14 minutes ago, whitav8 said:

To see what a newly engineered flight sim can do with photorealistic scenery, please just load from Steam (30 gb  - or more if you download all the free DLC) and do a 2 hour tryout (then return at no charge if desired) of Aerofly FS 2

I own and enjoy it and you are on spot. Visually as well as performance-wise it leaves P3D as well as XP way behind.

However, according to their forum, even there the devs follow there own "master plan", and a lot of requests (including from my side) go unnoticed or earn a "it's on our list", at best. My 3 Saitek Panels work more worse than better and my 9 FIPs simply remain black. And I was not alone to complain about this several times since day 2 of EA. Maybe it's on the master plan for 2030.

Supposedly this is offtopic, though. As always the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.🙂 

Kind regards, Michael

2 minutes ago, pmb said:

As always the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.🙂 

 

Best quote of the day 

Does anyone remember the work that was once going on in the public domain for a publicly sponsored flight simulator?  The code was available to all and the hope was the community would come along and help out with various features.  It had high hopes at the time, but I haven't heard anything about it in about 15 years or so.

As I've mentioned in other posts, the ultimate flight simulator will be a Earth Simulator first and foremost.  And let's face it, that's a tall order.

Mark

 

1 hour ago, mtrainer said:

Does anyone remember the work that was once going on in the public domain for a publicly sponsored flight simulator? 

FlightGear? https://home.flightgear.org/

Still alive.

Kind regards, Michael

5 minutes ago, pmb said:

FlightGear? https://home.flightgear.org/

Still alive.

Kind regards, Michael

I have no idea if this was what I remembered or not, but a quick review of their site seems to indicate a very good and lively public domain effort.  I have not tried this software, but this model of development may indeed be the future of flight simulation.

Mark

 

On 8/8/2018 at 7:15 PM, edpatino said:

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

I don’t actually have AFS2 but as far as I have been able to ascertain, it only models small regions like the defunct MS Flight. Is this true? If so how can one compare it to XP or P3D where we have worldwide scenery coverage ?

What needs to happen, but likely never will, is to have P3D core foundation being modular, and then have a split division. LM can then focus on military and corporate features.  A more hobby sim enthusiast division would then focus on features we simmers really want.  As it stands now, all the wants, are not exactly high priority , and likely never will be unless they dont know what do anymore. (again highly unlikely). Obviously LM is not going to fund resources for a hobby sim enthusiast division, so it would have to be external, licensing and branding it a little differently yet working very closely with LM.  Bill Gates.... interested in rekindling your flight sim interests? Someone with deep pockets. 

I really cant see this happening at all, (.0001% chance) so we have to put up with the P3D platform and live with its goals of corporate and military goals.  I am still appreciative we still have this kinda sim, and that the development is firm and stable. Our reliance is with 3PDs to enhance and deal with what we perceive is shortcomings.  Its a good thing devs have a pretty good relationship with LM and the SDK appears to be strong.

1 hour ago, deetee said:

I don’t actually have AFS2 but as far as I have been able to ascertain, it only models small regions like the defunct MS Flight. Is this true? If so how can one compare it to XP or P3D where we have worldwide scenery coverage ?

That comparison doesn't apply. While AFS2 doesn't come with a worldwide (albeit quite poor out of the box, let's face it) base synthetic scenery like P3D or XP, it already covers out of the box or via addons several detailed regions much more extended than what Flight! ever had: The SW US, an extended region around NY, Utah, Colorado, South Florida, Switzerland. Plus ORBX is continually supporting it with soon to be released The Netherlands and the UK to follow. This isn't enough but enough to make at least GA flyers quite happy. And where you can compare regions (say the Eagle County area) I find them to look so much better than in any other sim.

Besides, AFS2 contains worldwide base scenery which is very low resolution but well enough for airliners flying >10km above ground. And there are free tools available to add you own high-resolution photo scenery + autogen wherever you want (which I did for parts of Germany).

Besides, AFS2 comes with quite a number of planes far better and more functional than those Flight! provided including, e.g., a b737 and an a320. They probably are not "study level", if you like the expression, but some of them like the Learjet comprise a host of functions (and this one comes with an excellent manual).

I certainly know - and occasionally complain about - the shortcomings of AFS2 but the stunning visuals + performance (forget about those ugly stutters!) at least partially outweigh these.

Kind regards, Michael

AFS2 is a beautiful simulator, especially in VR.  Trying flying an F18 around the mountains of Switzerland in VR, just keep a bucket handy!

But I’m mainly a heavy iron flyer.  Yesterday in P3D I flew CYHZ-CYYC in an A319 and KDFW-KPHX in a 757, all with payware airports, in real weather, with real world AI traffic, just because those routes/aircraft tickled my fancy at the time.  

That’s what P3D brings to the table, and while AFS2 is great for localized GA flying (and perhaps even some limited long distance airliner flying, though I’ve never tried), to me P3D is the king of flying high quality airliners wherever you want in the world.

12 hours ago, deetee said:

I don’t actually have AFS2 but as far as I have been able to ascertain, it only models small regions like the defunct MS Flight. Is this true? If so how can one compare it to XP or P3D where we have worldwide scenery coverage ?

