sundog

Is it a driver crash? What exactly happens? Are you overclocking anything?

1. Neither SkyMaxx Pro nor RWC have anything to do with X-Plane's precipitation effects. That is still managed by X-Plane itself, and we don't interfere with it. 2. You are probably running out of video memory (VRAM.) Check what's displayed in the SMP configuration screen. If the amount of free VRAM is just a few hundred MB or less, then you need to turn down some settings. Aircraft texture resolution works for some people, or you can reduce the cloud draw area setting if you increased it previously. 3. The main thing NOAA gives you when used with RWC is upper level winds outside of the US. If you don't need that, then you can probably just disable it if you're using RWC.

I'd go with "always".

Cool. Yeah, there's really no way our add-ons could mess with your scenery like that.

For the record, I have a GTX970 can can run at around 50 FPS even with SkyMaxx Pro's cloud draw area set to the maximum setting, in cloudy conditions with RWC on. (Proof below for the doubters!) We carefully selected the maximum setting of this slider so that you could still get good performance with it all the way up on a modern PC, as we know a lot of customers just turn everything to the max and expect things to keep working smoothly. Where people get into trouble is when they install things like HD Mesh that consumes all of their video memory, leaving nothing left over for SkyMaxx Pro.

I don't see the "problem". You've got the cloud draw area set to just the default 2500 square meters, which 50km on each side of the cloud layer - which is just 25km ahead of you. The manual for RWC recommends you set the draw area to at least around 10,000 for this reason. If you want a larger cloud draw area, turn up the cloud draw area setting. Everything's working as designed as far as I can tell; new grid cells of weather are loaded as you approach them. With a larger draw area, they appear further in the distance and are less noticeable. You just need to turn that up if you're going to be flying at high altitudes. If you can't for performance reasons, that's a separate issue. I have to wonder if your 5 monitors are making your PCI bus into a bottleneck or something.

Glad you got it working. I've had nothing but bad experiences with overclocking myself - it leads to stuff like this where only specific applications start crashing for no apparent reason.

Ah, I hadn't considered overheating as a possibility. Makes sense. I should also point out to others that all bets are off if you're overclocking.

In principle I think that should work.

We already take visibility into account with cloud shadows. Not sure why it's a bit off here, but could involve rth as you said.

if you set RWC to "always" mode, then it downloads metar data from NOAA and uses it for cloud placement. Any cloud data sent from the NOAA plugin is ignored in this case, because the data it outputs is only a single set of conditions for the entire scene. This is explained in the manual.

My guess was correct. You'll see this line a couple of times in your log: SkyMaxx Pro: Coordinate system changed; recreating weather. That means we crossed a boundary where X-Plane changed its coordinate system, and we had to regenerate the clouds in order to properly position them again. What probably happened is that you flew across a corner of one of X-Plane's grid cells that define a given coordinate system, which led to this happening a couple of times as you flew into the corner of another frame of reference and then back out of it. Like I said, these boundaries are pretty far apart, so this isn't something that happens often - you just got unlucky in your location. I've actually talked to Laminar about finding a better way to deal with this case, and it's hard to say the least. But it's something I'll be looking into for future revisions.

RWC only positions clouds; we don't do anything to visibility. Visibility changes are coming from your weather engine, or X-Plane's built in weather.

I think Ben's right and you're running out of VRAM while loading. Your driver is just giving up. You've got a lot of add-ons and a lot of high-resolution custom scenery loading up. SkyMaxx Pro 3.1 consumes a little more VRAM than 3.0 did. I suspect you were just on the edge of running out in 3.0, and 3.1 pushed you over the edge. Try starting your flight somewhere that does not have custom scenery, and see if you have better luck. From there, you'll probably need to lower some settings in SMP if you're not willing to sacrifice your other add-ons. Also double check that you have SkyMaxx Pro 3.1.1 installed, and not 3.1. 3.1.1. uses a little less memory.

Yes. There are no bitmaps involved in this problem at all. It's not an anti-aliasing problem.

Hi. Guy who wrote Real Weather Connector here. Yes, it's a known issue that the gridded nature of our weather data can become apparent from some viewpoints and weather conditions. But solving it is a hard problem; it's not just a matter of coming up with an algorithm to smooth out the corners, it's a matter of translating that into individual clouds in individual cloud layers, and doing it so fast that the "stutters" we've been so harshly criticized for in the past don't come back. It is something I plan to work on for future revisions, but for version 1.0, it was a conscious trade-off in order to get a fast-performing and stable initial release out.

Yup, we'd need to see your log.txt. Looking at your screenshot, you don't have an overly high cloud draw area set, so I think there is some sort of plugin or scenery conflict going on. Updating your video driver might be worth a shot, but let's see your log first.

In general, no - the whole point of RWC is to render complex weather formations around you, and normally that's what it does. We'd have to see your log.txt to understand what's going on for sure, but my guess would be that you crossed a boundary within X-plane where their internal coordinate system changes. It has to do with how X-Plane corrects for a flat-Earth model as your move across a round Earth. When this happens, it can shift the weather patterns on us. These boundaries are very far apart, but if you happen to be near one that's probably what it is.

Licensing issues aside, as long as FSGRW is delivering the same metar.rwx file to each PC, RWC should represent the clouds in the same way on each one.

Dense particles work fine in my tests here. It doesn't do any sort of system test for them. Try it again, and if you still don't see any clouds, send your log.txt so we can take a look.

Yes; if you set RWC to "always", then it will download its own METAR data and use it to position the clouds even if NOAA is present. That way you can use RWC's clouds together with NOAA's worldwide upper level winds. It's a last minute feature we added; for awhile we were saying it wouldn't work with NOAA so you're not imagining things

Yes.

kneighbor - the extent of the clouds is a function of what you have your cloud draw area slider set to, and the visibility data sent to us from X-Plane, whichever is lower. I assure you it can go much, much higher than 5km.

The sky color set selected doesn't affect the cloud lighting, but the time, date, location, and even position and phase of the moon do.

Bear in mind too that as you enter new weather conditions for the first time, SMP may allocate more memory in response. That's normal behavior, and not a leak. The amount of memory SMP consumes has an upper bound that it properly enforces, but it can take time to hit it. The size of that upper bound depends mostly on your cloud draw area and cloud detail settings.