rawdmon

@Frank So I was flying the other day and noticed that I wasn't seeing those flickers when flying through the clouds. I then messed around a bit and found that the best way to reproduce them is to set the cloud base at about 5000 feet (extending slightly above that) in the weather settings, select scattered clouds, set the time of day to 2:40pm, then make sure you're flying in to the clouds from the side that the sun hits them at (they should look pretty bright white on the side that you're flying in to them from). If the effect is still happening you should see it then. Note that sometimes I see these little wisps of cloud, almost like a single cloud layer floating by itself and when I fly through those the effect is most noticeable, however I also see it when flying through actual cloud formations as well. Just something specific for you to try to see if you can spot any.

That looks like you may have been in the shadow of a cloud. The way SkyMaxx draws it's cloud shadows is different than the way that XPlane does it and the shadows seem to also significantly affect the inside of the plane as well as far as I have noticed. They were looking in to fixing that but not sure if they were able to make any progress with it. They can only work with whatever Laminar opens up in the API for them to use. Maybe try putting the shadow slider to 0 and see if that issue remains?

HDR is on, but the slider is set to high, not max. Using Vulkan, though this happens with OpenGL as well. Anti-aliasing is set at FXAA+SSAAx2.

The effect I'm talking about that I see is when flying through clouds I see flashes of white in the bottom of the left or right eye of my headset. It's like someone is flickering light in to my eyes with mirrors. This only happens when flying through clouds. I use a first edition Oculus headset and that's the only issue I've personally noticed, the clouds otherwise look fine for me all the time (other than the odd "pop-in" effect where part of a cloud will suddenly appear on the left or right close to me). When I fly outside VR I can see moments where the instrument panel will be covered in what looks like a white cloud texture while flying through clouds, but only the instrument panel is ever covered by it (for a split second each time), not the windscreen. This is in the stock C172. I'm thinking that's what is causing the flashes of white towards the bottom of each eye when flying through them for me.

I get the same issue which I had also reported to Frank in a different thread and he stated that he was working on several VR related fixes (as he mentioned in his last note). We'll have to wait and see if this ends up being fixed in the next release whenever it's available. @Frank If you want to me to beta test it to check and see if it's resolved prior to release let me know. I can reliably reproduce the issue in the current version. I get this with the fast clouds as well btw.

Cool, well I guess I'll just wait and see what's still broken once the next release drops and report back. If you need a beta tester I'd be all for it.

I just noticed today that when I try to fly in Overcast, Low Visibility, and Foggy in VR the fog looks all wrong. It looks like 3 layers and they move around as you move your head. It happens when moving the camera too outside of VR, though not as noticeable as in VR. I also find it kind of strange to really even have fog to the degree that it does when overcast, it seems like overkill. When I go to Stormy there's no fog and it looks great. It would be nice to have an option to disable the fog layers if they can't be improved. It would then at least allow VR players to fly overcast without the distracting fog layers. I really find they are overdone in general (the fog is too thick in most cases and doesn't look real). I've heard the same comment made by several reviewers online as well. Xplane already has built in fog levels, I'm guessing you're not allowed to manipulate those at all and you need to try to do it with texture layers like that instead?

No problem. I made a small change to the script since I originally posted it to make it a bit more efficient (it only runs once per second now instead of once per frame since that's all that's needed based on my testing). I edited the original post and attached the new version of the script. That's great news about having success addressing some of the VR issues. I'm looking forward to seeing the results. Thanks.

The mountains appearing and disappearing happens even when I just move the camera around when outside of VR, so that's not a VR specific issue for me. In terms of the lighting problem, I decided to just create my own flywithlua script to work around that. Attaching it here in case anyone comes across this and has the same issue. auto-rayleigh.lua

