Mild complaint about the P3D platform

[Christopher Low 5,353]

Quote

When are we going to see 6 or 7 GHz breached?

Based on progress over the past 15 years, I will be surprised if we ever see 7Ghz.

Edited August 8, 2018 by Christopher Low

[Tomaz Drnovsek 440]

Every time a see a screenshot from XP, DCS and AF2 recently I cry a little. I'm a long time FSX and P3D user but I must admit our beloved platform is starting to look very outdated.

Edited August 8, 2018 by 0Artur0

[Litmoose 90]

37 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

Based on progress over the past fifteen years, I will be surprised if we ever see 7Ghz.

Agree, my last CPU was a 7 year old 3770k which would safely go to 4.6Ghz, my new 8700k does 5Ghz.

Edited August 8, 2018 by Litmoose

[edpatino 1,964]

Hi people:

In my opinion, nobody has mentioned the biggest downsides of the P3D platform (in part inherited from the old FSX programming):

(1) its lack of fluidity and lots of pauses. Even having a supermachine you have to tune up a lot of things to get P3D run with some smoothness. I cannot imagine running this sim in VR. Yes, it's good to have nice scenery addons and very complex aircraft, seasons, ATC, AI traffic, weather representation, but, when it comes to put all this together in the sim, you'd better go and set your sliders to the left and sacrify graphic details!.

(2) complicated installation and maintenance. I had never seen something unnecessarily as complicated as the "new" addon.xml method to register your addons into the sim, for instance. We are supposed to spend our time flying and experimenting new areas and aircraft, not tweaking or tunning up the sim.

(3) the "cartoonish" look of the entire sceneries and earth representation, a complete lack of realism .

My 2 cts.

Cheers, Ed

Edited August 8, 2018 by edpatino

[djbully 210]

Some intel chips will hit 7ghz on nitro! Not very practical though! 

I think we are going to need quantum bits before we get anything significantly faster than what is available now. 

[shivers9 1,174]

We as users have to take some of the blame for the slow developement of flight sims. The only way that we can have even a little bit of control for its future is what some refer to as the "power of the purse". We can hardly blame LM or the Dev's when we as a group of consumers run to every new thing that comes along screaming wow this is going to fix all our problems. Yes it's been a bumpy road and somewhat understandable. When MS dropped FSX and took a big dump and the community we thought our hobby was doomed. Then we started to hear that other companies were looking at a "new sim". We have now gone through a period of everything from the DTG scam and the FSX this and Fsx that thing as well as the Carenado "Flying Textures of the Week Club". Every dollar that we spend on those pipe dreams is money that we take out of the pockets of legit Dev's who want to make better products. A little customer loyalty could go a long way to help. If you think that you can continue to use those FS2002 "free" add ons forever then you are going to be very un-happy real soon. I think the world of P3D and X-Plain😀 are going to take some major changes in direction very soon.

[FlyBaby 659]

1 hour ago, edpatino said:

Hi people:

In my opinion, nobody has mentioned the biggest downsides of the P3D platform (in part inherited from the old FSX programming):

(1) its lack of fluidity and lots of pauses. Even having a supermachine you have to tune up a lot of things to get P3D run with some smoothness. I cannot imagine running this sim in VR. Yes, it's good to have nice scenery addons and very complex aircraft, seasons, ATC, AI traffic, weather representation, but, when it comes to put all this together in the sim, you'd better go and set your sliders to the left and sacrify graphic details!.

(2) complicated installation and maintenance. I had never seen something unnecessarily as complicated as the "new" addon.xml method to register your addons into the sim, for instance. We are supposed to spend our time flying and experimenting new areas and aircraft, not tweaking or tunning up the sim.

(3) the "cartoonish" look of the entire sceneries and earth representation, a complete lack of realism .

My 2 cts.

Cheers, Ed

Yes, the maintenance / convoluted updates (first P3D and all other addon when “compatible”) is the reason why I have just stuck with an earlier version as the last few updates (for me) did nothing to really enhance my sim experience.

I, like others, fly P3D with $500+ more in addons to get a decent sim experience. The core product itself is not great and the 3^rd party DEVs are the only reason why this platform is viable today, the same goes for X-plane.

The flight sim community, in my opinion, is at a standstill. The lack of a good core sim has left everyone dependent on these 3^rd party products to a point where a new sim has to compete with P3D and XP….+ all of their relevant addons…to get anyone to switch. Any new sim (with new fresh ideas, tech etc) will need funding to last the “many years” that it will take to develop and outpace the Frankenstein (core + addons) sims available today.

I have come to terms with the limitations of both P3D and XP, and I do not expect much more will happen with either P3D or XP over the next 5 years. I say this because both LR and LM haven’t done anything groundbreaking over the past 5 years, which is why we been flooded with tons of 3^rd party products.

