sundog

Hey @Cameroncan you check that SMP is working OK on your Mac with HDR off? This is the first I've heard of this I think, but maybe you can repro it...

OK, I would still advise changing the anti-aliasing setting and see if that gets your clouds back with HDR off. Also, make sure you are using the latest version of SMP (4.9.3)

Try changing the anti-aliasing settings in X-Plane, or use OpenGL mode. I think you're running into a known bug in AMD drivers when using Vulkan.

Oh, it's not true that Laminar won't collaborate with third parties; in fact they've worked quite closely with us. But, we can't expect them to do everything we want; they have very limited resources.

To go into more detail, whenever you cross a DSF tile boundary (every one degree of latitude or longitude in general) X-Plane changes its frame of reference to fit its flat coordinate system to the round Earth as you travel around it. More simply, "which way is up" suddenly changes on us. When this happens, the coordinates of all of our clouds have to change along with everything X-Plane is drawing. But, there's no simple way for us to move our clouds in exactly the same way X-Plane moved its coordinates. We do our best to match it but the clouds do end up moving a little bit when this happens. We've spent a lot of time trying to make it absolutely seamless but haven't quite gotten there.

Make sure Real Weather Connector is set to FSGRW mode, and if having things completely in sync is more important to you than not seeing sudden weather changes, make sure "never change visible weather" is off. For the best overcast simulation I would set SMP's overcast setting to "Soft HD". Also remember you can use the "force weather refresh" menu item in SMP if you think it is out of sync with FSGRW somehow.

You might want to experiment with different anti-aliasing settings in your X-Plane graphics screen. As I recall there are some unresolved driver issues on AMD that manifest themselves with certain combinations of HDR and anti-aliasing settings. Both we and Laminar are aware of the issue and it's been reported to AMD, but it's out of our hands. Changing your HDR (graphics quality) setting may also influence it.

No, 20K isn't high at all. You really shouldn't be having performance issues at that setting. If fiddling with your graphics settings helped, it does imply that your GPU was overloaded somehow and perhaps weather updates were pushing it over the edge in some complicated matter. GPU issues can lead to CPU issues as the CPU needs to issue commands to the GPU and help manage the GPU's memory when things get tight. If you have "never change visible weather" enabled in Real Weather Connector, the weather should never completely update all at once. When new weather is downloaded I'd expect a delay of perhaps a fraction of a second while it is processed but that's it...

That could be. SkyMaxx Pro has to completely disable X-Plane's built in cloud system so it can replace it with its own, but this probably has the side effect of X-Plane thinking there are no overcast clouds being drawn when in fact we're drawing them ourselves. I don't think there's any way for us to tell X-Plane otherwise in their current add-on interface.

Weird, that always clears things up for me. What is your cloud draw area slider set to in SMP? You might need to pull back on that a bit.

I'm still of the opinion that it's memory fragmentation on your GPU causing this. One thing you might try if it happens again is selecting "force weather reload" in the SkyMaxx Pro menu, or disabling and then re-enabling SkyMaxx Pro via the plugin admin menu. That should force it to dump all of its memory and reload everything, which may allow your video card to organize its memory more efficiently.

The most realistic setting will always be as high as you can set the slider without impacting performance too much on your system. That will vary based on your system specs and how many other add-ons you have installed. I can't really give you an answer, you just have to experiment to see how high you can push that setting while still maintaining acceptable performance on your system.

Have you tried selecting "force weather reload" when this happens? Also, what is your RWC set to? If you're not using FSGRW, it should be set back to "automatic".

Hey @JohnMAXX

I see, it just forcibly disables and enables MaxxFX as a whole when you want. That works!

Looks like it was overwritten; this file contains no data. If it happens again, make a copy of your metar.rwx before shutting down x-plane to preserve it for us. Odds are the issue has cleared itself up as whatever unexpected METAR report popped up is likely long gone by now. But we'd definitely like to know what it was so we can fix the underlying issue.

Yes, sounds like it was that add-on. I don't see anything in your log file indicating a license issue.

Can you try a flight without photoscenery and see if that helps? It's not just about memory usage, it can be about memory fragmentation too.

OK, that means ASXP generated a METAR.rwx that we couldn't make sense of. Do you happen to still have that METAR.rwx file? (I think this is different issue from your texture files going away)

It's not just a matter of how much video memory you have, but it could also be a memory fragmentation issue or even a system memory issue. If you could post your log.txt file we could take a look to see if there are any obvious culprits installed. Photo-scenery in particular can eat up massive amounts of memory, no matter how good your system is.

SkyMaxx Pro does nothing that would affect winds or your weather radar display. That all comes from X-Plane's internal weather system. Even with RWC, we don't actually "inject weather," we just read the weather data that's provided to us from X-Plane. RWC's job is to interpret that in more detail to produce localized areas of clouds in SkyMaxx Pro. That all said - if you're seeing nothing but clear skies regardless of what the default X-Plane weather and your radar is saying, I suspect this may be a licensing issue. If SkyMaxx Pro cannot validate its license, it will refuse to draw its clouds, leading to clear skies no matter what. There should be a message to this effect in your log.txt file; if you could post that we could look for it. Another possibility is that it's a timing issue and the new weather conditions appeared in X-Plane after SkyMaxx Pro already set up the clouds for the scene. In this case, the new weather should appear within a few minutes, but you can force it to happen immediately with the "force weather reload" option in the SkyMaxx Pro menu.

Are you referring to shadows of the clouds, or of other objects? If it's clouds, then it's our fault and I'll look into it.

If you can share your log.txt file it might shed some light on what might be happening.

Anything you can do to reduce memory usage should help; lower SkyMaxx Pro's cloud draw area setting, reduce your AA settings or other graphics settings, limit use of photo-scenery, etc.

What option did you select in your overcast cloud settings in SMP? If it's solid or broken procedural, try switching to one of the other choices instead. If that's it, I think this is a known issue that we've already fixed for our next release.