FlyAgi

I found another possible bug where the lightnings in thunderstorms suddenly turned black. I was flying towards to the storm cloud and the lightnings were fine at first but then suddenly they turned black and did not 'recover'.

I finally got some very impressive weather situations and it seems there were not so many cloud layers discarded (or at least it did not feel like that) and in those more complex situations SMP 5 really shines, the new thunderstorms are looking amazing and the integration of ray casted clouds and billboard clouds is about perfect. I think getting the cloud layers right in position would greatly enhance the current experience as FSGRW usually injects lots of layers and if they don't get lost the average weather situation should look more interesting and impressive.

Well... that's weird because I would think that, if I'm looking at a cloud layer from the same altitude, the performance in theory should be better than looking from below as the rays only need to pass some few clouds, some meters into the clouds blocking almost everything behind them.

Not sure if this can be done technically but maybe it's possible to stop rendering voxels which are not visible meaning the ray march stops if it reaches a point where this pixel/voxel won't change anyway as it's already fully opaque no matter how many stuff behind this point is added to it? Maybe I get the ray marching wrong but I can imagine that there is some space to stop the marching not only a the defined threshold but also in certain cases to improve performance.

In case of intersecting cloud layers: Instead of discarding one of them could you try to just move the upper one upwards and sowhow 'staple' the layers so they don't get lost? Discarding cloud layers seems to create very similar weather all the time and reduces the vertical diversity which always was one of the reasons I loved SMP.

I have checked manual weather and there it seems to be fine. Also I had another try with XP real weather and there again, the lower cloud layer was not present but only the higher one, in general it seems as if I always get only one cloud layer using real weather (with RWC all the time) and the lower cloud layers are always missing.

I did another test and this seems to confirm my observation. Weather comes from FSGRW (historical, this afternoon, files attached to this post). Reported cloud base by FSGRW (confirmed in XP weather menu after injection): Few, 2200 ft Broken, 4600 ft Broken, 28675 ft Field elevation (EDXE Rheine-Eschendorf, flat area): 130 ft No cloud base at 2200 ft, no cloud base at 4600 ft but at about 5800 ft I start touching clouds which makes not much sense to me (500 m = 1640 ft so 2200 ft for the cloud base should be outside the safety margin). wxdata.zip

I will do some special tests in a very flat location and report my results later on. :-)

That's what I have expected. Sadly there is not much I can do as lowering AA below FXAA does nothing and rendering settings don't have that much of an effect to this load spikes (the objects slider only has a minor effect on GPU load, it's there but does not matter in most cases).

Oh... okay... :-)

Yes, I'm using RWC 1.2.

I figured out how to get reasonable performance with my old GTX 1070 in most conditions but there is still one situation breaking all of this: If I start climbing towards a cloud layer from below at some point when the clouds start to create some kind of white-out effect (the effect is fine) my GPU load goes up heavily while flying very close to the clouds layer or when trying to climb through a hole to get above the clouds. As soon as I get close enough from below the GPU load increases and keeps high until I get high enough above the cloud layer (will upload a video later on showing this effect, my upload takes some time).

Well... actually not, the clouds are placed much higher than I would expect even if the metar does not report them extremely close to the ground. So far the clouds where always higher positioned than in the reports for me (with a Robinson R44 helicopter I could not get above any volumetric cloud layer so far). Also, even if I tried to force the clouds come down a bit using a manual weather setting the tops still were hardly reachable for me (using the R44 helicopter again which is limited to about 13.000 ft). Maybe this is because the clouds are larger/thicker/higher than the old ones but it feels to me so far as if the cloud base is always to high.

I have made some similar observation with my NVidia card, the cockpit glass shadows seem to be altered or affected by SMP in some ways, at least they look or behave weird now. Look at the strange horizontal shadow line in the ceneter of this image: And here there is some shadow looking like a haze artifact but in fact it's part of a misplaced shadow on the glass - this one was gone after changing cloud draw distance:

Also, with the volumetric clouds the cloud height seems to be off, mostly the clouds are to high and the lower cloud layers are not present at all.

Are you using the included Geforce plugin? This also creates some camera movement effects and maybe removing this from the aircraft's plugins folder solves the issue (just move the plugin to your desktop for testing so you can restore it later on).

I found a way to use the volumetric clouds now, going to FXAA creates some flickering but then the 1070 seems to do a good job and I'm CPU bound again. Seems as if I really have to do some time traveling stuff and come back with a proper machine...

That's funny... for me it's the other way around, I like the clouds seen from below but for me personally they seem a bit weak when flying just above them, higher altitudes then again look good. Sadly my gtx 1070 ist slightly to weak to get SMP volumetric clouds running at 60 FPS, I need some 25-30% more GPU power and currently new graphics cards are barely available and if they call crazy prices for them...

With RWC and slider maxed out the clouds seem to reach the horizon indeed, also it seems the visibility range increases with altitude.

I'm not completely sure about that, I had the old RWC which was not working in use at first when I figured there was a low draw disctance but I have increased the slider full right, there was still a limited distance.

I noticed that clouds don't extend to the horizon for me (real weather and scattered preset), is there any special setting for this? I was using default configuration with volumetric cumulus and overcast enabled.

You have to update RWC to version 1.2 then it will work as before.

You basically only need to buy SMP 5 but if you want to get the most out of real weather situations you should also buy RWC as this avoids redrawing clouds every x minutes and also gives you a much more detailed weather representation, better cloud formations and special clouds like the towering thunderstorm clouds - with RWC the weather you see can be very impressive and much less repetitive than what you get woth SMP alone. If you want to see weather like this you need RWC - I think it's worth it (video shows SMP 4.8.1 + RWC 1.1 + FSGRW):

So, this means that SMP 5 is faster one CPU side than SMP 4? This is good new as I need a faster GPU anyway but sadly neither AMD nor NVidia can deliver their products. Do you think a GTX 1070 is good enough to maintain 60 FPS at 1080p? Currently I'm limited by my pretty fast CPU when using SMP 4.9.6.2.

I understand. Thanks for clarification. I have just checked with current SMP 4.9.6 and non glossy waves and it looked better than what I remebered, maybe an XP 11.50 effect or something like that so it's not that much of an issue for me now. Would be cool to see this in a later update but even better would be if the clouds get somewhat darker when seen from below and brighter wenn getting above them. And then add an option to adjust both brightness values (above and below) in the menu and it should be perfect - for everyone. Will the original clouds look like they do now in 4.9.6? I really like the brightness here with the shading and variation and in case I don't like the new voxel clouds this would be great.