With that said, I also do not believe that the flight sim arena will get any better than what we have today because the community will hold fast to what they know (P3D and XP) and be very impatient / too skeptical to support / fund a new DEV who is most likely the very one to bring fresh ideas to this hobby. We only have “Deadstick” left and hopefully these guys can hang in there and advance their product over time.

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

1 hour ago, FlyBaby said:

....

I, like others, fly P3D with $500+ more in addons to get a decent sim experience. The core product itself is not great and the 3^rd party DEVs are the only reason why this platform is viable today, the same goes for X-plane.

The flight sim community, in my opinion, is at a standstill. The lack of a good core sim has left everyone dependent on these 3^rd party products to a point where a new sim has to compete with P3D and XP….+ all of their relevant addons…to get anyone to switch. Any new sim (with new fresh ideas, tech etc) will need funding to last the “many years” that it will take to develop and outpace the Frankenstein (core + addons) sims available today.

...

At a standstill?

Let me offer a "glass half full" view of what you laid out..

I have been flightsimming since the 80s, and have lived through many generations of flightsim products, including ATP, Propilot, FU3, etc

I consider myself lucky that LM picked up the abandoned FSX product and has given it new life.

The addon vendors are adding fabulous airplanes, scenery, avionics, weather, you name it..

I can fly my favorite airplane, the Cessa 421, across the world, using a Garmin GTN 750 for navigation, and participate in multiplayer sessions with my buddies and fly a Quest Kodiak into remote airstrips, thanks to Orbx scenery..

Flightsimming has never been better 

[edpatino 1,964]

1 hour ago, FlyBaby said:

With that said, I also do not believe that the flight sim arena will get any better than what we have today because the community will hold fast to what they know (P3D and XP) and be very impatient / too skeptical to support / fund a new DEV who is most likely the very one to bring fresh ideas to this hobby. We only have “Deadstick” left and hopefully these guys can hang in there and advance their product over time.

You have not mentioned Aerofly FS 2. We all know, it's still a sim lacking the support from 3rd. party developers (except ORBX and Aerosoft in some way) and several important features that have already been discussed here at AVSIM for a while, but in my opinion it fully compensates all this with its excellent graphics engine, fluidity, simplicity, aircraft physics and its high degree of realism. I've flightsimming since the early 80s and had avidly supported FSX and P3D during the last five years, but after discovering Aerofly FS 2 one and a half years ago, I only use P3D around 25-30% of my flightsimming time, the rest is dedicated to Aerofly and developing scenery for it, very easy and rewarding task.

Cheers, Ed

[Psybear 23]

Competition makes things happen. 😎

[nhagag 26]

As an avid simmer for 20 years I am impressed with the progress P3D v4 has made and 64bit environment. Except again for 20 years ATC is the same as it was in FSX.

I don't mind using UTLive for AI but I cant use ATC for SID and STARs procedures although easily built into the flight plans. And most of the Airports' AFCADs in P3d are not correct in terms of gate size and numbering.

Since LM expects Simmers to add on Heavies like PMDGs and FSLABS and Quality Wings and so on, why not give ATC a little boost/priority in future updates. I believe the less addons the better performance and 

Thanks

Bill Hagag

 

[CFIJose 5,485]

4 hours ago, 0Artur0 said:

Every time a see a screenshot from XP, DCS and AF2 recently I cry a little. I'm a long time FSX and P3D user but I must admit our beloved platform is starting to look very outdated.

Every now and then take a look at our screen shots forum, you'll be pleasantly surprised. 😀

[Rocky_53 1,579]

I have been on the cusp of dropping P3D in favour of XP for the past six months. I've dabbled with XP but sadly have returned to P3D V4.3. However, I am still frustrated as hell with the platform. Sure, it looks beautiful and the performance I get from my rig is very good, rarely do I see less than 30fps with smooth performance under any situations. BUT, the texture loading, particularly photoscenery, is abysmal and completely ruins immersion for me. Some will have seen posts from me on several forums over the past year or so, trying to get to the bottom of this issue. LM say they are aware of it, but never seem to get any closer to a satisfactory conclusion. Even with all slider to zero, and running photoscenery on a single 1920x1200 monitor, makes no difference whatsoever. So for me, the one thing I would hope to see before I lose interest completely, is for this issue to be resolved.

[pmb 5,137]

2 hours ago, Rockliffe said:

I have been on the cusp of dropping P3D in favour of XP for the past six months. I've dabbled with XP but sadly have returned to P3D V4.3. However, I am still frustrated as hell with the platform. 

