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I see in the release notes that SMP 3 was made with the NOAA plugin in mind. Fly2pilots has released FW Global Real Weather for X-Plane (http://www.fly2pilots.com/Cms/Ui/Pages/Products/MainPage.aspx?id=253b8b5c-0a91-4935-8d01-b3c70aee6034), making it the first weather injector for X-Plane, and an enormous improvement over X-Plane's default weather engine and/or the NOAA plugin. SMP 3 doesn't seem to play too well with it. At times the entire sim will pause on a weather update while clouds are redrawn. This is less a bug report and more of an informational post. Don't know if you guys know about FSGRW, or have tested against it.

I'm not quite sure how to word this, so bear with me. While SMP 3.0 is, obviously, a huge improvement over 2.x, there's a drawing issue which is bugging me, and I'm wondering if it's something I can change in the rendering settings. Unfortunately, the manual doesn't go into much detail about what they actually do. It seems to me that SMP draws, basically, three types of clouds: overcast, cirrus and variations on big, fluffy cotton balls. The problem with those cotton balls is they often don't look realistic, especially when close to the ground. I loaded up at Tromsø with SMP 3. Real weather gave scattered clouds at 1,000 feet. However, SMP had drawn this enormous, fluffy monster descending from 1,000 feet to cover half the apron, when, IRL, there should've been thin layers of light coverage at 1,000 feet. I messed around with the rendering settings as much as I could, but there wasn't any way I could get the cloud layers to look like the thin layer of clouds which should've been there. And, say what you will about X-Plane's default clouds, but the thin cloud layers look pretty good. So, is this a user problem? Or is this the kind of limitation Sundog has run into because, at the moment, Laminar doesn't provide much third-party access to the parts of the sim required to change this? Additionally, is it possible for the cloud rendering section in the manual to be expanded a bit? Perhaps you could put some screenshots in there which show what messing with the minimum/maximum/hi res puffs features look like.

FWIW, I saw this running 1080 with SMP 3.0: about 60 MB of VRAM left on my 980. Could be cloud draw distance, which would be a shame, as that's 3.0's best new feature, IMO.

Current and upcoming: the x737 team doesn't supply an FMC.

I have the v8 version around here somewhere. Just to note: the plane itself, which is free, doesn't come with an FMC other than X-Plane's default. To get a an upgraded FMC you have to buy the x737 FMC, which is about $20.

8.1.

If I were you, I'd drop the CPU down to an i5-4690K and replace the 745 with a 4GB 290X. I've got an i5 and a GTX 670 (which is a little more powerful than the 760) and I'm GPU-limited most of the time.

A minor note: hyperhtreading will make your scenery loads go faster, as X-Plane will utilize all your logical and virtual cores.

Okay guys. Thanks for the info, and for SkyMaxx. I'm looking forward to the future, when Laminar allows access to their weather API.

Well, that sucks. I assume there isn't anything which can be done about it?

So maybe the issue is I'm misunderstanding how X-Plane renders weather. I look at the screenshot of the weather above and think, "hey, I should look to my left and see clouds."

Finally built a new machine for X-Plane, which means I can install SkyMaxx, as my new machine has the grunt to use it. However, I'm running into an issue where SkyMaxx doesn't draw any clouds. I think the issue arises when I switch airports and the weather changes when X-Plane is set to download real world weather. This is the weather when viewed in X-Plane. This is what I see onscreen. The sky is completely clear for 360 degrees. And these are my SkyMaxx settings. If I change the weather settings to manual and put in some cloud layers, then the clouds will appear. But, if I'm downloading real weather, this seems to happen when switching airports. Running the latest X-Plane under Windows 8.1. As I haven't been able to run SkyMaxx for most of the year, I haven't kept up on bugs, so forgive me if this has been asked and answered before.

That's pretty much how Laminar rolls. Ben was hired from his work on the SDK, and others have followed.

I'd imagine the devs are taking the chance to fix the bugs people have brought up, and probably address some issues they were going to leave until the 1.1 release. Although, looking at some of what people are reporting, I'd still bet half the problems are from people not reading the manual. Airbus logic is its own special thing, and if you jump in thinking you know how to fly one, you will be disappointed.

Looks like a lot of the problems were because people didn't read the manual.