Alan, in all the interactions I've had with the devs on the LM forums, there certainly nothing they convey that makes you think you're on the periphery. There's something to be said for the transparency and details when they're working on bug fixes and features (take Beau's response on VAS for example)...less "along for the ride" and more "jump in and get your hands dirty" so to speak. 

 

 

Alan, in all the interactions I've had with the devs on the LM forums, there certainly nothing they convey that makes you think you're on the periphery.

 

Oh, I agree.  It's not that I feel dissed or neglected.  It's more that, at some point you have to follow the money - meaning that, if a choice has to be made between our needs/desires (say, for backward compatibility) and the needs of commercial customers, the needs of the commercial customers are going to win out.  Nothing wrong with that - it's the only sensible way for them to do business.  But it might mean that over time, P3D goes off on its own path.

 

It is nice (and amazing... and also smart) that they've opened the doors and developed relationships with those of us in the rank and file.  

Divergence is part of the equation, another is direction. Divergence leading to more realism and simulation fidelity is good. Another is affordability. As long as those 3 meet on the same path with p3d I don't think there's anything to worry about.

 

As I understand it, Dovetail's options are more limited... We have seen good good results thus far but to your point will it continue?? ...we'll see.

while it may be the case that we may eventually see something like a 64-bit version from LM, it's not absolutely certain that we will, nor that any such revision would be the panacea many on AvSim are hoping for.

 

Most everyone by now would know that 64-bit anything is not a panacea, but it solves a giant issue, plus offers at least a less restrictive environment to play in and maybe some other benefits.  But the giant issue is giant.

 

I installed P3D V2 when it debuted and it didn't take long to learn the immersion factor was considerably greater, and off FSX went and I was a dedicated user of FSX since its debut.  Whatever you install consider installing as much upside in your new build as you can and aim for E type processors which overclock well.  I have SB-E running w/ HT enabled have have excellent performance considering the box is now 5 years old, and GTX Titan still works well as well.   There never are blurries as my 10 available terrain texture loaders can keep up quite well even in the densest sceneries.

 

Consider ample physical ram for when we get to 64-bit which sounds likely and already is in XP10 so you will have plenty of space to play in.  I have 32Gb of DDR3 2400Mhz ram and the box is easily overclocked to 4.42Gz, or 4.54 if I can to go to 1.335v, likely more but the cost:benefit in terms of heat and voltage to the core gets progressively steeply worse the higher you go.  I'm air cooled w/ the best air cooler. 

 

The other likely development for P3D is DirectX 12 support and this is potentially very significant as a key feature of DirectX 12 is dynamic parallelism and w/ it better offloading of work from CPU to GPU, and as it stands now, anyone w/ a very strong GPU or two has a lot of headroom to exploit for this sort of thing.  Of course before the other chime in, no one here can say w/ certainly exactly how P3D's rendering engine can take advantage of this, but that too may change when 64-bit debuts, i.e. LM may be able to adjust what they need to to exploit DirectX 12 better.  All spec as of the moment here.  Maybe Rob knows more.   DirectX 12 & 64-bit will open a different future for P3D and there are enough strong content development partners who will want to support that as well going forward.  Whereas for FSX there appears to be a static and dying future ultimately.

Most everyone by now would know that 64-bit anything is not a panacea, but it solves a giant issue, plus offers at least a less restrictive environment to play in and maybe some other benefits.  But the giant issue is giant.

 

Well done - you know your stuff

Noel,

 

very well written and I fully agree.

 

But, even just the plain vanilla P3dv2.5 I installed last week gives me the shadows I never had in FSX even with the Fixer, and clouds that, using the default textures, look simply AMAZING!

 

The sim is fluid, in my i5 2500k, with a GTX 650 Ti 1GB, because I do not ask more than 30 fps, and have scenery sliders set to the mid lows...

 

When ASN paints the skys with those gorgeous dense clouds then, I have low FPS, but that's more than understandable and I only have to get the chance to upgrade to a better graphics card ( thinking of an ASUS Strix GTX 960 OC 2 GDDR5 ) and, one day also a new processor and MB... Meanwhile, P3Dv2 is giving me the best experience I had in the last years, and I did like the fluidity and stability of FSX:SE !

Noel,

 

very well written and I fully agree.

 

But, even just the plain vanilla P3dv2.5 I installed last week gives me the shadows I never had in FSX even with the Fixer, and clouds that, using the default textures, look simply AMAZING!

 

The sim is fluid, in my i5 2500k, with a GTX 650 Ti 1GB, because I do not ask more than 30 fps, and have scenery sliders set to the mid lows...

 

When ASN paints the skys with those gorgeous dense clouds then, I have low FPS, but that's more than understandable and I only have to get the chance to upgrade to a better graphics card ( thinking of an ASUS Strix GTX 960 OC 2 GDDR5 ) and, one day also a new processor and MB... Meanwhile, P3Dv2 is giving me the best experience I had in the last years, and I did like the fluidity and stability of FSX:SE !

Agreed, although I saw something last night that didn't look right.  While flying VFR over EGCC in a Piper Cub (Yes, THAT Piper Cub), I noticed that the bodies of water throughout the countryside had a wierd texture to them, or rather, it looked as the the textures were half there.  I could see water and waves but then these sharp cutoffs, almost in the middle of the water body and the rest of the water body was black.

 

Thoughts?

 

-Jim