all those clouds are still there, waiting to go, and consuming memory some customers don't have. The only reason it works doing it by hand is because when you adjust the draw area slider, I throw away all of the clouds we had and recreate them for the area you specified, which does change the amount of memory they consume. But we can't do that at runtime without introducing massive "stutters". Anyhow, it's complicated! But I'm always looking at ways to improve the product. Thanks for the ideas.

Just ran some tests here, Peter. Even with no add-ons at all (including SMP, RWC, etc.) and no custom scenery, I can blow through 2GB of VRAM just by having the "high" rendering preset on. I think upgrading your video card would be a wise investment, if possible. HD Mesh V3 + SMP + good rendering settings probably means memory thrashing is all but unavoidable on a 2GB card. Laminar recommends 4GB just for X-Plane itself.

I think I see what might be causing this. I'm afraid a code change will be needed, so you'll have to wait for our next update for a fix. You might want to downgrade to SMP 3.0 for the time being, if this is an important issue for you. I'm working on fixing this now.

If DreamEngine isn't loading but SkyMaxx is running OK, I suggest you take this up with the developers of DreamEngine. We don't do anything that would directly interfere with other plugins. Only they would know conditions that would result in their startup function returning an error. SkyMaxx Pro cannot operate without Gizmo, by the way. This is the first we've heard of anything like this, so unfortunately it's likely something specific to your setup. Starting over with a fresh install wouldn't be a bad idea.

You're not doing anything wrong; it's just that there are no airports in the middle of the ocean reporting METAR data! Clearly the manner in which X-Plane's built-in weather guesses at the weather in these locations differs from our own (we try to sync up with the closest station, wherever that may be.) So X-Plane's weather display doesn't match with what we're showing in this case. Neither representation is necessarily correct, as METAR just isn't a good weather source for oceans. This might be a good case for purchasing an external weather add-on like FSGRW. It basically fabricates weather stations around you no matter where you are, and would result in better correlation. We're also talking with Laminar about a longer-term solution to sync up their weather display with our clouds.

I was using the "medium" render setting preset at the time.

One customer reported here that he had to reboot in order to get NVidia's driver out of a bad state with memory management. Might be worth a shot. Our clouds actually don't use much VRAM at all if you're using default settings. You might try the "medium" preset in the rendering settings just as an experiment; it frees up a good amount of memory for me.

SkyMaxx's measurement of VRAM is much more accurate than what X-Plane reports. X-Plane is only telling you how much memory is used by its textures, but there are many other things that use VRAM. SkyMaxx actually queries your video driver for the real amount. So yes, you are simply running out of VRAM - 70MB isn't enough to maintain good performance. You'll need to find a compromise with your settings in order to keep at least a few hundred megabytes available.

Tinamus, turn up your cloud detail setting in X-Plane's rendering settings to 80%, and tell me if your performance is any better in the same weather conditions compared to using Skymaxx Pro. If you aren't running out of memory, I'm pretty confident that it isn't. Skymaxx Pro is not a "FPS killer" people - running out of memory is, and turning up all of your settings in general is. Mad Mat - SMP does not consume 2 gigabytes of VRAM in any circumstance. As a test, I turned up SMP's cloud draw area to its maximum setting, and measured memory usage using GPU-Z with SMP enabled and disabled. Even in this worst-case scenario, SMP consumed no more than 500 MB. Using SMP's default settings, only a 7MB difference was measured.

You might consider upgrading to SkyMaxx Pro 3.1.1. It no longer prints these messages. Cameron's right, there is nothing in the log that indicates your crashes are in any way involved with Skymaxx Pro.

There are differences in how each puff of a cloud are oriented on each view, and that could result in the puffs being illuminated a little differently. The cloud puffs always face the camera, and that will be a slightly different direction on different views. I think that's probably what you're seeing. I don't really have a solution, however - that's just how this particular graphical trick works. Increasing the cloud detail setting in SMP may reduce the effect, but that will come at a performance cost.

The clouds should still be consistent when using RWC. You might want to double check that the exact settings are using in SMP on each PC; the recent updates may have changed them. Setting RWC to "always" on each PC might also help, depending on how things are configured.

What we are trying to explain is that you may just have too much stuff installed, and smp 3.1 may have just pushed your system over the edge (as opposed to there being a bug in smp ). Are you flying over custom scenery, HD mesh, etc?

Just to be clear, running low on VRAM is the "FPS killer" here, not SkyMaxx Pro. 3.1 does take a little bit more memory than 3.0 did, but it only causes a problem if you were on the edge of running out of memory to begin with. You might be able to do something simpler, like reduce your texture resolution setting, to reclaim some of that VRAM and give SMP the room it needs.

asyscom: Your cloud draw area setting is rather high. Are you sure you're comparing comparable settings with what you had in SMP 3.0? You can't crank up a setting in 3.1, observe it's slower, and then say 3.1 is slower than 3.0. Here's a good test to do: turn up your "cloud detail" setting tp 80% so you can get default clouds again. Then, go to the plugin admin menu, and disable the "SilverLining" plugin. That disables SkyMaxx Pro. Is the FPS much different? If not, then your performance problem isn't SMP. Tinamus: how much available VRAM does the Skymaxx Pro configuration screen say you have?

Yes, clouds will redraw in response to a new metar.rwx being found. You might have a better experience setting RWC to "always", as that only updates weather once an hour no matter what.

I'm not sure if they are aligned with 1x1 degree cells but they may be. Like I said before, if you flew across the corner of one of these cells you could see two different coordinate system changes in a short distance.

Nothing in the log you sent implicates SkyMaxx Pro as causing your crash at all. SMP is not the only thing that affects your VRAM. The issue could have to do with your custom scenery, your plane, or something else. I would recommend installing a clean version of X-Plane to a new folder, add SMP, and see if things are stable. If so, we know SMP is not the root cause.

SMP / RWC only affects the PC or laptop it is on. I haven't messed with networked setups myself, so I'll have to rely on others to respond to that question!

Yeah, that's normal. When new clouds get loaded in response to new METAR data, the old clouds fade out and new ones fade in. The cloud shadows come directly from the clouds being drawn, so they too fade out and back in as this happens. Like Cameron said, you'll want to make sure new METAR data isn't downloaded more frequently than needed.

No, you need RWC installed on the clients as well.