Folks, I am having since installing from 'virgin', and reapplying one by one, all my purchases over the years for FSX/P3D (X),  SUCH A BLAST!   Over the last couple of days...I have reworked my 'out-take' on every and all my flight sims.  What I mean by that...is simply this.  What do you want to do today from the moment you turn, or flip on the battery(s), to the time you land, and flip off the battery(s)  THAT (if you have a few flight sim titles all sharing your system hard disk(s)....should point you to a particular sim that shines for that flight parameter, perhaps over all the others.

Man..they are all good..all of 'em...

Human Nature, is that we tend to pick 'favorites'...and tout, or support mostly only genre.  Myself included in the masses...but today...today...I have taken a new bent....not ONE OF THEM...is 'better'...overall, as a platform....than the others...from my FS9, to FSX:Steam, P3D4.5x, Xplane 11.41---none of them TRULY, are any better overall....they are just different platforms, that can give you a partcularly better 'type' of flight, perhaps over the other.  I imagine that 2020 MSFS will be that as well, DESPITE, all the severe eye candy and promised features.   Could it be the cumulative Grand Daddy of 'em all?  Could be....maybe....but here I was not flying my P3D 4.4x for months....and honestly,  in now flying P3D 4.5x, the smoothest and best over-all MSFS-typed version yet to grace my system...I'm smiling like a banshee...with the sim full throttle Graphics out...getting 28-32 FPS over most of Orbx 'everything'...and even now...this version puts the holee (lol)-grail FPS moniker on the back burner, or maybe yet...booted out the front door. I can go as low as 10-12 FPS, on one second FPS to screen declines...and yet...not one burp, twitch, stop/go of the animation.  

Not so much in eye-candy features between P3D 4.4.x and 4.5x...but....performance?   HUGE! Huge!......!!!!!    

This guy suggests that if you are still running anything OTHER than v4.5x...that you make the leap soon.  I did it because I had to...and thought, what could be so 'great' about one .decimal version update.?  I found out....by installing it.

In final...having a blast....P3D 4.5x runs superbly...everything looks great, and now it will be run regularly rotated, amongst Xplane and FS9 (still the premier flight sim for flying at the FL's and inside a tube!)

Cheers...and again, Happy and Safe New Year to all!

 

Edited January 6, 20206 yr by Sesquashtoo

Is it a better sim, or are you just benefiting from a clean install? 

Also, your opening statement nullifies your thesis; specifically, you stated your sim is great because ‘you reapplied, one-by-one, all the the add-ons you purchased over the years.’

A great sim wouldn’t require “years of additional  add-ons”?  Moreover, it shouldn’t take days to reinstall a word not allowed sim 

I agree that all sims are similar; in terms of modern platforms, they all stink.  I’m done with the notion of spending hundreds/thousand of dollars on outdated software.  I’m done spending days to update/reinstall my sim.  This paradigm should no longer be celebrated...a quick load time and stable environment should be expected!  I’m ready for this era of flight simulation to be over. 

I hope MS kills our current flight sim model!  

I’m glad your happy but Im done perpetuating the notion that any of these sims are any good.  In terms of modern performance, they all stink. 
 

if I was on 4.4, I’d stay on 4.4 until MSFS is released...

 

 

@kingm56 you can rest assured that any new sim is going to *require* add-ons too, at least for the people around here.  People here are super-enthusiasts, and if they can find a way to improve a stock sim, they'll do it.   And there you have your dozens of add-ons.  It's the nature of the beast.

56 minutes ago, Mace said:

@kingm56 you can rest assured that any new sim is going to *require* add-ons too, at least for the people around here.  People here are super-enthusiasts, and if they can find a way to improve a stock sim, they'll do it.   And there you have your dozens of add-ons.  It's the nature of the beast.

