FSW AND P3D go head to head...

[hypercide 97]

Hmmm...one month in and, on balance, FSW has convincingly muscled its way into real contention. The proof? Thousands and thousands of words in this thread debating exactly how many sim-angels can dance on the head of a sim-pin. And nary a mention of either X-plane or AF2. Sure, they're not in the premise of the thread, but that fact alone is pretty telling.

[Chock 17,769]

4 hours ago, hypercide said:

Hmmm...one month in and, on balance, FSW has convincingly muscled its way into real contention. The proof? Thousands and thousands of words in this thread debating exactly how many sim-angels can dance on the head of a sim-pin. And nary a mention of either X-plane or AF2. Sure, they're not in the premise of the thread, but that fact alone is pretty telling.

Well, to include those then lol... Personally, I support all those other sims too, hell, I even bought Ready For Take Off lol.

AF2 has a lot of potential, however, we keep seeing that comment about it 'having a lot of potential', its been in Early Access for over 12 months now, so I think it's about time we started seeing some of that potential realised with things like ATC, more complex weather and AI added instead of us all repeatedly saying it could be good if they were in there.

Likewise with XPlane, Austin has banged on for years about how XPlane is the best, but we are still waiting for things like decent real world weather capabilities, seasonal changes, better flight planning, better ATC to show up in it, not to mention the fact that ground handling seriously needs some work in the current version. Some of those can be added with plug ins, but even that isn't too spectacular when you do so and many of those plug ins involve additional costs. More importantly, in comparison to what FSX offers, I strongly suspect that is what holds people back from really adopting XPlane, because in pretty much every other respect, it trounces FSX and P3D.

Even as it stands, P3D could do with some improving in my opinion; yes it is all groovy and 64 bit now and it runs very well even on a modest machine, but what on earth possessed LM to remove the ability to have real weather downloads in it? It was already in the ESP sim platform they based it on for chrissakes, and it worked okay too, as evidenced by the fact that it still works okay even on an unpatched 11-year old boxed version of the thing and indeed on versions before FSX.

[A32xx 129]

1 hour ago, Chock said:

what on earth possessed LM to remove the ability to have real weather downloads in it? It was already in the ESP sim platform they based it on for chrissakes, and it worked okay too, as evidenced by the fact that it still works okay even on an unpatched 11-year old boxed version of the thing and indeed on versions before FSX.

The simple answer is that P3D isn't a game. In a training scenario you'll be setting your weather manually, in fact the specific weather conditions may be the purpose of the training scenario itself.

[Chock 17,769]

Did I ever refer to it as a game? The ability to set it up with a metar was already in ESP.

[A32xx 129]

1 hour ago, Chock said:

Did I ever refer to it as a game?

No, but you did compare it to FSX and earlier games. Either LM regards real weather as a games feature, or they don't want the expense and hassle of maintaining their own weather server or hiring the use of someone else's.

[bonchie 2,305]

12 hours ago, hypercide said:

Hmmm...one month in and, on balance, FSW has convincingly muscled its way into real contention. The proof? Thousands and thousands of words in this thread debating exactly how many sim-angels can dance on the head of a sim-pin. And nary a mention of either X-plane or AF2. Sure, they're not in the premise of the thread, but that fact alone is pretty telling.

Oh, I could talk about those sims. I just choose to respect the users in this forum that really like FSW and not be overly harsh on it.

[arsenal82 120]

On 19/06/2017 at 11:46 PM, hypercide said:

Aren't you putting your thumb on the scale?  You write, "notice that the default FSW terrain, buildings and airports are a bit nicer than the default P3D ones, as you'd expect, since there is a bit of third party stuff going on in the default FSW"-- but "that third part stuff" IS default FSW.  In short, vanilla FSW is better looking than vanilla P3D and without the paranoia-inducing EULA.

You've probably already checked out the screenshot thread over at Flightsimworld where there's a whole lot of very good looking shots of default FSW. 

 

Tim

Did you read fsw eula ??

that is the most paranoid and restrictive  piece of writing to be born along any new sim.

 

 

 

[hypercide 97]

7 hours ago, arsenal82 said:

Did you read fsw eula ??

that is the most paranoid and restrictive  piece of writing to be born along any new sim.

 

 

 

In both the Steam forums and in DTG's very own FSW forums there is already a pretty brisk modding community openly sharing how to mod the base sim (which mods DTG has gone on to including in subsequent updates), and how to get FSX scenery and aircraft into FSW, including screenshots and youtube links. So like, EULA-schmolla, don't you think? (and yeah, I'm one of those profane anarchists who strongly feels that the P3D EULA is one of the most brilliant pieces of marketing ever foisted on the flightsim community). One of the things that gives this hobby such life is that it flourishes in the Windows ecosystem, where there's always been plenty room to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself--if that weren't the case, would this place--Avsim--even exist?

[Chock 17,769]

9 hours ago, hypercide said:

In both the Steam forums and in DTG's very own FSW forums there is already a pretty brisk modding community openly sharing how to mod the base sim (which mods DTG has gone on to including in subsequent updates), and how to get FSX scenery and aircraft into FSW, including screenshots and youtube links. So like, EULA-schmolla, don't you think? (and yeah, I'm one of those profane anarchists who strongly feels that the P3D EULA is one of the most brilliant pieces of marketing ever foisted on the flightsim community). One of the things that gives this hobby such life is that it flourishes in the Windows ecosystem, where there's always been plenty room to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself--if that weren't the case, would this place--Avsim--even exist?

Yup, I think DTG are smart enough to realise that getting people into faffing about with their sim, far from being something they need to alert the EULA police to, is something they should, and doubtless are, very happy about. they did after all, say they wanted the sim community to guide them on where it goes in terms of development and features. And as far as the P3D EULA goes, it's obvious they could care less about that too, they've had tons of avid flight simmers 'beta testing' it for them across four versions, as a result, their military training sim works a treat. And neither DTG nor LM needed to be blessed with ESP (of the supernatural kind) to suss that one out.

[A32xx 129]

2 hours ago, Chock said:

And as far as the P3D EULA goes, it's obvious they could care less about that too, they've had tons of avid flight simmers 'beta testing' it for them across four versions, as a result, their military training sim works a treat.

Which brings us neatly back to your original topic, the FSW lighting/weather engine - once it is up and running, it will be interesting to see how much of a game-changer the cloud shadows etc. in FSW will be for current P3D users.

[Chock 17,769]

What will be really interesting to see, is when they've got that stuff going in FSW and optimised it all to use the GPU etc, how it runs in comparison to P3D V4, because even on a fairly modest system you can drop the settings on P3D V4 and get 50fps with a default GA aeroplane. And we should be able to do a reasonably close comparison given that both P3D and FSW's default GA aeroplanes are essentially one and the same, in that they are basically payware Carenado add-ons which are included with the sim as default aeroplanes. Granted, FSW is running slightly fancier terrain, but then again P3D is modeling ocean floors, so there shouldn't be too much in it in terms of them both shoving pixels around the screen.