I see, fair enough. Thanks

Something new that I noticed today when I switched to an external view in VR was that the ground shadows shift when moving my head around. It's like they follow my head slightly left to right but then eventually settle back to where they should be. I'm not sure why the position / movement of my head would be affecting the position of the ground shadows. I would have thought those would just be based on the position of the sun in reference to the clouds and the ground mesh. Another thing I noticed is that at dusk or dawn some of the mountains or large hills in the distance will vanish and re-appear as I move my head around. This doesn't happen with SkyMaxx disabled and it doesn't happen with SkyMaxx during the daytime (and it's not noticeable at night). It's not a subtle effect, it's very noticeable. I noticed it a lot with the mountains / hills towards the left hand side when taking off from Seattle International flying towards Mount Rainier. One final thing I noticed is that the sky color at dusk or dawn (with the Hosek-Wilkie sky model) doesn't match well with the colorization of the hills/mountains in the distance by default. See the attached screenshots. The first one is with the "Inscatter gain rayleigh" set to 2 and the "Inscatter gain mie" set to 1 (which are the defaults). If I set both of those to 0 then it looks more natural (second screenshot). With Rayleigh scattering set at the defaults it looks much stranger in VR than shown in the screenshot. It's like the sky is a curtain that ends before the horizon (it looks closer than the hills do). Without the Rayleigh scattering it looks much better / more convincing. I personally think it looks better in non-VR that way as well. If you look up photos of mountain sunrises or sunsets the mountains look fairly dark and are quite sharply defined against the horizon even when far off. You might consider having SkyMaxx automatically change those Rayleigh scattering values based on the time of day. They need to be set to the defaults that I mentioned during the day or it doesn't look as nice, but during dusk or dawn they look much better zeroed out when using SkyMaxx (it makes the hills/mountains blend better with the sky color). At night it's not really noticeable either way but might be worth just zeroing them anyways for any non-daytime views. I've been really putting SkyMaxx through it's paces since I got it and the problems I just mentioned plus the ones I mentioned in my last few posts are the only problems I've found with it. Everything else seems to work perfectly as far as I can tell. Hopefully you'll be able to sort some of these out in the next few releases.

Cool, well I'll just hold on for now and see what happens then Thanks for being so responsive.

Thanks, that would be great. I really hope something can be done about that. From what I've heard the X-Plane devs are kind of roadblocking you guys and making it harder to get your stuff working properly in general by not making the API open enough and by even closing some things off for no apparent reason. I've heard similar complaints from other projects. I just tested flying through clouds outside of VR and I can spot what's causing those flickers of light in the headset that I was talking about. If you fly through a cloud outside of VR you'll notice that occasionally a cloud basically comes inside the plane for a split second and you'll see it quickly overlap with the instrument panel of the plane then disappear a moment later. In VR instead of seeing that cover the dash you basically just end up with a flash in the bottom portion of the right or left part of the headset (probably because it's only there long enough to be rendered in one eye or the other). In VR it kind of looks like someone is quickly reflecting some light in to your eye with a mirror out of the corner of your vision for a split second, or something along those lines. If you've flown in VR I'd imagine you probably already know what I'm talking about. That might be pretty difficult to fix though. You'd almost have to create some sort of small "wall" in front of the plane that prevents those cloud textures from rendering inside of it.

The weird flickering thing that happens alternating in each eye in the VR headset when flying through clouds is kind of annoying too but I can live with it since it would likely be pretty difficult to track that one down. Disabling lense flare has no effect on it.

Not having ground shadows working in VR in the cockpit view is really the only thing that keeps me from giving this a 10/10 for VR use. Otherwise it's amazing, so hopefully there is some way to fix that in a future release.

Sure, the version shows up as being 4.9.6.2. I had selected the version in the installer that contained a couple of extra performance fixes, so I think that's what I was thinking of. The screenshot was actually taken from a cockpit view (albeit I ended up with the headset poking out of the plane because I was just holding the headset in my hands at the time). So from the sounds of it I can't see the ground shadows in VR unless I'm outside of the cockpit in an external view of the plane? Is there any particular technical reason why this isn't able to work in the cockpit view as well? Because most people using VR are going to be using the cockpit view almost all the time, so it kind of defeats the purpose not to have the ability to have that working in that view.

I currently have my Visual Effects slider set to High (HDR). I'm assuming that's what you're referring to? Both of those screenshots were taken with that set like that.

Just to add to my previous post, one thing I noticed is that the cloud shadows appear to be drawn based on the position of the plane. It seems like in VR it's possibly not doing this properly or something. When the plane is on the ground in non-VR I can't see any shadows but once I get the plane up in to the air I can. It's like in VR it's not even trying to draw them, almost like when the plane is still on the ground. Although I suppose there could also be several other reasons why they aren't showing up in VR. Too bad because I really like the look of them. Hopefully someone can help figure out what's causing this. I'm using the latest Beta of SkyMaxx and I'm using X-Plane 11.50 (the latest official release version, I have it on steam in non-beta). The screenshots were taken running under Vulkan, though I noticed the same issue under OpenGL as well previously.

So after some testing I've figured out that for whatever reason SkyMaxx will not draw the cloud shadows on the ground while in VR but it draws them fine while in standard non-VR mode. I'm attaching two screenshots that I took, one is in VR and one is not. They were taken with the exact same clouds at the exact same time of day in the exact same location (the simulator was paused while I was taking these). Also note that when I switched back to standard mode from VR the shadows showed back up right away. Can anyone think of any way to fix this or can we chalk this one up to being a bug?

