Warnings on 4.4 Aircraft?

[LTCSZ 16]

I am currently in the process of downloading P3D V4.4 (Early Christmas Present!)...I know nothing about the program, other than it is supposed to beat FSX hands down...I have been trying to learn what I need to know on some of the Forums, and I have been seeing a lot of warnings about using non 4.4 approved/certified aircraft and scenery...Even some warnings not to use anything below 4.4 at all...Could someone clarify this to me and perhaps recommend a few freeware planes/scenery that are 4.4 ready? Sure would appreciate it! Thanks...

[Jim Young 2,356]

Aircraft developed for P3Dv3 will not work in P3Dv4 mostly because the gauges are not compatible.  You are moving from a 32-bit application to a 64-bit application and that is a major difference.

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

57 minutes ago, LTCSZ said:

I am currently in the process of downloading P3D V4.4 (Early Christmas Present!)...I know nothing about the program, other than it is supposed to beat FSX hands down...I have been trying to learn what I need to know on some of the Forums, and I have been seeing a lot of warnings about using non 4.4 approved/certified aircraft and scenery...Even some warnings not to use anything below 4.4 at all...Could someone clarify this to me and perhaps recommend a few freeware planes/scenery that are 4.4 ready? Sure would appreciate it! Thanks...

It is not V4.4. that is the issue, but as Jim posted,  V4 vs V3.

If you look in the forums, you will see that many of your FSX planes will work in P3DV4.  Sometimes with sound or individual gauge issues, but there are often fixes..

All Orbx scenery can be installed in P3DV4.

Edited December 5, 2018 by Bert Pieke

[Chock 17,769]

Strictly speaking, since P3D 4.4 is only a couple of weeks old at this point, there aren't actually that many add-ons at all which are 'officially' compatible with it. Nevertheless, you will find that many add-ons - in fact the vast majority - which are not 'officially' for P3D will still work in it, and plenty of add-ons which are listed as being only compatible with much earlier versions of P3D will work just fine too, even given that some of these were, theoretically at least, only written for a 32 bit program rather than a 64 bit one.

Much of this depends upon how the developer of any add-on went about creating their add-on. More specifically, and as noted by others, it is generally how the developer went about creating the gauges for an add-on aeroplane. It can sometimes be tricky to install these, since many installers will demand that they find a P3D exe file in order to continue installatkion, and so plenty of people will keep an FSX installation on their computer so that they can work around this; installing an add-on into FSX and then either pointing P3D to the installation files, or, copying and pasting the installed files to P3D. There can be some display issues, and sound issues with doing this, but if you are happy to move files about on your PC and willing to accept that you might conceivably mess up your main program install and - just possibly - have to reinstall it, then there isn't much to lose in trying it.

A good example of this would be the procedure for installing an FSX only aeroplane into P3D if the installer insists on only installing to FSX. What you could do is the following: Install the aeroplane into FSX on your hard drive, then navigate to the Airplane folder of FSX, copy that aeroplane's folder, then paste it into the equivalent P3D Airplane folder, then do the same procedure with any specific sounds, gauges and FX files from FSX into P3D. Quite often this will work, but you have to bear in mind that when doing this, you are going outside of what the developers agreed to support, so if doing this messes up your P3D and makes it unstable, or gives you some warnings upon starting up, or it perhaps refuses to even fire up at all, then, as noted, you might have to undo all you have done in order to fix things, and there is no guarantee that you won't have messed something up in doing this, so you're doing this kind of thing entirely at your own risk and cannot expect any support from either Lockheed Martin or the product's developer in such a circumstance.

Having said that, the chances are that if you do this sort of thing, it will either 'work or it won't' and you'll be no worse off, simply being left with the minor task of deleting the files you added which there is no point in keeping there because they don't work.

I've got quite a few things which are theoretically not for P3D V4.4 working in it just fine despite not being officially compatible with it. For example, Aeroplane Heaven/Just Flight's wonderful F-111 Aardvark is only officially compatible with FSX and P3D v1 (which are of course both 32 bit versions of the sim), but I was able to manually point the installer for it at P3D V4.4's folder and it installed just fine and works just fine in the sim too, although one thing it does do is on the aircraft selection screen (and this is to do with how it was compiled), is display the aircraft quite small and not centered in the 3D window, and there is nothing which can be done about that, but it's not really a big deal when it comes to flying it in the sim.

 

[LTCSZ 16]

Thank you for the excellent reply to my post...Do you know of any freeware "fully compatible" 4.4 aircraft? I am mainly interested in general aviation planes...Also, while I do not want to clutter up my brand new installation, I wonder if you could recommend any global scenery enhancement that would be a worthwhile addon? Thanks again,

Steve in Kansas

 

[Bob Scott 7,720]

Generally-speaking, if the gauges are coded in xml (often found compressed into .cab files) then they are likely to also work in P3D v4.x.  Gauges that are compiled (.gau or .dll) have to be explicitly compiled into 64-bit executables, so FSX/P3D v1-3 aircraft with 32-bit compiled gauges are unlikely to work in v4.x

As far as regional/global scenery enhancements, I use Orbx FTX Global (global texture replacements), Orbx Open Landclass (regional landclass replacements, currently available for North America, South America, and/or Europe), and Ultimate Terrain X (UTX) which is regional vector scenery (roads, railroads, coastlines, lakes, rivers etc), available for CONUS, Canada, Carribean/Central America, and/or Europe.

Regards

[Indy511 686]

@LTCSZ
The Cessna 172 I carried over from FSX works fine in P3Dv4.4. Only the N number shows in white instead of black.

Edited December 6, 2018 by BillS511

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

46 minutes ago, LTCSZ said:

Thank you for the excellent reply to my post...Do you know of any freeware "fully compatible" 4.4 aircraft? I am mainly interested in general aviation planes...Also, while I do not want to clutter up my brand new installation, I wonder if you could recommend any global scenery enhancement that would be a worthwhile addon? Thanks again,

Steve in Kansas

 

I would suggest buying Orbx Global and the Alabeo Seminole.

If you like real world avionics, add a GTN750, either from Flight1 or Reality XP (currently on sale..)

There is much to like in P3D 

[Chock 17,769]

3 hours ago, LTCSZ said:

Thank you for the excellent reply to my post...Do you know of any freeware "fully compatible" 4.4 aircraft? I am mainly interested in general aviation planes...Also, while I do not want to clutter up my brand new installation, I wonder if you could recommend any global scenery enhancement that would be a worthwhile addon? Thanks again,

Steve in Kansas

 

As with most things in life, you tend to get what you pay for and this is no less true for flight sims, so whilst there are plenty of freebies out there (see Avsim's file library for example), the chances are that you'll get more joy out of payware stuff. This is not to say that there are not any decent freebies out there, but as you can probably understand, the amount of time people can spend on developing stuff without any remuneration for their efforts tends to mean that the better stuff will generally come at some cost. Having said that, rather than recommend something, I will suggest that you keep an eye out on Avsim's main page and it won't be too long before you see some freebie stuff worthy of your attention showing up.

It's worth noting however, that many of the default aeroplanes in P3D were originally payware products, so there is no need to dismiss these out of hand; at one point people were paying for them.