New MS Flight Sim shown at E3

[ckyliu 1,749]

I guess we have different opinions then, I'm really not blown away by how P3Dv4 looks compared to FSX. With default textures there's no difference, with photo/ortho and Orbx Global base you see improved sharpness particularly at distance. It looks and feels the 13 years old that it is, it isn't even up to the graphic standards MS Flight achieved.

Edited June 18, 2019 by ckyliu

[eslader 1,787]

24 minutes ago, ckyliu said:

When did we get volumetric cloud in P3D!?

You're right, we didn't. Even the add-ons are obviously 2d - you can tell if you get in a fighter and point straight up at a cloud. It starts spinning like crazy because it doesn't know how to orient itself toward you.

 

26 minutes ago, ckyliu said:

Forgive for me playing devil's advocate but P3Dv4 looks precious little different to FSX

I do think it's funny that you said this and then went on to list a myriad of visual improvements in p3d that were not available in FSX. 😉

 

 

[Ray Proudfoot 8,980]

10 minutes ago, ckyliu said:

I guess we have different opinions then, I'm really not blown away by how P3Dv4 looks compared to FSX. With default textures there's no difference, with photo/ortho and Orbx Global base you see improved sharpness particularly at distance. It looks and feels the 13 years old that it is, it isn't even up to the graphic standards MS Flight achieved.

What resolution are you running? If 1920*1080 then you're not seeing all the high res stuff now being added to airports and how much the ground is improved with UHD.

[pmb 5,138]

12 minutes ago, ckyliu said:

I guess we have different opinions then, I'm really not blown away by how P3Dv4 looks compared to FSX. With default textures there's no difference, with photo/ortho and Orbx Global base you see improved sharpness particularly at distance. It looks and feels the 13 years old that it is, it isn't even up to the graphic standards MS Flight achieved.

The landclass system and textures have been reworked for some very early version of Prepar3d. There once was a detailed comparison between certain areas in default FSX, P3D (and I think some LC addons) available by Simmerhead. One of the results I recall was while FSX got assignment with all sorts of differing elements more sparse than in RW, default P3D tends to present the world more overcrowded than it is. Your choice.

I still have the link, but it doesn't work anymore.

Kind regards, MIchael

[ckyliu 1,749]

42 minutes ago, eslader said:

I do think it's funny that you said this and then went on to list a myriad of visual improvements in p3d that were not available in FSX. 😉

Haha well I wanted to be honest and genuine, I don't want to do LM a disservice. But they're really just small tweaks in the grand scheme of things, there's nothing that's overwhelming or revolutionary from where ESP was 13 years ago. Just small evolutions, implementing features most other game engines got 5+ years ago. I only really notice the extra shadows, everything else is easily missed.

31 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

What resolution are you running? If 1920*1080 then you're not seeing all the high res stuff now being added to airports and how much the ground is improved with UHD.

That's not how improved texture resolution works, it's not dependent on display resolution. I only run a few airports, mostly UK2000 Xtreme, most textures I see are REX4, Orbx and Horizon VFR Photographic - and close up they don't look much different between sims (but I did tweak my FSX cfg to exceed the normal 1024 texture size limit). But as it happens I'm running 1440p anyway. And watching footage from other games and simulators at that resolution, they look a lot better than P3D.

19 minutes ago, pmb said:

There once was a detailed comparison between certain areas in default FSX, P3D (and I think some LC addons) available by Simmerhead. One of the results I recall was while FSX got assignment with all sorts of differing elements more sparse than in RW, default P3D tends to present the world more overcrowded than it is.

I think that's just autogen object density, P3D is a bit more efficient and has a lot more virtual memory (VAS) to use than FSX, so it can draw more objects in the same space. The actual textures and landclass boundaries are the same afaik.

Edited June 18, 2019 by ckyliu

[Paraffin 2,197]

4 hours ago, irishsooner said:

If new flight Sim product is successful... Bring back Combat Flight Simulator!  Either that and allow us to shoot at giraffes. Sorry, so wrong. 

Great minds think alike. Not the giraffes, but one of the first things I thought of when seeing the trailer, was how the scenery model might be used for a spin-off Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator.

