Transition to P3Dv4

[edpatino 1,960]

Hi folks:

Seems to me that something should be happening with the current installations of the new P3Dv4. I'm reading here on the forums about too many sim crashes from users everywhere. Considering also the recent recommendations from PMDG's CEO Rob Randazzo, it could be possible that most of the addons, supposedly compatible with P3Dv4, are not reallly conforming to the LM's new SDK and are not rendering the sim stable?. In my case. I'm still enjoying P3Dv3.4 very much, both with the existing variety of addons available and with the perfect stability of the sim.

I've decided myself to postpone a bit the installation of P3Dv4 until I see more addons available (all PMDG's, most of ORBX's, amongst others). I would not like to spend too much time in fine-tunning or troubleshooting an unstable installation.

Would like to know the opinion and ideas from the community and every personal experience people want to share over here!.

Cheers, Ed

 

 

[king1706 1]

Hello Ed ,

I was so excited with the new prepar3d V4 coming out I added a new hard drive in my computer specially for the V4 while I am keeping the old drive for V3.4 . I upgraded my Global FTX no vector update yet, also I bought the new A2A Cessna for prepar3d V4 and the PMDG 747 .

Majority of addons are crashing regardless of vendors saying it is working

Chaseplane ( crash) AS16 crash , Rex texture with softclouds  ( it says compatible) it is not . Majority of the sceneries I have from before are not working yet. I have spent three days trying to find the reason but I can not say why every time I load prepar3d V4 and just put a simple flight plan and choose one of the original plans came with the prepar3d V4 not an addon no happiness crash within seconds .

I will stick to your advise to wait till things are more clear

Cheers

Amr

[Chock 17,769]

Since I never bought V3 of P3D (I have earlier versions of it and most of the time I only used those for training and teaching people stuff, generally using FSX-SE for my own thing). Thus I've gone from using the first version of P3D, to V4, which is a big leap.

V4 is much nicer than earlier iterations in terms of GUI and it runs a lot better than them too, but, as with the other 64 Bit ESP-based sim - FSW -  it is obviously not quite so happy having things shoehorned into it which were coded for earlier iterations, some work, others not so well and one or two crash it. But, if one is inclined to experiment, that is to be expected and indeed some of when I do that is to demonstrate to people I am teaching how to sort things out (yup, amazingly, I am someone who uses the Academic version for actual academic stuff. well, there has to be at least one person doing that lol). So for example, UK2000's Liverpool airport can be forced into P3D V4 by changing the installer paths etc, and it looks like it loads in okay, but it crashes P3D after about 30 seconds of any flight, so there is obviously something untoward in the V3 version, which of course is in no way UK2000's fault because they've not said it is V4 compatible, but evidently some developers have said things are V4 ready it would seem, when they really have not used LM's recommended methodology (for example the recently released Virtualcol CRJ is listed as V4 ready, and indeed it installs and runs okay in V4, but even Virtualcol admit in the manual that it's not fully V4), which is why I'm personally not going mad buying stuff for it just yet and not even sticking much stuff in there which I already have which supposedly has updated installers.

Frankly, as far as using it for fun is concerned (oh no! Lockheed Martin will come and arrest me now for having enjoyed it rather than solely used it for teching stuff lol), I'm happy enough to wait for things to tip up which are legit for V4 and enjoy other sims whilst that wait transpires, after all, in the past I bought quite a few of the aeroplanes which come as default in V4 (JF's Connie, Virtavia's UH-60 etc), so to me, those things are payware add-ons as far as my bank account is concerned.

[jedwards 10]

Hello, I have installed P3D v4 and have no problems whatsoever. I have all The Orbx addons that are compatible installed. My fps are better than v3.4, I am very happy with the performance and appearance of P3D v4.

4790K 16Mb ram Asus Maximus Hero Corsair H2, GTX 980 SLI.

[keithb77 305]

There is a good discussion on the uk2000 forum re p3d4, how to get uk2000 sceneries working and the legacy fs2002 and fs2004 components that cause issues.

Cheers

Keith

[Drumcode 1,892]

21 minutes ago, jedwards said:

Hello, I have installed P3D v4 and have no problems whatsoever. I have all The Orbx addons that are compatible installed. My fps are better than v3.4, I am very happy with the performance and appearance of P3D v4.

4790K 16Mb ram Asus Maximus Hero Corsair H2, GTX 980 SLI.

Exactly. I don't know where this bad reputation of v4, crashes and other nonsense is coming from. I guess this is what happens when people with outdated hardware install v4, and expect amazing results out of the box, attempt to tweak things while breaking more along the way. 