Howard, I am with you here. The issue is not at all with bad screenshots. The fact that there are a couple of XP screenshot spammers in the screenshot forum doesn't say they are better, just more. Even more, as some of the most annoying P3D issues can't be discerned from screenshots at all.

I am afraid LM will surprise us in version 5 with a new RENDERING engine, perhaps taking advantage of PBR and DX12 and stuff. In my opinion, P3D renders quite nice (and imo better than XP) and would be in much more need of a completely rewritten TERRAIN engine.

In this repect, there are at least 4 issues having been reported to LM on their forum over and over without virtually any (yes, any) improvement over the last years:

1. Blurry photoscenery, that's the one you name. I can take all sliders down in France VFR, switch off all autogen - the terrain remains blurry and does not even come close to crisp LC-based textures.
2. Textures snapping into place. The higher resolution the mesh the more ugly this looks. I was told (probably right) this comes from different mesh resolutions being loaded in order when approaching a hill etc. Good example: ORBX Norway fjords.
3. Chewing-gum like distorted textures on vertical faces like steep rocks.
4. Black buildings. Fly into Toronto from Lake Ontario. The city center will pop up at once -  and in black. Textures will appear a couple of seconds later.
5. Autogen loading late and in patches with any distance setting above medium. I even uploaded a Silicon Valley videoclip to the LM forum a year ago.

Not anyone will see all of these issues. I'd guess, 80% around here fly tubeliners mostly or exclusively. They certainly will not notice terrain snapping into place 10km below them and most major airports are just flat anyway. I fly mostly VFR and have seen all of these issues, at least since version 2, and some of them are even an inheritance from FSX, as far as I recall.

And don't tell me these issues are unavoidable: XP may have no seasons and weather, development of AeroflyFS2 may go slow as molasses - I still have to find any of those issues in either of them (while I recall having seen at least some of them in FSW!). 

And we didn't speak about 12 (twelf) years old default airports and navaids yet.

I really would like to go on with P3D, however those unsolved issues make it less and less competitive. I often hear the argument that "we" are not LM's target group. However, aside LM internal use, don't their external commercial customers (flight schools, public motion platform sims and the like) consider these issues in their judgement of a preferred platform? 

Sorry for the long posting, Michael

[Rocky_53 1,579]

5 hours ago, pmb said:

Howard, I am with you here. The issue is not at all with bad screenshots. The fact that there are a couple of XP screenshot spammers in the screenshot forum doesn't say they are better, just more. Even more, as some of the most annoying P3D issues can't be discerned from screenshots at all.

I am afraid LM will surprise us in version 5 with a new RENDERING engine, perhaps taking advantage of PBR and DX12 and stuff. In my opinion, P3D renders quite nice (and imo better than XP) and would be in much more need of a completely rewritten TERRAIN engine.

In this repect, there are at least 4 issues having been reported to LM on their forum over and over without virtually any (yes, any) improvement over the last years:

1. Blurry photoscenery, that's the one you name. I can take all sliders down in France VFR, switch off all autogen - the terrain remains blurry and does not even come close to crisp LC-based textures.
2. Textures snapping into place. The higher resolution the mesh the more ugly this looks. I was told (probably right) this comes from different mesh resolutions being loaded in order when approaching a hill etc. Good example: ORBX Norway fjords.
3. Chewing-gum like distorted textures on vertical faces like steep rocks.
4. Black buildings. Fly into Toronto from Lake Ontario. The city center will pop up at once -  and in black. Textures will appear a couple of seconds later.
5. Autogen loading late and in patches with any distance setting above medium. I even uploaded a Silicon Valley videoclip to the LM forum a year ago.

Not anyone will see all of these issues. I'd guess, 80% around here fly tubeliners mostly or exclusively. They certainly will not notice terrain snapping into place 10km below them and most major airports are just flat anyway. I fly mostly VFR and have seen all of these issues, at least since version 2, and some of them are even an inheritance from FSX, as far as I recall.

And don't tell me these issues are unavoidable: XP may have no seasons and weather, development of AeroflyFS2 may go slow as molasses - I still have to find any of those issues in either of them (while I recall having seen at least some of them in FSW!). 

And we didn't speak about 12 (twelf) years old default airports and navaids yet.

I really would like to go on with P3D, however those unsolved issues make it less and less competitive. I often hear the argument that "we" are not LM's target group. However, aside LM internal use, don't their external commercial customers (flight schools, public motion platform sims and the like) consider these issues in their judgement of a preferred platform? 

Sorry for the long posting, Michael

Absolutely 'on the money' Michael. I have experienced all your observations. What you say regarding airline flying as opposed to GA is a good comparison. I fly far less GA flights than ever and concentrate more on flying the NGX moreso than ever before, mainly due to what you have said regarding how less obvious poor texture loading is when flying airliners.