Released just a day ago I picked up a new plugin on X-Aviation. It’s a fancy new system that procedurally creates clouds similar to the standard X-Plane 10 weather system. However, it’s dynamic so the weather isn’t static anymore and the lighting is pretty amazing even with the HDR turned off (which is recommended). With HDR off I noticed a real performance improvement as I play with max texture res. max objects and lots of other resource hog settings. You’ll also note that the puffs of cloud look much more realistic than the default, although there’s free mods that will also do that. The suns rays are also simulated so clouds add a real depth to the scene and bring brilliance and dazzle to soaring through and above the clouds.

I’ve not messed much with the different lighting tones as you need to restart X-Plane when changing them. I did notice that the system hung for a few seconds when loading and updating the weather, that may have just been an initial pause though and didn’t happen during actual flight.

The only real issue I’ve noticed is completely black clouds loading sometimes. This has happened particularly after skipping time forward to sunset when the scene was still well lit. It wasn’t something I could reproduce reliably so I can’t really blame the mod yet as it might be ‘user error’.

Check it out in my first look video here:

Categories: Flight Simulation

Tags: 64-bit, color, first look, graphics, impressions, skymaxx pro, weather, X-Plane 10