New Version of P3D Coming?

[Mace 1,902]

1 hour ago, Boeing or not going said:

 and at sunset and sunrise also low FPS.

On my system the culprit of that was cloud shadow settings.  I haven't noticed that problem in my 4.3 though.

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

4 hours ago, Cactus521 said:

I am using the default KPHX, I am interested in an updated airport, preferably freeware.  Xplane11 has a great rendition of KPHX which I enjoy alot, very detailed, yet very framerate friendly, it has lots of static aircraft on display to go along with it, and the downtown Phoenix buildings as well.

John

Edit: As usual the Avsim Library provides, I found some Sky Harbor scenery for FSX that works in P3DV4, and adds the missing control tower back to Phoenix Sky Harbor

The Flightbeam version is compatible as I pretty well done.

http://www.flightbeam.net/kphx.html/

[John_Cillis 2,406]

45 minutes ago, cmpbellsjc said:

The Flightbeam version is compatible as I pretty well done.

http://www.flightbeam.net/kphx.html/

I found a freeware, FSX incarnation of the airport that includes the tower.  It does not include the current Skytrain, but I am fine with that--just missed not having a tower at the airport.

[Boeing or not going 578]

50 minutes ago, cmpbellsjc said:

The Flightbeam version is compatible as I pretty well done.

http://www.flightbeam.net/kphx.html/

A great airport but some landclass and mesh issues around the airport using OpenLC

Edited October 28, 2018 by Boeing or not going

[Guest]

15 hours ago, Bobsk8 said:

And after it is released, no add ons will work, The fix will be , New PC, new OS, and purchase everything you own again. 

I've gone from P3D v2 to v3 to v4 on the same PC. I did upgrade it for free to Windows 10 but that's all. No, wait, I bought a new GPU around 2 years ago but not specifically for P3D. I had to buy some addons again in the beginning but not for every version. Some addons were updated for free. Other addons have been replaced by my own choice, not because P3D forced me to do so.

So it isn't as bad as you make it sound. 😉

[Jude Bradley 659]

They haven't finished the bugs in 4.3 yet. 

FSLabs split display on take off.http://www.prepar3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6312&t=130185

 

[wizzards 99]

21 hours ago, WarpD said:

NDA.=No Donkeys Allowed

 

Edited October 28, 2018 by wizzards

[pgde 571]

8 hours ago, Boeing or not going said:

A great airport but some landclass and mesh issues around the airport using OpenLC

No problem with Flightbeam's KPHX and MSE. Highly recommended.

[Amon1973 1,421]

20 hours ago, Bobsk8 said:

And after it is released, no add ons will work, The fix will be , New PC, new OS, and purchase everything you own again. 

If this was the case, i'd may as well bight the bullet and move to X-plane lock stock and barrell, it would have to blow all the other flight sim's out of the water for me to purchase everything again.

[pmb 5,137]

29 minutes ago, eaim said:

If this was the case, i'd may as well bight the bullet and move to X-plane lock stock and barrell, it would have to blow all the other flight sim's out of the water for me to purchase everything again.

This is plain nonsense. You can reuse e.g. all ORBX scenery which you bought for FSX or any previous P3D version in Prepar3D4.3, without paying any additional cent. Some Aerosoft sceneries had free of charge upgrades as well, for some of them (the Professional product line) you have to pay a moderate upgrade fee like 5 $ or such.

I went through all Prepar3d versions from 1.2 and had to pay an upgrade fee now and then, but not a huge amount as for a complete collection. I am notably very grateful to ORBX (where I own the complete collection) for allowing reuse of their sceneries in any Prepar3d versions so far, which actually involved some work for them to provide compatibility updates. 

Also some planes had free of charge upgrades. I think this concerns all Carenados/Alabeos. The really costly parts are those from, e.g., A2A and PMDG.

It was the declared goal of Lockheed Martin (can be read on their website) to maintain some basic upward compatibility of Prepar3d. This does not mean any FSX scenery or plane will work out of the box (which would hinder any further development) but develoment effort will be reduced compared to a completely new development as the developer can reuse some assets.

Kind regards, Michael

Edited October 28, 2018 by pmb

[Greggy_D 935]

5 hours ago, Jude Bradley said:

They haven't finished the bugs in 4.3 yet. 

FSLabs split display on take off.http://www.prepar3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6312&t=130185

 

LM should have released a hotfix for this.

[Amon1973 1,421]

8 hours ago, pmb said:

This is plain nonsense. You can reuse e.g. all ORBX scenery which you bought for FSX or any previous P3D version in Prepar3D4.3, without paying any additional cent. Some Aerosoft sceneries had free of charge upgrades as well, for some of them (the Professional product line) you have to pay a moderate upgrade fee like 5 $ or such.