Hmmm, from what I see in another thread the ground shadows should be working in 11.50 with Vulkan so I guess I'll keep messing with it and try to figure out what's going on there.

Thanks, 50% discount seems reasonable. I decided to purchase SkyMaxx and the Real Weather Connector today and spent several hours trying it out. I fly in VR and I was having a heck of a time finding a good cloud configuration that didn't destroy FPS. I had tried basically everything else out there, including ASXP + Cloud Art. I read some discussions online previously where some people said Cloud Art looked better and worked better than SkyMaxx in VR. Having tried Cloud Art already with and without ASXP, and after trying SkyMaxx out for myself today, I have absolutely no idea what the heck they were talking about. SkyMaxx looks way way better than Cloud Art. The performance is also much better than anything else I've tried. Running with SkyMaxx with the Fast clouds (which I find look the best in VR out of all of the available textures anyways) with 9155 sq. km coverage area is like running with a clear sky for me in terms of performance. It seems to cause virtually no FPS loss or stuttering at all despite a full sky of beautiful looking clouds and the amazing Hosek-Wilkie Sky Model which finally gets me the sky blue that I've been trying to get for ages now. The other thing that blew me away is that that level of performance is maintained even when enabling SSAA x2 anti-aliasing, which in my opinion is an absolute must have in VR (it makes everything look so much better). With that enabled with any other cloud package, I end up getting incredibly bad stuttering and FPS drops any time I'm anywhere near a cloud, even when there are only 1 or 2 clouds around. Being able to have that enabled with a full sky of clouds is incredible, it's a total game changer for me and has saved my VR experience. I'm guessing the performance issue with SSAA is specific to the X-Plane cloud system which SkyMaxx appears to replace with it's own system. I'm running the beta version which mentioned fixes for stuttering so maybe that's why the performance is so great. I'm not really sure since this is my first time using it and I don't have any baseline from previous versions to go on. The lack of cloud flashing is also amazing too. I've found every other half decent looking cloud pack I tried had terrible flashing in the clouds in VR, but this doesn't have that problem. The way the clouds fade in as well instead of popping in is amazing too, it really creates the illusion of just having endless clouds in the sky as I fly. I also really like that any changes I make on the config screen are instantly loaded in which was a huge time saver while testing this to figure out the best settings for me. For anyone wondering, I'm running an i9 9900K with a 2080 ti. I use OVR Settings (which is an X-Plane plugin) to set my supersampling rate for my Oculus to 1.6 and I use VMI Twick (which is also an X-Plane plugin) to set the LOD for objects to 80% and I also tweak various other settings in there, though the LOD is the big one in terms of performance. VMI Twick has a "VR Mode" that I enable which I find makes everything look nicer in VR. I'm currently running with Vulkan though I also tested with OpenGL earlier and it was buttery smooth with SkyMaxx as well, though I found I needed to drop my LOD to 75 and even to 70 at some points with OpenGL instead of Vulkan. In SkyMaxx I have cloud area set to 9155 sq. km and cloud shadows set to 0.65 which I find is what looks and runs best in VR for me. I also turn Cloud / Terrain Blend Softness to 0 because it just looks better in VR. I run with HDR at High, Textures at High, World Objects at Maximum and Reflections at Low, Anti-Aliasing at FXAA+SSAA x2. I was testing with Orbx TrueEarth Washington HD, so the terrain / scenery from that is more intensive to work with than the standard stuff too, but it was no problem running with it at all with SkyMaxx. The one thing that I noticed that kind of sucks is that there were no ground shadows when using SkyMaxx. Maybe they are there but just really faint or something. I'll have to do some more testing but I couldn't see any at all. Another thing I noticed that breaks immersion for me is that when I'm flying through a cloud I get these flickers of light towards the bottom of each of my eyes that happen in one eye then the other and kind of alternate until I'm out of the cloud. It's really strange and distracting. It's too bad because the actual transition through the cloud looks soooo good compared to stock. If those flickers could be fixed it would be epic. I'm glad to finally have an X-Plane cloud related purchase that I can actually say was totally worth the money for me. It's also amazing to see that ASXP has built in integration with SkyMaxx, so I can't wait to try that out too and see how well it works in stormy conditions and such. Thanks and keep up the good work!

If I purchase SkyMaxx so late in the 4.x release cycle when 5.x drops am I going to have to pay for it all over again?