FlyAgi

When new data is injected by FSGRW you will often notice immediate wind changes. You can change the update inerval in the FSGRW options so this happens less frequently (default interval is 5 minutes). I doubt this is the cause because X-Plane either uses it's own weather engine or uses what FSGRW tells XP to use, there is no way to mix this up by accident or user error. If there is any doubt load the clear weather preset prior to running or connecting FSGRW.

I've tested xEnviro from time to time and never had any conflicts with TerraMaxx - both do very different things and TerraMaxx is technically a scenery library (aside from the plugin part which is telling the library which content to show) so I can't imagine a single reason why there should be issues.

xVisibility might cause this. The plugin changes the haze drastically, increasing visibility at low altitude (below standard cloud layer 0) while decreasing visibility at higher altitudes (above standard cloud layer 0). Standard cloud layer means this is depending on a standard DataRef defining the lowest cloud layer position and this is also true when using SMP although you don't see the standard clouds - the dataref is still active and in use and xVisibility adjusts haze using this DataRef. Anyway you can adjust this in the xVisibility script changing some values or using FTU for configuration (in submenu "atmosphere + visibility").

Cool new update... The performance improvements are quiet significant, I wondered how the new default cloud draw area of 40000sm would work but it's indeed working pretty good, I have never used higher settings like this before so the experience was very impressive while keeping good performance. @sundog@JohnMAXX@Cameron Great job once again, thank you very much. :-)

That's interesting indeed. If this is true I would really appreciate a setting to switch clouds intercation with wind off to get much better performance, this is especially true for people using lower end GPUs. For me personally having moving clouds is not that important, it's a cool feature but it comes at the cost of massive FPS loss I would like to turn it off.

Well... if that is true with exactly the same weather situation there is some hope this might be a bug and finding this one would speed up things. Have you saved the weather files or do you still know time and date from the weather files for testing? Using ASXP or FSGRW historical weather it should be possible to test exactly the same weather situation with different versions of SMP.

Well... it works to some extend because I'm mostly flying small helicopters so I can stay away from the clouds, this works fine in most situations but might get hard with thunderstorms or towering cumulus clouds if they are very low above the ground. Further, I'm only with 1070, the 1080 with about 25% more processing power would help in many situations already.

Even if there are about no volumetric clouds visible around the thunderstorm cell? Well... if I think further this might make sense as the ray casting has to be done even if there is no cloud reflecting them... then the ray casting creates some kind of 'base GPU load' even if there are no clouds visible which the classic only clouds don't and everything adds up to this, is this right? Also I know my graphics card is lower end in this regard but I also have a need for 60 FPS to feel comfortable so it's another special situation (if I was fine with 30 fps I think I would have no issues at all with performance).

Well... this sounds like your GPU is just not fast enough - I'm in the same situation (GTX 1070 in a single screen 1080p) so welcome to the club. The only thing which helped my out with volumetric clouds performance is reducing the SSAA in X-Plane options one notch (leaving me with only FXAA and a lot of scenery flickering but I can fly this way at least). Further, SMP always had some adaptive quality mechanisms such as cloud draw distance dynamically changes depedning on weather situation and altitude, the higher you fly, the more clouds you can see for example, and this is still present in SMP 5 with the volumetric clouds but it seems this is not as effective with the volumetric clouds as with the classic ones. Reducing the rays casted to give a sigificant increase in performance will most likely result in a more grainy or blocky look of the clouds, they are already looking a bit blocky on the edges when seen from certain distances. But yes, I would appreciate any kind of performance increase myself but I think a (much) faster graphics card is the way to go here (and I know there almost nothing to buy on the market currently, at least not for a reasonable price tag).

Yes, but why is this impact only there when using volumetric clouds? I never experienced this impact in SMP 4.x, there was a noticable hit but it was not that severe (as least I don't remember that).

The download seems to work now. @JohnMAXX I know this might sound a bit weird but have you considered offering an non-terramaxx version for UrbanMaxx 3 (in fact this would just need to add a fallback region in the library.txt)? I could even imagine SAM Seasons compatible version which also works completely standalone and still supports TerraMaxx (technically this is easy to do).

Low volumetric cloud layers will have more impact than higher ones as the rays passing through the clouds create more work for the GPU the closer you get to the clouds because of the angle the camera looks at the cloud formation. In low clouds situations the clouds come closer to you so low clouds cause higher FPS impact. But, as the thunderstorms are non-volumetric I wonder why the have a more dramatic impact on my FPS than flying closeto the volumetric clouds (with full classic style clouds the impact is not that heavy).

SMP is not affected by the XP white-out effect but has its own logic for this when using certain types of clouds (volumetric clouds and procedural overcast clouds).

I also noticed there is severe performance impact with thunderstorm/towering clouds involved. If I understand correctly those are still classic style clouds so I don't understand why there is a massive hit with them - even if there is low visibility, massive fog present (about 10 sm, so low clouds draw distance) and very few volumetric style clouds present (just one or two small volumetric clouds not touching the storm clouds), the towering clouds can reduce performance heavily (this is more severe than the volumetric clouds when flying through or close above/below them).

I have one more question regarding this as with 5.0.4 the results are now much more detailed but I still found some discrepancy to the metar: Is this 500m shift based on sourrounding base mesh elevation so if there is a mountain in range the mountain top is the baseline, then add 500m and you get the lowest possible height for a cloud base? If this is how it works it seems to work fine with 5.0.4.

I think RWC has to be installed on every machine which is drawing visuals (meaning clouds) so all of these machines have the same setup and the same weather information. If one of your machines renders weather information without RWC I expect there will be differences in the result so the screen(s) connected to this machine will draw different clouds not matching the other screens which have RWC installed. Anyway, if you have a machine which is not drawing clouds I don't see why you would need SMP and RWC installed on this one so as long as only 3 machines draw clouds you should be fine.

Oh... I did not notice the hint... sorry for that.

@JohnMAXX I still have the download file for UrbanMaxx 3.01 just in case it got lost. Further I could setup a stable download link if that helps, my server seems to be pretty reliable so far.

I accidentally opened the precipitation menu and found it's broken, I can't click anything and some checkboxes as well as the sliders are not visible (using Gizmo Beta currently, not sure if this also happens with the stable release).

You only need one license per product for 3 computers as the DRM allows to have 3 activations at the same time for everything linked to your X-Aviation account so there is no problem installing SMP and RWC on all your computers (and it also does not waste any resources). As fas as I know you will need SMP and RWC installed on every computer which is intended to render clouds so most likely all of your 3 computers and then ASXP has to feed them all with the same weather information.

That's just the basic theory, I could not put that into math/code and this is where the magic begins for me.

I think the transparent fading on the edges of SMP volumetric clouds could be smoother indeed, the blending seems to be a bit rough currently (it seems to fade a linear way, maybe the fading should follow some curve instead).

Of course... waiting patiently. :-)

This just happened once yesterday, maybe it's rare issue... if it occurs more frequently I will provide more details, sadly I don't know anymore what time and date I had set for the flight, I used some historical weather from last summer and searched for thunderstorms so this was no real time weather.

Thanks for clarification... and by no means I want to tell you how to do things, that kind of coding you are doing is far beyond my skills and it feels like magic to some extend. :-)