I went through all Prepar3d versions from 1.2 and had to pay an upgrade fee now and then, but not a huge amount as for a complete collection. I am notably very grateful to ORBX (where I own the complete collection) for allowing reuse of their sceneries in any Prepar3d versions so far, which actually involved some work for them to provide compatibility updates. 

Also some planes had free of charge upgrades. I think this concerns all Carenados/Alabeos. The really costly parts are those from, e.g., A2A and PMDG.

It was the declared goal of Lockheed Martin (can be read on their website) to maintain some basic upward compatibility of Prepar3d. This does not mean any FSX scenery or plane will work out of the box (which would hinder any further development) but develoment effort will be reduced compared to a completely new development as the developer can reuse some assets.

Kind regards, Michael

I was only talking about moving my main sim, if say P3D V5 broke all backward compatibility, and we had to buy all our products again, which I know is rather unlikely.

[pmb 5,137]

32 minutes ago, eaim said:

I was only talking about moving my main sim, if say P3D V5 broke all backward compatibility, and we had to buy all our products again, which I know is rather unlikely.

I am sorry for misunderstanding then. Although I can hardly imagine LM to abandon their backwards compatibility paradigm.

Kind regards, Michael

[harrry 322]

9 hours ago, eaim said:

If this was the case, i'd may as well bight the bullet and move to X-plane lock stock and barrell, it would have to blow all the other flight sim's out of the water for me to purchase everything again.

Well I would not consider that the problem.  How many of the Xplane 9 aircraft work in Xplane 11.  The person who does Carenado for them even had the cheek to charge for conversions, though p3d conversion was free.  No more Carenado from my money due to that.

 

[simbol 5,818]

9 hours ago, harrry said:

Well I would not consider that the problem.  How many of the Xplane 9 aircraft work in Xplane 11.  The person who does Carenado for them even had the cheek to charge for conversions, though p3d conversion was free.  No more Carenado from my money due to that.

 

I feel I need to jump into this topic at this point as it is important to make users aware that it is not posible always to offer "free" updates / conversions when Laminar Research or Lockheed Martin perform fundamental changes to their platforms.

I understand many people don't know or understand the amount of work required to build an Airplane in 3DSmax, code all the gauges and software elements to make the Airplane behaves as closes as posible to the real world, or the amount of time it takes to build any add-on for Flying simulators being these "Freeware" or "Payware", but it is important to try to put the comment above in context:

• Imagine for a moment you are a hardware or software vendor provider.
• You created and manufactured a Joystick, Mouse or a Software Application, and at the time of the customer purchasing your product you stated is totally supported under Windows 7 (Windows 10 didn't exist).
• During multiple Windows 7 updates performed by Microsoft, you have been providing drivers / software updates for free to all your customers.
• Then Microsoft announces the end of support for Windows 7, it gives you access to Windows 10 (early access release before any end users can see it, not even the media knows about it existence and you are under NDAs with MS) when you test the private Windows 10 Beta operating systems you realise your mouse, Joystick or software will not work for this operating system as it requieres from you to scratch all your work and start again since 70% to 80% of your source code will need to be rebuild in order to allow the product to operate under Windows 10, this is due to the OS catching with new technology available.

Now what do you do? would you work for free all those months / years and not charge for anything for your hard work? imaging if in your current work being paid a salary for let's say drive a train, and your boss tells you:" Due to changes to company policies, your destination schedules have changed, you will need to cover for some slag the next month without receiving any remuneration, we have also deciding that you need also to work 4 hours of extra time each day for the next 10 months without any extra payment", would you like that?" you still have a mortgage to pay, utility bills to pay, etc. these factors also affect software developers plus their expenses for servers and developing infrastructure which are required in order to allow current customer support. 

So if you were the developer you will end up with the following options:

A) You drop the support of your product for the new platform, the effect of this is that your products will not be available for Windows 10, so you move on and create something new in the future or you cease to exist.

B) You work for free, this would cut your revenue income entirely as you already sold most of your copies under Windows 7, so your market share is almost fulfilled, there would not be not much new sales coming in the future, this decision effectively will be putting your business in the red line.

C) You perform the work and charge a fee for the software or hardware (firmware) upgrade to your current customers.

I will leave to each of you to think about this, what you would do in the developer position?, please put yourself in the correct perspective before thinking about it, take in consideration your current personal life situation, think it very well, you have a wife, you have parents that need care, your car just broke down last week, you have kids, you have a mortgage to pay, you have employees that need salaries to be paid, etc.

There is a reason why so many software vendors are giving customer the opportunity to acquire support maintenance contracts for a monthly / yearly fee, and such customers get new software releases entirely for free while other customers that don't wish to pay the software maintenance subscription will need to purchase again new software releases, and It is an interesting business models concept that many successful software houses in the market are adopting (Adobe, Symantec, Veritas, HP, Dell, IBM, etc.), now would you be willing to do the same for Flying Simulation Software? in my personal opinion I don't think this would be the case.

Kind Regards,
Simbol