I concur, Mace; they’re will be a need for add-on aircraft, utilities and maybe airports.  However, we shouldn’t need to purchase/install 20+ add-ons to achieve an environment that still looks dated.  In my case, I have the following installed:

 

ORBX:

FTX Global

FTX Vector

5x Regions

3x OpenLC

Global Buildings

Global Trees

PILOTS

FS Global Ultimate

REX:

World Wide Airports HD

Sky Force

Environment Force

HiFi:

AS16

TOGA:

ENVTEX

This list doesn’t include the multiple airports and city scenes I own; think about it, we ‘need’ 20+ add-ons just to improve the environment?  P3D has been around for a decade; yet, we still require the exact environmental add-ons required 15 years ago?  In fact, all these add-ons are compatible with FSX.  This needs to change, folks!  I hope MSFS is the cure to this ridiculous paradigm.  To be clear, I’m not concerned about the money, I’m concerned about time.  I have spent way too much time loading and configuring my sim; the latest rebuild came after the ORBX Central V4 disaster.  In short, I’m not going to celebrate any sim that fails to deliver an inclusive, stable platform…

Less is more.

ive found that having just the  Bare essentials

for instance

payware weather/ textures 

Payware land class/ mesh 

a few payware airports and aircraft 
That are regularly updated and compatible with v4

My sim is running quite smooth.

Mike
 

 

 

Great advice, Mike!  

The op mentioned all current sims being useable because the difference between them isn’t huge. 
But once 2020 is released - already it’s light years ahead of them all put together - nobody will use the previous platforms. 
 

Plus it will make avsim a nicer place to visit only having one forum section (2020) as the others won’t be needed. 

3 hours ago, kingm56 said:

I’m glad your happy but Im done perpetuating the notion that any of these sims are any good.  In terms of modern performance, they all stink. 

if I was on 4.4, I’d stay on 4.4 until MSFS is released...

Now, now...you've forgotten One Simulator we already have on the market.  And its the only one which is currently available with a superb and real modern graphics engine, sublime flight dynamics included.  It blasts away everything else in terms of performance and smoothness; in VR as well.

Here we go:  Aerofly FS 2

And I'm in hight doubt that MSFS2020 will ever reach this kind of performance; this upcoming "new" sim will be backwards compatible in some areas according to its developers, so it can't be a completely new MS engine.

All the best and stay happy

Edited January 7, 20206 yr by KBUR
English=n.m.m.t.

1 hour ago, KBUR said:

Now, now...you've forgotten One Simulator we already have on the market.  And its the only one which is currently available with a superb and real modern graphics engine, sublime flight dynamics included.  It blasts away everything else in terms of performance and smoothness; in VR as well.

Here we go:  Aerofly FS 2

And I'm in hight doubt that MSFS2020 will ever reach this kind of performance; this upcoming "new" sim will be backwards compatible in some areas according to its developers, so it can't be a completely new MS engine.

All the best and stay happy

AFS2 has about 10% of the overhead and fidelity of both P3D and XP so not a really apples to apples comparison.

4 hours ago, kingm56 said:

I concur, Mace; they’re will be a need for add-on aircraft, utilities and maybe airports.  However, we shouldn’t need to purchase/install 20+ add-ons to achieve an environment that still looks dated.  In my case, I have the following installed:

 

ORBX:

FTX Global

FTX Vector

5x Regions

3x OpenLC

Global Buildings

Global Trees

PILOTS

FS Global Ultimate

REX:

World Wide Airports HD

Sky Force

Environment Force

HiFi:

AS16

TOGA:

ENVTEX

This list doesn’t include the multiple airports and city scenes I own; think about it, we ‘need’ 20+ add-ons just to improve the environment?  P3D has been around for a decade; yet, we still require the exact environmental add-ons required 15 years ago?  In fact, all these add-ons are compatible with FSX.  This needs to change, folks!  I hope MSFS is the cure to this ridiculous paradigm.  To be clear, I’m not concerned about the money, I’m concerned about time.  I have spent way too much time loading and configuring my sim; the latest rebuild came after the ORBX Central V4 disaster.  In short, I’m not going to celebrate any sim that fails to deliver an inclusive, stable platform…

I have nearly all those as well, having purchased over the years.

I completely disagree with your take.

I think the performance and look of my sim now is as lifelike as it can be running on my system, not dated at all (if it were truly dated we would still be landing on black and white blocks representing runways). I have no supposed waste of time updating/re-installing: Orbx central takes care of that automatically for its products as do nearly all the others. Even upgrading P3D itself is quick and easy  And the 5 minutes Navigraph requires once a month, I think I can manage that. 

I don't waste any time re-configuring, it is where I want it.

I am sorry you had problems with Central v4 ("ORBX Central V4 disaster ") , for me it just seamlessly installed, updated itself and has done nothing untoward whatsoever, certainly no disaster .

The only time I have had to re-install was for a hardware failure and with a decent backup system, that was really quite painless.

