Progress: Where I'm at With P3Dv4

[dal330200 216]

Hi everyone,

Just a quick update as to how things are going in P3Dv4.  Orbx, AS16, my FSDT, Flightbeam and Flytampa airports are all installed.  I also installed UTlive and am having no significant performance hits as posted by others.  I'm still in the process of tweaking frames and performance, but I have to say this is one fantastic platform.  The addons are spectacular compared to the visuals in v3, and I'm noticing that there must be some vector data in the default scenery, because I see railroad tracks, proper highways and parks.  Unless Orbx put them into their updates, which I don't think they did since they said Vector won't be ready for a while, so to see it in v4 default was nice.  Was it like that in v3 also?  I don't remember.

My sliders are to the right on most settings with the exception of autogen (high) and radius (high).  I've turned off most of the water reflections with the exception of terrain and aircraft, but I never liked cloud reflections anyway.  I've enabled hdr textures.  I installed hd clouds from ASCA.  I haven't fiddled with the impact of traffic settings yet, but I will later.  What else?  Oh, the night lighting is awesome, but I hate the sky and clouds.  Adjusting the tonemap in the .cfg helps, but it's not perfect.  I really hope we get a shader utility to replace PTA since it doesn't look like it will be updated, or someone comes up with the answer for those horrible lighting conditions at night.  That is my biggest gripe. After all of the complaining over the years, I can't believe LM overlooked that.  For me it's a big deal because I do a lot of night flying.

In any case, I'm waiting for PMDG to roll out the updates.  Still waiting for Imagine sim, Taxi2gate, Latinvfr and a couple of others to officially update.  I'm debating if I want to play around with these and some others I have beforehand to see how they work.  We'll see.

I'm debating whether or not to use FSLabs Airbus or Aerosoft.  I was never overly-thrilled with the Aerosoft line, but it's good enough for the price point and variety of aircraft.  I haven't purchased FSLabs yet, but whoever rolls out the updates first will be what ends up in my sim.  I will get the 330 from Aerosoft when it's released.

The biggest thing I've learned is that we can switch on a lot of settings in Nvidia and it seems to improve performance quite a bit.  I don't want to get into specifics as I'm not a tech guru, don't want to provide support, and have no idea what to suggest, but please, please, experiment with your Nvidia settings and see what works for your system.  It really helped with some stutters, particularly with UTlive, which has been an annoyance for some.

You can look at my specs in the signature.  I also just bought a 40" LCD 4k monitor to celebrate, and I have to say wow. 

So, everything is almost there.  Just need my planes and then I can start moving over from v3. 

Finally, does anyone know how to edit afcads in v4 yet?  I want to change gate assignments and parking for AI, but I've been hearing that using ADE causes the sim to crash. 

Thanks for reading and happy flying.

John