It would work as-is for a sim with a modern focus like DCS. Unfortunately, my personal preference in combat sims is WW1 and WW2, but maybe that fancy Azure tech could be used to alter the scenery enough for a plausible 20th Century battleground. A WW2 Pacific Theater game wouldn't require too much work for the islands, even if it was hand-edited for the time warp.

[vortex681 806]

9 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

A WW2 Pacific Theater game wouldn't require too much work for the islands, even if it was hand-edited for the time warp.

For most regions it would be quicker to create historic scenery from scratch based on how much has changed since WW2! Historic combat sims usually have a very limited area of operations and there are already a few very good options out there. Unlike civilian flight sims (which are generally not impressive, graphically, compared to modern games), there are a few really good combat sims around so I'm not sure that it would sell that well. Combat sims also tend to be more about the game engine and AI than the graphics.

Edited June 18, 2019 by vortex681

[Ray Proudfoot 8,980]

16 minutes ago, ckyliu said:

That's not how improved texture resolution works, it's not dependent on display resolution. I only run a few airports, mostly UK2000 Xtreme, most textures I see are REX4, Orbx and Horizon VFR Photographic - and close up they don't look much different between sims (but I did tweak my FSX cfg to exceed the normal 1024 texture size limit). But as it happens I'm running 1440p anyway. And watching footage from other games and simulators at that resolution, they look a lot better than P3D.

With the scenery addons you’ve mentioned I’m not surprised you don’t see much of a difference. And 2560*1440 is still 50% fewer pixels than 3840*2160.

Take FlyTampa Boston. Designed for 64-bit. High res textures really do make a difference. I also have Air India Group Ai and those models are optimised for 64-bit. They look every bit as good as the PMDG737. In comparison MT6 ones are grim.

Gary hasn’t created high res textures for UK2000 airports but that will come. Ultimate Terrain X, FTX Global and FS Global all enhance the default scenery. Photo scenery probably has a fixed resolution and will only look good from a certain altitude.

 But cockpit gauges look brilliant in UHD. That is where I see the biggest difference.

[ckyliu 1,749]

Increased texture resolution definitely helps when close up, but there are very few addons making the most of increases permitted by 64 bit as they are 32 bit ports. The core P3D engine isn't really adding much else, the textures are sharper but everything else still lags, in fact FSX could have addon textures that sharp 13 years ago so long as you only had a few to keep within the 4GB limit.

Default scenery enhancements are where I'm seeing the most improvement, given they crop up everywhere! The sharpness of runways, taxiyways and aprons up close, and distant scenery from altitude. I don't keep visiting the same airports and areas over and over, so I like the default to look good. I could easily pick out the improvements of a 4096 texture sheet on a 1024x768 display resolution, especially when standard stuff is so blurry!

Gauge sharpness when not zoomed right in is more dependent on your display resolution and anti-aliasing than it is on texture resolution increases enabled by 64 bit. I'm unsure if FSX supports 4K/UHD, but if it does you would get the same effect for the most part unless you really zoomed in, especially as mechanical gauges are modelled in 3D these days.

Undoubtedly your P3D will look better than mine. But at what cost, what fluidity, what time investment and what hardware? I understand you have a lot invested in P3D and you're happy with it so you don't want to move on again so soon. I'm sure you'll be happy with it for a few years yet at least.

But to me, P3D's sharper textures in some addons and additional shadows are really just makeup covering up the now aged face of FSX. And I'm also fed up of some developer's P3D pricing policies. P3Dv4 is definitely an improvement, I welcome it, I invested in it and I'm grateful to LM for enhancing FSX and bringing us 64 bit, but FS2020 looks to be delivering the much overdue major surgery and facelift that I don't think P3Dv5 will. But it's nice to know that should FS2020 flop we have a fall back.

Edited June 18, 2019 by ckyliu

[shivers9 1,174]

4 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

I would imagine anyone in business has the goal of trying to earn income?  With perhaps the exception of communism, people usually expect to get paid for work ... are you suggesting this is a bad thing?  The more complex and higher skill set required the more one usually gets paid ... thats why Doctors make more than Uber drivers.

I cant dictate to my doctor what I feel I want to pay him/her?  What would I base it on?  I have little to NO understanding of the knowledge required to be a doctor and I certainly don’t have PHD in the medical field.

I could however provide you details on what’s required to be a software engineer, but I certainly am not going to dictate the worth of other jobs/work I have zero practical experience in.

