True volumetric clouds. xEnviro is doing it. Dovetail did it. It just needs to happen.

I'd dream of a DX12 rewrite of the engine, but that's not gonna happen (if only for legacy Windows compatibility)

10 hours ago, Avidean said:

Whatever V5 brings the degree to which it brakes backwards compatibility with the major 3PD will be limited. my guess is that it will brake backward compatibility up to a point that the major 3PD's can deal with and updates to existing addons will as standard come with a price. I am guessing the days of free updates will be over with V5. This is of course all speculation but I expect that V5 will have no main thread and be asynchronous so that it can take full advantage of all CPU cores. It will also be DX12 and it will use PBR. I expect that 3PD in the know have already been informed of the road map for V5 and are already working on compatibility issues

Based on what beta testers of P3D have said here previously, I hardly doubt they will break any backward compatibility at all. That means no changes in flight dynamics etc. I guess it will be the same as v4, just with PBR and maybe a few other graphical improvements and improved VR support. Not much else. This is my guess, we'll find out once v5 is out 🙂

Hopefully they drop backwards compatibility and move things forward for real.  Unlikely.

From what community members have commented so far, it seems as though a complete rewrite of P3D’s engine needs to be done. Like literally gutted out. Which may not be a bad thing. So far, P3D is the only 64 bit sim still clinging on to an old platform. I won’t lie, this strategy has worked so far but as we start to see more games use More advanced technology, P3D will start to get old to us much like FSX did. I believe P3D should hire some of Dovetails members and maybe milk some info out of them on how we can make our virtual skies more life like. To me FSW has the best thing going emerssion wise but to bad it didn’t quite work out. That is what we need. We just need to go in and gut the whole thing and start over. Because let’s be honest. Some of these wants that have been mentioned would need a total rework of the whole sim. Plus, all of these add-on’s Would have to go back to the drawing board as well. Like for instance: volumetric clouds. Well if they did somehow bless us with actual life like clouds as default then a company like REX would be a sitting duck with their Sky Force product. 

Maybe we will see the implementation of Vulkan graphics in V5...

How about stars not appearing whilst the sun is still above the horizon? I don’t have v4 yet but I’m guessing this is still one of those long-standing bugs from FS9 days.

I would like to see PBR, more realistic sounding ATC, those ripples effects you see at the back of the engines, better optimization.............but

Personally I don't think we will see any drastic improvements all the time LM are using the ESP engine, every update they do get closer and closer to the engines limitations, look what happens as soon as you add multiple addons, the sim gets quite unsteady, realistically in my opinon, those that have the 12+ core CPU's and all the other top of the range hardware should be getting a nice and steady 60fps, but we just don't see that happening with the ESP, that is what is holding the sim back 😞 maybe LM can find a way to totally revamp the ESP so it utilises all the latest hardware efficiently but I think personally getting away from the ESP will be the best thing.

We can only wish and pray lol.

Nevertheless, I will continue to support LM, like most peeps, to much time and money has been invested in this and FSX lol.

Stars can also be seen though the atmospheric haze near the horizon just as easily as they can when high in the sky. I would like to see this corrected, together with small improvements to ATC when on the ground (no more endless "stop/start" messages to AI planes), better separation of AI planes on final approach, and more realistic rollouts after landing.

Edited July 5, 20187 yr by Christopher Low

I really wounder how much more they can squeeze out of the ancient FSX engine...

20 minutes ago, roi1862 said:

I really wounder how much more they can squeeze out of the ancient FSX engine...

The development team at LockM and a number of key developers seem quite upbeat about future prospects.   They managed to turn a clapped out 32 bit engine into a 64 bit engine - so it isn't exactly the same ancient FSX engine.  On that basis, I'm sure much more can be done if they wanted -   if they are willing to drop backwards compatibility, 

 

5 hours ago, otreblA said:

I believe I will skip version 5. I am very satisfied with v4.3.

v5 will have to bring something very good that will make me change.

I guess you have not had this trouble  YET   then http://www.prepar3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6322&t=130122   I just wish I had saved P3Dv4.2  😞

 

9 minutes ago, Lord_Nibbo said:

I guess you have not had this trouble  YET   then http://www.prepar3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6322&t=130122   I just wish I had saved P3Dv4.2  😞

 

I started to have the same issue last night.  The Indexing got stuck at 95%.    Task manager showed there was 0% activity on the P3D application.  I didn't realise this was 'a thing' until I read your post.  I thought id just go home tonight, delete the scenery.cfg and that would sort it out.  The last - and only other scenery I installled other than Orbx Global, Vector  was Flytampa Vienna 2.7 - and that's when I had the issue.

How about buildings and cockpits having hard surfaces so that they can't be 'penetrated'?

Edited July 5, 20187 yr by Richard McDonald Woods

59 minutes ago, ErichB said:

I started to have the same issue last night.  The Indexing got stuck at 95%.    Task manager showed there was 0% activity on the P3D application.  I didn't realise this was 'a thing' until I read your post.  I thought id just go home tonight, delete the scenery.cfg and that would sort it out.  The last - and only other scenery I installled other than Orbx Global, Vector  was Flytampa Vienna 2.7 - and that's when I had the issue.

Yes it's a bigger problem than Lockheed would like any one to know. Just do a google "P3Dv4.3 freezing on Generating Scenery Files "    They keep saying it our scenery addons that cause the problem, That's not true because mine worked ok with the same scenery on P3Dv4.2, nothing was added but now I'm totally shot trying to get P3Dv4.3  to work with my original scenery.cfg that was backed up from P3dv4.2.  😞

3 minutes ago, Lord_Nibbo said:

Yes it's a bigger problem than Lockheed would like any one to know. Just do a google "P3Dv4.3 freezing on Generating Scenery Files "    They keep saying it our scenery addons that cause the problem, That's not true because mine worked ok with the same scenery on P3Dv4.2, nothing was added but now I'm totally shot trying to get P3Dv4.3  to work with my original scenery.cfg that was backed up from P3dv4.2.  😞

I've done a clean Windows 10 and P3D install and there is no other scenery other than Orbx Global, Vector and one Flytampa airport (so far) installed.   I managed to start P3D successfully a few times after the Orbx scenery was installed - it's only after the FT installation that this happened.  (it's the same package i used for 4.2, so doubt it's anything to do with FT scenery)