It actually covers parts of western USA (California, Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Nevada), some parts of Eastern USA (New York state, South Florida including the city of Miami) with very well detailed airports. ORBX has released airports in Colorado, California and Chicago. Also, it covers Switzerland and Innsbruck in Austria (ORBX LOWI). ORBX is planning to release soon the True Earth Netherlands scenery for Aerofly. Additionally, If you'd like to, it's very easy to produce very good scenery by yourself using the existing tools. Using those tools, we have recreated parts of the USA, South America, France, Italy and Asia by ourselves, a group of enthousiasts that decided to work together and have fun. The scenery looks very very realistic as it's only photoscenery.

Sorry, but have no experience with XP, have never tried it. And, yes, P3D has a worldwide coverage, but you still need addon airports, which of course you can have tons of them, but the default airports are not good, as you may have noticed.

For more information you can go to the IPACS forums and/or website: www.aerofly.com.

Cheers, Ed

PD: Noticed that Michael beat me in the timing of my response. I do agree with him entirely.

 

 

Edited August 10, 20187 yr by edpatino

To return to Prepar3d, this begs an interesting question, mainly to those with some insight into programming and internals. LM always declared they don't want to sacrifice backward compatibility to existing addons (certainly for a reason). Would you guys/gals think it to be possible to equip Prepar3d with a revamped state-of-the-art core engine without some (ideally all) of the annoying "features" named in this thread - ideally providing a performance like AeroflyFS2 (maybe minus some fps for moving cars, AI, weather and stuff)?

I am not so much asking for speculations if LM will actually do it which no one knows, but if it would be possible technically, while at least basically mainting the present scenery and aircraft file formats. I often was told backwards compatibilty would be a main obstacle, but I am not sure if this really applies.

Kind regards, Michael

25 minutes ago, pmb said:

To return to Prepar3d, this begs an interesting question, mainly to those with some insight into programming and internals. LM always declared they don't want to sacrifice backward compatibility to existing addons (certainly for a reason). Would you guys/gals think it to be possible to equip Prepar3d with a revamped state-of-the-art core engine without some (ideally all) of the annoying "features" named in this thread - ideally providing a performance like AeroflyFS2 (maybe minus some fps for moving cars, AI, weather and stuff)?

I am not so much asking for speculations if LM will actually do it which no one knows, but if it would be possible technically, while at least basically mainting the present scenery and aircraft file formats. I often was told backwards compatibilty would be a main obstacle, but I am not sure if this really applies.

Kind regards, Michael

Given that Orbx is able to adapt their FSX/P3D scenery packages to AF2 would have me believe that the compatibily issue is manageable.

When P3D is running in an unstressed mode, it actually provides quite a smooth experience.. it is when the urban sceneries and airports show up, that P3D starts showing its jerky, uneven behavior.  As for the mesh scenery visibly changing, I am convinced that this could be addressed, possibly with a performance penalty..  No idea how AF2 handles that..

Would be interesting to have someone "in the know" comment..

2 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

Given that Orbx is able to adapt their FSX/P3D scenery packages to AF2 would have me believe that the compatibily issue is manageable.

When P3D is running in an unstressed mode, it actually provides quite a smooth experience.. it is when the urban sceneries and airports show up, that P3D starts showing its jerky, uneven behavior.  As for the mesh scenery visibly changing, I am convinced that this could be addressed, possibly with a performance penalty..  No idea how AF2 handles that..

Would be interesting to have someone "in the know" comment..

Not that I am particularly 'in the know', but what I would suggest is that scenery and aircraft are two very different ball games. 

Scenery, ultimately, is just data: conversion from one format to another is not necessarily a major issue, it doesn't really care about 32 bit/64 bit and so on. We have seen this already with many sceneries converted for different platforms, updated for P3Dv4 etc very quickly (indeed many legacy sceneries work in v4 right off the bat). (Of course, creating a product properly optimised for and taking advantage of all the features available in a particular platform is another matter).

Aircraft, on the other hand, are far more complex in the way in which they interact with the sim and it is mostly simply impossible to just 'convert' an aircraft to another format. There's just too much going on behind the scenes.

1 hour ago, skelsey said:

Scenery, ultimately, is just data: conversion from one format to another is not necessarily a major issue, it doesn't really care about 32 bit/64 bit and so on. We have seen this already with many sceneries converted for different platforms, updated for P3Dv4 etc very quickly (indeed many legacy sceneries work in v4 right off the bat). (Of course, creating a product properly optimised for and taking advantage of all the features available in a particular platform is another matter).

I believe there is more to it.. a lot more, actually.

P3D scenery consists of elevation mesh, landclass data, phototexture data, vector data, autogen data etc.

The rendering engine has to put all this together into a 3d image.. no small task.

Both the CPU and GPU are involved... if you change the rendering engine, do you change the data concept as well, or does it stay the same?  Not as simple as it might seem..

On 8/8/2018 at 7:50 PM, nhagag said:

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 

I am an avid AI user, I customize everything, newest models, flightplans ETC.

 

I really really recommend ATC PRO X, its all that you want! But still has some limitations of course, but it changed everything for me.

The AI engine is very old, LM were asked about this, and said they would consider working on it... But again slow slow progress.