[29JUN16] PMDG 747-400 Queen of the Skies II - Tech Testing Commences

[777cap 12]

I thought the gag order was going to be removed "soon"... Remove the gag order I said and that's an order.

 

P.s: apologies for acting in such an arrogant manner.. Now

REMOVE THE GAG ORDER!!

[scandinavian13 5,192]

I thought the gag order was going to be removed "soon"... Remove the gag order I said and that's an order.

 

P.s: apologies for acting in such an arrogant manner.. Now

REMOVE THE GAG ORDER!!

 

...it's not even in beta yet.

[Steven Silva 27]

...it's not even in beta yet.

Kyle 

As is it that is not in beta ??? I mean that is a lie tod

[scandinavian13 5,192]

 

 

As is it that is not in beta ??? I mean that is a lie tod

 

I'm not sure I'm fully understanding what you're trying to say, but:

 

No. It is not in beta. Tech testing is not beta testing. Note the title of the thread.

[kevinh 409]

In my opinion, the reason the community is small and shrinking is because it is not profitable. It does little to attract new members because the standards of simulation are a long way behind the alternatives. And because of the constraints of the sub-standard FSX platform, product release cycles are too long and getting longer, and as a result, it is difficult to retain existing members. All of which means there is no one left to buy the product and make the profit to invest in new product.

Product release cycles are not longer due to FSX constraints. Don't you think PMDG would be able to cope with those by now? They are due to the ever increasing complexity of addons. The more detail you put into a simulation the longer it takes to test and debug.

 

I agree upgrade costs are a red herring. You can buy very good hardware at reasonable cost. It's only if you want the very latest and best that you pay silly money. The idea you need such hardware to run FSX is a myth. Hardware capable of running FSX with the sliders at max has been around for years.

 

32 bit is still perfectly good enough. 64 bit has more capacity, that is all. It isn't intrinsically better. It won't improve simulation fidelity very much.

[ferrariman15 13]

Product release cycles are not longer due to FSX constraints. Don't you think PMDG would be able to cope with those by now? They are due to the ever increasing complexity of addons. The more detail you put into a simulation the longer it takes to test and debug.

 

I agree upgrade costs are a red herring. You can buy very good hardware at reasonable cost. It's only if you want the very latest and best that you pay silly money. The idea you need such hardware to run FSX is a myth. Hardware capable of running FSX with the sliders at max has been around for years.

 

32 bit is still perfectly good enough. 64 bit has more capacity, that is all. It isn't intrinsically better. It won't improve simulation fidelity very much.

 

 

Indeed I remember RR's comments regarding P3D V3 when it came out saying that 64 bit is not the be all and end all people believe it is. In fact it could make some developers extremely lazy and not optimise their products. RR said a while back that when they are developing a product like the 747 v3 once they have the core functionality they want in the sim they will then spend some time optimising it. In fact I seem to remember as a result of the development advances of the 747 V3 they were able to optimise the 777 even more. I am very very keen to see what masterpiece of a 747 will be like. If only every other developer put as much effort into optimising their products as PMDG do then people would have no reason to whinge about VAS.

[Boomer 1,619]

64 bit is not the be all and end all people believe it is

 

Of course it is, if the coding is done well.

[kevinh 409]

Of course it is, if the coding is done well.

As I said above, it just adds more capacity. On the face of it a good thing, but having vastly more data to compute and update means much more computing power is needed to drive it all at a decent framerate. FSX's graphic limitations aren't related to 32 bit addressing.

 

But we are way off topic again. We need some 747 news to sharpen the focus.

[777cap 12]

But we are way off topic again. We need some 747 news to sharpen the focus.

 

Right you are!

We need to learn to appreciate the smaller things...a few years ago pmdg aircraft didn't have terrain radars, weather radars were deemed impossible to accurately recreate.

Who knows.. Someday we might have a perfect 64 bit simulator.. Till that day

Let's just enjoy what we already have.

Regards

[Paul_Smith 92]

Product release cycles are not longer due to FSX constraints. Don't you think PMDG would be able to cope with those by now? They are due to the ever increasing complexity of addons. The more detail you put into a simulation the longer it takes to test and debug.

 

I agree upgrade costs are a red herring. You can buy very good hardware at reasonable cost. It's only if you want the very latest and best that you pay silly money. The idea you need such hardware to run FSX is a myth. Hardware capable of running FSX with the sliders at max has been around for years.

 

32 bit is still perfectly good enough. 64 bit has more capacity, that is all. It isn't intrinsically better. It won't improve simulation fidelity very much.