PS It is not my intention to minimise any problems you may have had, merely to say that there is another view which is not so negative.

Ian Harrison

 

Ian, I appreciate your counter-point and well articulated response.  However, If I may, I disagree with your premise, which is to compare today to yesteryear flight simulations.  Obviously, things have advanced from those days of landing on black and white blocks :).  However, if you compare our genera to other gaming platforms, you will notice how woefully antiquated flight sim has become.  MSFS has the potential to eliminate that gap and thwart the need to acquire, update and manage 30+ add-ons to update a sim environment that's gone unaltered for 2 decades and 4 major P3D releases.  Again, I truly appreciate the counter-point; lets revisit this topic when the new sim is released; I bet your perspective changes :).  Have a good day, Ian!    

3 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Yes, lets! ... sorry but if you're being serious about "unaltered" then I must assume you haven't used P3D V4.5 at all. 

Why do you think you will not need 60+ add-ons for MFS?  Microsoft's 200 resource team can't possibly deliver what 1000+ add-on developers have delivered for P3D ... even Microsoft have admitted that.

Cheers, Rob.

I am not going to argue about the MFS simulator, since very few know what is coming.

All I will say in support of Rob is that cars have been around for decades and have steadily developed to where we are now: almost self -driving but do you see any fewer spares and accessory shops? People still buy better sound systems, more lights,tinted windows etc. to customise. Why should our flight sims be any different?

Ian

I think this is an existential argument 

Been simming for years -always enjoyed new items 

But there is a Faustian price to pay 

As you continually add items the sim gets bloated and slow plus older versions of planes and scenery etc start to corrupt the base sim

A new install is eventually required-don’t reinstall those old planes and scenery !

I keep a FSX setup for one or two planes and scenery that won’t work in P3Dv 4.5# -Tipella and Aerosoft Katana D20 etc

When to bite the bullet and reinstall is simmers constant problem especially when we have so much “stuff” but there comes a day and a new install is so fine till it all starts again!

xxd09

 

6 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Yes, lets! ... sorry but if you're being serious about "unaltered" then I must assume you haven't used P3D V4.5 at all. 

Why do you think you will not need 60+ add-ons for MFS?  Microsoft's 200 resource team can't possibly deliver what 1000+ add-on developers have delivered for P3D ... even Microsoft have admitted that.

Cheers, Rob.

Your assertion is incorrect; P3D v4.5 is my main simulator, which is why I made the statement pertaining to the environmental add-ons. Is it your contention that P3D's weather, mesh, textures and airports are vastly improved over FSX?  Clearly they're not, which is why we 'need' ORBX, HiFi, Pilots, REX and on and on.  I'm aware that LM made several changes/updates to allow said add-ons distributors to improve their products; however, the environmental is pretty much unaltered from FSX.  With satellite data, edge computing and AI, MS can/(have ?) truly fabricate an accurate, living world.  If you 'can fly over your house', you won't need landclasses, regions, mesh or vector data.  Thus, the environmental add-ons might become obsolete, which should be celebrated.

To be clear, it's not my position that all add-ons should/will be eliminated; I suspect they'll be plenty of demand for aircraft, utilities and airport (maybe) add-ons.  Concerning the latter, MS has stated "they like their default airports", which suggest they'll be superior to FSX, I mean P3D default airports (they're the same, right?).

If I read your post correctly, it sounds like you want to perpetuate the status-quo (i.e. the need need for hundreds of add-ons)?  My question is why?  Don't you want a sim you can simply fire up without first needing to launch 10 applications?  Don't you want a sim that doesn't require applications (e.g. simstarter/orbx central) to manage your applications?   In short, the new MSFS has more potential than anything P3D or Xplane has released; everyone with access to the sim has stated it's not over-hyped...it's as good as marketed. Only time will tell if that's true...

 

I continually have trouble keeping track of LM releases and add-on compatibility.  Can anyone give me an idea if most current add-ons are updated to 4.5 and how serious an incompatibility issue you get running 4.5 now ?  

For a while in 2019 it seemed I had to first decide which add-ons I wanted to run, and that determined which P3D version I needed.  Some add-ons were compatible only with 4.4 or higher, and some only with 4.5 or higher, while I also had a bunch that only worked with 4.3 or lower.     

I am still using V 4.3x because of this. I absolutely don't claim to have the correct view here but welcome being educated :-)

thanx in advance.

Jeff