I see people try to associate value to something they have no idea or very limited information on what was involved in creating that something.

Cheers, Rob.

Rob....that is pretty deep coming from a member of the AVSIM Online Retirement Home!!😂

[eslader 1,787]

17 minutes ago, ckyliu said:

in fact FSX could have addon textures that sharp 13 years ago so long as you only had a few to keep within the 4GB limit.

But it largely didn't. One thing I've discovered in remembering graphics from years past is that my memory of them looks a whole lot better than they actually are. I went back to play the original Deus Ex awhile ago, and I remembered it as being this awesome, immersive world. And while the graphics were great for the time, after being spoiled by modern graphics they looked pretty godawful in my replay!

Just for fun I fired up FSX, which is still installed on my system but never used anymore, and the graphics don't look nearly as good as what I have going in p3d right now, despite me remembering them as looking better than they actually do.

 

 

[Ray Proudfoot 8,980]

@ckyliu, I very much doubt running FSX in UHD would last long. Over 8m pixels to manipulate means very little VAS remaining. There may be a way of working out the remaining memory but I don’t know how.

You really don’t need anti-aliasing in UHD. From memory I have just 2xMSAA, the minimum apart from off. It just helps a bit with speckling.

The new sim will have greatly improved ground scenery but we have no info on performance. Also, anyone switching can say goodbye to:-

FSUIPC and WideFS, Radar Contact or equivalent, GoFlight hardware working at the outset, PMDG and similar quality aircraft and Air India Ai. Active Sky may well be involved and maybe Aerosoft.

That is an enormous price to pay to switch over and one I won’t be making unless FSL make a version of Concorde specifically for that sim. Good luck to all the pioneers and trail blazers. 👍

[Ray Proudfoot 8,980]

18 minutes ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

I would imagine anyone in business has the goal of trying to earn income?  With perhaps the exception of communism, people usually expect to get paid for work ... are you suggesting this is a bad thing?  The more complex and higher skill set required the more one usually gets paid ... thats why Doctors make more than Uber drivers.

Cheers, Rob.

Rob, the reason I used that phrase is because of how 3rd party developers were treated with Flight. I don’t recall the precise details but the reason so few entered into partnership with Microsoft is because Microsoft wanted a bigger chunk from a sale than the poor old developer would get.

Now it’s possible that Microsoft will rethink that strategy and be less demanding. But you also have to consider the cost of running those servers with 2 Petabytes of data on them and the likely demand if there’s no local storage option. It won’t be cheap and they would quite rightly want payment for it. I don’t have a problem with that.

But I would have a problem with a subscription since I have no interest in any other leisure software from Microsoft so would possibly be paying for things I wouldn’t use.

Buying a licence to install P3D is still my favoured option and as long as LM do that I’m happy.

 

[ckyliu 1,749]

Agreed, much will depend on how fluid MS make it, if it's hideously inefficient like FSX is and they've focused on a big feature list without optimising, then that might kill it for years until hardware catches up.

But as regards addons, it's always been the same with a new flight sim version not supporting them initially, particularly when P3Dv4 came out. However most key addons had been ported across within 6 months, and if FS2020 "takes off" the trail blazers will get the developers porting pretty quickly, as it's easy money for them (relatively speaking), provided MS don't get greedy with them! We don't all have to switch on Day Zero (and you could run the two side by side), indeed I started out with P3Dv4.1. And switching was a big expensive hassle that meant foregoing some of my favourite aircraft (PMDG I'm looking at your J41...), so FS2020 will have to prove to the our community it's worth that price of entry.

Unlike some speculators here, having looked at the video some more I think it's a heavily rebuilt ESP and whilst scenery addons might not port well, I'm hoping aircraft will after some polish. Not sure I'll miss ActiveSky much if the weather lives up to the promise of the trailer video!

Edited June 18, 2019 by ckyliu

[irrics 1,517]

Regarding “switchers”, Let’s also keep our eye on the ball of simply getting market share from people that aren’t even in the game anymore.

I fly in real life multiple times per week but I don’t use any Sims anymore as I’m just totally bored with them all. 

I am sure Microsoft sees a huge opportunity to get new people and bring old people back and those groups probably dramatically exceed the market size of just switchers anyhow.