Sorry, but yes they are. My day job for the last far too many years has been as a professional software developer and I have written addons for FSX and earlier platforms for my own use so I know the impact different development paradigms, platforms and environments can have. The platform supporting FSX, and I am sure that PMDG would not disagree, would have been considered at best adequate at the turn of the last century.  By its very nature, it is designed to support small and light simulations and was quite good at that as evidenced by the number of hobbyist and home build addon's that were produced, but it does not support large or complex models. They can still be done as PMDG and others have proved, but they are slow and difficult and expensive.

 

As for 32bit being perfectly good, there is an argument for that, though not a very good one. I am not sure if you can actually buy a 32bit CPU any more. There was once an argument that nobody would ever need more than 640k of RAM, nor would they need more then 2 digits for the year. When FSX was new, the argument was that 32bits was enough and no one would ever need more then 2 Gig of RAM. The second half of that argument that people often forget was "during the expected life of the product", which was only 2 years!

[kevinh 409]

Sorry, but yes they are. My day job for the last far too many years has been as a professional software developer and I have written addons for FSX and earlier platforms for my own use so I know the impact different development paradigms, platforms and environments can have. The platform supporting FSX, and I am sure that PMDG would not disagree, would have been considered at best adequate at the turn of the last century.  By its very nature, it is designed to support small and light simulations and was quite good at that as evidenced by the number of hobbyist and home build addon's that were produced, but it does not support large or complex models. They can still be done as PMDG and others have proved, but they are slow and difficult and expensive.

 

As for 32bit being perfectly good, there is an argument for that, though not a very good one. I am not sure if you can actually buy a 32bit CPU any more. There was once an argument that nobody would ever need more than 640k of RAM, nor would they need more then 2 digits for the year. When FSX was new, the argument was that 32bits was enough and no one would ever need more then 2 Gig of RAM. The second half of that argument that people often forget was "during the expected life of the product", which was only 2 years!

I didn't say FSX constraints were not a problem but they haven't become a greater problem recently. You mentioned two year cycles for the J41, NGX and 777. Nothing about FSX got worse to explain the apparently longer cycle of the 747 you used as an example. Anyway the NGX and 777 took longer than two years to develop, so the release cycle is more to do with when they were started.

 

32 bits is perfectly good enough for most full flight sims in the world. Surely it's good enough for desktop sims too? Of course you can pack more in with 64 bit addressing but are such second order effects really crucial or just nice to have. what would 64 bits add to the 777 that we'd notice? The main limitation is not 32 bits, but FSX's own hardcoded graphic constraints.

[Cpt DePaola 3]

CANT WAIT ANOTHER DAY!!!!! :Nail Biting:    

[Cann0nF0dd3r 21]

My credit card is ready!!!! The Queens will have a nice home in the hanger with my NGXs and T7s!!

[777cap 12]

Thanks to pmdg's long and tedious development cycles I have successfully become immune to this.

 

 

 

Who am I kidding.. I've lost all my hair and I've been biting my nails off.

 

This is stressful

[jcomm 5,916]

Just my 2 cents...

 

I've used  FSX, P3D and X-Plane 10, and sometimes none of the three, to run the visuals of Aerowinx PSX, the simulator I use for the Boeing 747-400.

 

Sometimes I feel this is ridiculous, and wonder why we can't have it all in a single sim. I run it all based on a single PC, and "old" i5 2500, and it runs perfectly, but it's not the best way of getting good out-of-windshield visuals imo.

 

Then I recently decided to invest in yet another platform, Aerofly FS 2, tired of spending useless time trying to like combat simulation with either DCS World or IL2 BoS / BoM, because they were the only providing me credible flight dynamics, and I was tired of flying in limited areas and playing war games... Aerofly FS 2 runs smoothly in my old rig, has very good graphics, potential World coverage, and very promising flight dynamics. Honestly, I would really like to start seeing the main 3pds looking into that platform, PMDG surely included.

 

I guess it'll take it's time, but now, more than ever before in the latest years, I believe we have good reasons to dream again about the next hop from FSX...

 

This being said, of course I keep FSX because there simply is no comparable 777 for it in XPlane, no high quality weather injector / configurator like ASN or AS16 in XPlane, and the 747v2 is coming along sooner or later, as well as that long awaited FSLabs Airbus A320 :-) but, each time I play the Airbus and the two Boeings in Aerofly FS 2 I really miss the same sensation of inertia and "feel of being there" when I return to FSX....

 

There are now two really promising alternative platforms available - X-Plane 10 and Aerofly FS 2. DTG Flight Sim is still far from being able to join the list, and P3D still 32 bit, still same core flight dynamics of MSFS, so, no big deal for me... I strongly hope IPACS with their dedication ( even being a small team ) and LR with the announcement of XPlane 11, can bring the long awaited Steam to this hobby, and PMDG products released for those platforms of the future :-)