P3D v5 Land Sea and Sky

[Biggles2010 343]

Prior to deciding on purchase I have read every v5 post on Avsim, studied the screenshots and viewed all the videos posted on YouTube up to now.

Accepting that the performance seems to be somewhat better, I find the visual appearance quite disappointing. Yes I know we all use add ons, but some basic features do not cut it. and the effect is more arcade game than serious flight simulator. I can see why the pre release shots were all done in a heavy haze.

Land textures are what I expected, with an obvious need for replacement if any kind of realism is wanted. Some sea textures are so bad it's hard to understand why they are still being used. The 'bathroom window glass' effect is so out of scale it looks silly. A 30 metre high swell on a river would surely be unusual enough for it to be noticed pre launch.

To me, the worst effect is the cloud textures, Having volumetric clouds does not compensate for clouds that look unreal. The fair weather cumulus look like out of focus photos of a bundle of cotton fibre, like the old Rex soft clouds, but more fuzzy. But this same 'out of focus' process has been applied to all the clouds. In real life many clouds have at least some sharply defined edges, which are often highlighted by the sun, creating fantastic visual effects. This is missing in all the v5 images seen so far. They do not begin to compare with the old Flight Environment X cloud textures, which the older simmers might remember. And Active Sky will not solve this because the problem is with the textures, not just their distribution.

[1st fltsimguy 466]

That is exactly what I think I'm seeing when reading the voluminous posts.  I'm not sure I want to fuss with all the re-installs and upgrades at this time.

[Ezra 29]

I`m sad to hear this. I want the latest offering to be good because I was planning a revisit ( I uninstalled P3Dv4 four months ago) until MSFS is released. I just grew tired of poor performance with enthusiast hardware.

It looks like silky smooth flying @ 4K in DCS will remain for now. It would be nice to fly in my region again though. B.C. Canada. I hope they get it sorted out. I can wait.

Cheers.

Edited April 16, 2020 by Ezra