Currently, there are 137,133 members of AVSIM. Of that, how many would you speculate are historical versus active members?

 

I did a filter search of the member list for those that has visited the forums at least once after March 1st 2013 (One year) and displaying 60 members per page resulted in 1091 pages, that comes out to be 65460 active members in the last year. Out of those 10800 have posted at least once in the same time period. This assumes the forums search function are accurate of course.

 

 

I think you are close, Noel, but not quite there with respect to "control over content quality".

 

I hear ya, I think I said that wrong I should have said content compatibility rather than quality.

Thanks for reviving the dead horse and treating him better

.... Are any of us really willing to wait anywhere from three to six YEARS for a "from scratch 64bit sim?"

 

I'm sure not!  :LMAO:

I doubt it would take six years! And if it takes three years, LM better gets going! ^_^

I doubt it would take six years! And if it takes three years, LM better gets going! ^_^

 

But why? We've already got other simulators starting from scratch.

 

 

I doubt it would take six years!

 

Hm… the first version of P3D was released in November 2010. It took them three years to fix the first few things and then implement DX11. I don't think going to 64 bit would take 6 years but I certainly wouldn't count on a few months or a year. I don't expect a 64 but within 2 or 3 years, really. But of course that's just guessing. 

But why? We've already got other simulators starting from scratch.

 

Well that is a concept that is called: Competition! The best will convince the customers/users and make the most money!  (Just a joke!)

 

I don't see that P3D is on short final to become a convincing state-of-the-art simulation platform. It may be o.k. for flight-simulation but you can’t simulate road traffic or off-road-traffic with it. I mean: Look at those ground textures! They hurt your eyes!

 

Just compare the visuals of P3D2 with modern games or a modern rendering machine like Outerra! And yes, lighting and rendering seem to be better even in X-Plane.

 

And your question is right ChaoticBeauty: Why should LM do the same? Because they have the client base that could justify such an investment. Laminar research refuses to sell the product to a certain type of commercial customers (my understanding) and Outerra is doing a terrific job but obviously has a small team that deals with the development and not with distribution of such a platform.

Well that is a concept that is called: Competition! The best will convince the customers/users and make the most money!  (Just a joke!)

 

I don't see that P3D is on short final to become a convincing state-of-the-art simulation platform. It may be o.k. for flight-simulation but you can’t simulate road traffic or off-road-traffic with it. I mean: Look at those ground textures! They hurt your eyes!

 

Just compare the visuals of P3D2 with modern games or a modern rendering machine like Outerra! And yes, lighting and rendering seem to be better even in X-Plane.

 

And your question is right ChaoticBeauty: Why should LM do the same? Because they have the client base that could justify such an investment. Laminar research refuses to sell the product to a certain type of commercial customers (my understanding) and Outerra is doing a terrific job but obviously has a small team that deals with the development and not with distribution of such a platform.

 

You might be right, but don't forget that Lockheed Martin cater mainly to the training market; the training market needs a large selection of aircraft on a stable platform, which is what Lockheed Martin are trying to achieve right now. You don't need extremely high-res ground textures or detail like in modern games to train. The people who want as much eye candy as in modern games are us, the simmers, and this is why I think that Outerra (and maybe aeroflyFS) deserves our support. Because it has began from scratch, and it is truly a revolution in the graphical department.

 

I wouldn't mind Lockheed Martin reinventing the wheel, in fact, it would be nice because there would be competition, as you said. But why would they? The ESP can evolve into a very high-performing engine (look at Microsoft Flight) which would cover their clients' needs I suppose.

 

 

You don't need extremely high-res ground textures or detail like in modern games to train. The people who want as much eye candy as in modern games are us,

 

Exactly and games is the key word. What ive seen of the professional trainers, the graphics are at best not good because there not the focus of the simulator. Vehicle realism is. I would guess computing power is reserved for Vehicles and runways .

Exactly and games is the key word. What ive seen of the professional trainers, the graphics are at best not good because there not the focus of the simulator. Vehicle realism is. I would guess computing power is reserved for Vehicles and runways .

 

The only reason professional training simulators don't have good graphics is because they don't need good graphics. Our hardware can definitely handle great graphics and accurate vehicle simulation at the same time. I think that you would be surprised at what today's hardware can do, if there weren't old engines and API overheads holding it back. ESP is an old engine that still can't multithread properly (even in Prepar3D 2.1), and while DirectX 11 is much better compared to DirectX 9 when it comes to CPU overhead, it's still horrible.

 

I'm placing many hopes on Outerra for those reasons. It's a modern engine on par with other engines in the market, and uses OpenGL which is an open standard, in continuous development, and not locked to Windows. Both the next DirectX and OpenGL will massively reduce CPU overhead (because Mantle sparked competition), but DirectX 12 will be locked to Windows 9.

Exactly and games is the key word. What ive seen of the professional trainers, the graphics are at best not good because there not the focus of the simulator. Vehicle realism is. I would guess computing power is reserved for Vehicles and runways .

Yes but LM is marketing P3D as a training aid not only for flight simulation! I don't want to be the tank driver that has to use that washed out ground textures ...

 

And, yes, I like eye candy because I fly VFR low and slow most of the time. And if P3D2 is used to also train things like this (low and slow) it definetly needs some improvement. Otherwise the 20 year old pilot/tank-driver/ship-driver/hovercraft-pilot/heli-pilot will laugh him self to tears (and will go home to play some BF4 ...).

 

I think there are some good reasons why a multi-role simulator needs modern graphic (unlike the airliner full motion simulators that are for IFR-use only).

I doubt it would take six years! And if it takes three years, LM better gets going! ^_^

You must have overlooked the qualifier "from scratch," which the person I was replying to had demanded!

 

It's critical to read carefully to make certain you didn't any words out!

 

(leave) :LMAO:

I'm placing many hopes on Outerra for those reasons. It's a modern engine on par with other engines in the market, and uses OpenGL which is an open standard, in continuous development, and not locked to Windows. Both the next DirectX and OpenGL will massively reduce CPU overhead (because Mantle sparked competition), but DirectX 12 will be locked to Windows 9.

 

You are right, except for the fact that Outerra also is still 32bit ... But imagine Outerra with a powerfull team of full-time developers and good connections to experienced addon developers.

You must have overlooked the qualifier "from scratch," which the person I was replying to had demanded!

 

It's critical to read carefully to make certain you didn't any words out!

 

(leave) :LMAO:

Yep, it was me!

 

And no, I have not overlooked it and still do not believe that with a sufficient team of full-time developers it take six years to have a next generation simulator up and running. But as you say in your signature: "It is not wise to contest forum moderators; they have more ways to admonish than you have of evading." (Shin'a'in Proverb) so I will leave it as it is. :lol:

You are right, except for the fact that Outerra also is still 32bit ... But imagine Outerra with a powerfull team of full-time developers and good connections to experienced addon developers.

 

The Outerra developers said that, even though 64-bit is not really needed because biomes/weather/other rendering stuff are running on the GPU, they are planning to move to 64-bit as the amount of objects is getting too large for the CPU.