After a short development process relative to previous updates of the addon, DarkSpace has released version 1.15 of their xEnviro weather addon.

The primary goal of this version is to provide compatibility with Vulkan rendering in X-Plane 11.50. This comes after the release of v1.14, which received criticism for being compatible with OpenGL-only.

That version was mainly about bringing performance improvements to the cloud-rendering software, which is the first in the X-Plane environment to utilise volumetrics.

"I'll start off with saying that many of the known issues that we had in 1.14 still persist. This is because we want to get the Vulkan conversion out as fast as we can without adding or changing too much of the core. Which could risk us having to stay in a development mode for longer than needed."

"I am not going to repeat why 1.14 had such a long development time, but we are trying to get away from the huge gaps between releases. We'd rather see many smaller updates than rare large ones."

Here's the full list of changes:

Known Issues

• Precipitation follows camera
• Snow coverage may appear in the regions where no snowfall encountered recently
• Default X-Plane night triggers lights artifacts
• Cloud edge artifacts
• In cloud artifacts
• Cirrus clouds may affect colorization of clouds beneath
• Low level clouds may be combined

What's new?

• Realistic ozone level checkbox
• Post processing tone mapping added
• Tone mapping selector slider
• Tone mapping mixing level slider
• Vulkan rendering support (dynamic seasons only available in OpenGL mode)
• Light scattering from scenery light sources at night
• Button or key assignable command to show and hide Settings window
• Windshield fogging effect
• Windshield freezing effect.

Changed

• X-Plane precipitation dataref update suspended for critical phases of flight
• Rain and snow effect improved

Removed

• Maximum ozone level slider

Fixed

• Scenery light no longer disappear abruptly at night

Unfortunately, with the update to Vulkan rendering, dynamic seasons will be halted for the time being as Laminar Research have locked down access to some key functions preventing their use in xEnviro.

As a result, 1.15 comes in two versions with the one installation - the OpenGL version will include seasons functionality, whereas Vulkan will not. You can view the full explanation from the developer on the Threshold Forum.

If you're an existing customer, you can download the new version of xEnviro here. Alternatively, you can purchase xEnviro for $69.90 USD from here.