V4 is just fine and performs like a champ. Stop screwing around with it and maybe it'll work for you too.

[Drumcode 1,892]

6 minutes ago, keithb77 said:

There is a good discussion on the uk2000 forum re p3d4, how to get uk2000 sceneries working and the legacy fs2002 and fs2004 components that cause issues.

Cheers

Keith

How about not and move on?

[anden145 2,285]

43 minutes ago, king1706 said:

Majority of addons are crashing regardless of vendors saying it is working

Chaseplane ( crash) AS16 crash , Rex texture with softclouds  ( it says compatible) it is not . Majority of the sceneries I have from before are not working yet. I have spent three days trying to find the reason but I can not say why every time I load prepar3d V4 and just put a simple flight plan and choose one of the original plans came with the prepar3d V4 not an addon no happiness crash within seconds .

You must be doing something very wrong! I have both ChasePlane and ActiveSky 16 working perfectly. 

So far, Prepar3D V4 is exceeding all my expectations in terms of performance and eye candy. The new dynamic lighting system, is just amazing. Just be careful with the AA settings, when enabled... 

[gtrbarbarian 1]

@King...something sounds hosed in your config. I'm currently using soft-clouds, Active Sky for P3Dv4 beta, all of my FlightBeam stuff, a bunch of non-pd3 v4 aerosoft scenary, realair planes...etc etc with no crashes whatsoever.

I'm thinking it's something else that is the root cause of your crashes. Did you go into the windows event viewer to see what exactly is crashing?

[Christopher Low 5,341]

Quote

How about not and move on?

I only fly around the UK and Ireland. That being the case, UK2000 airports are kinda important to me. In my case, I am sticking with P3D v3.3.5 until compatibility updates for my UK2000 addons have been released (or solutions to problems with other addons have been found).

[zmak 331]

Diving into anything flight sim platform is never a good idea. 

Most simmers had no idea that big upgrade with gpu was the limiting factor and so there are a lot of posts.. "it's a slide show" etc and now we have the sdk question on top 

Unless simmers are having massive ctd because of  ooms then what's the hurry to jump ship? 

Best wait and watch 

[Flic1 975]

I'm now running V4 exclusively and haven't opened V3 since I installed it.  I have ORBX FTXG, Open LC NA and HD trees installed.  Most of my addon airports are installed and working fine (FSDT, Flightbeam, FlyTampa, LatinVFR & T2G). Most of the airports are installed outside P3D using the addon-exe function.  I am also  running ASP4/ASCA, Chaseplane, UTLive and PTA tool. I have done several long-hauls in the PMDG 777 & 747 with no issues (so far).  The platform seems very stable to me without the stutters I experienced in V3 with many addon airports and FPS have been fantiastic.  My settings within the sim would be considered mid-high.  The downside is lack of aircraft as I am not really a long-haul flyer....although I am starting to like the 777 again after not flying it for a while.  Looking forward to the FSL Airbus and NGX so I can get back to short-haul flying...

[Drumcode 1,892]

17 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

I only fly around the UK and Ireland. That being the case, UK2000 airports are kinda important to me. In my case, I am sticking with P3D v3.3.5 until compatibility updates for my UK2000 addons have been released (or solutions to problems with other addons have been found).

Which makes total sense, but it is the developers responsibility to make a final call whether they're going to invest time and resources to "fix"  the incompatibility issues or simply re-write their most successful titles to properly utilize v4's capabilities. 

I personally will not spend a dime on any scenery add-on which I know is utilizing old technology which is "fixed" to work in v4 just for the sake of working. 

[odourboy 1,288]

47 minutes ago, Drumcode said:

Exactly. I don't know where this bad reputation of v4, crashes and other nonsense is coming from. I guess this is what happens when people with outdated hardware install v4, and expect amazing results out of the box, attempt to tweak things while breaking more along the way. 

V4 is just fine and performs like a champ. Stop screwing around with it and maybe it'll work for you too.

Agreed. I don't recall having any P3D v4 crashes so far. I've added my entire P3D v3 scenery library, UTX and AS16 (beta) and it's working very well. I've avoided trying to install anything that uses a .dll or .gau which are not recompiled for 64 bit.

BTW Ed, I hear the TDFi 717 open beta is working very well in v4.

[Nyxx 6,993]

Personally I have not moved over to v4, I need PMDG NG and FSL A320. Before I buy v4, By then it will have had a patch and hopefully more airports working for v4.

3.4 runs like a dream for me so even though I look forward to using v4, am enjoying the summer and being out and about. Winter for me is when P3D gets a huge amount of use.

Enjoy read people's reports on v4.