FSPS : FFTF DYNAMIC P3Dv5 Released

[NickBo 102]

Pete, I have to ask because I'm surprised by your statements to be honest. If there was a bug reported in FSUIPC where a typo in the code makes reading from offset X actually return data from offset Y. Would you:

A) Investigate, fix, test, and release a patch or update

or

B) Ignore all bug reports for 10 years and rely on another 3rd party developer to create a payware software that hijacks the offset reading function and redirects to the right offset.

Any developer taking pride in their software would choose A of course. In Prepar3D we're so used to B that we think it's the normal thing to do and we pay for it with a smile on our face thinking we just bought a new gearbox. Anyone who thinks that this isn't the way it should be (e.g. me), is considered annoying, stupid and incompetent. I find it a bit strange and I can't think of any other software where users would accept this.

[AnkH 2,267]

You do not get, don't you? The sim is perfectly smooth and provides by far enough FPS when using without any addons. Now explain me again, why it is the fault of LM if people stuff their sim with addons resulting in bad performance? I mean, my P3Dv5 installation is about 50GB. Now, with all addons installed it is close to 600GB. 550GB or 11x more stuff just addons. They need to work together, they all have their individual bugs and sometimes they even depend on each other to run correctly.

FFTF Dynamic is not a tool to make the default sim run smooth, whether or not you are capable of understanding this. It is a tool that allows a heavily modified simulator with tons of addons to run smooth. And as such, it is worth every penny.

Besides that you do even not use your so called definition of bug consequently yourself. ATC, clouds and missing AI traffic are no bugs. Neither are outdated navdata, airport data etc.

So, stop your rant or at least put some thinking behind that it makes sense. Otherwise it is just a non-reflected rant that serves nobody.

[Pete Dowson 558]

40 minutes ago, NickBo said:

Pete, I have to ask because I'm surprised by your statements to be honest. If there was a bug reported in FSUIPC ...

You appear to have missed the point. I was commenting on your rather word not allowed assertion that it couldn't be more than 30 lines of code and therefore didn't justify the price.

As far as whether Dynamic FFTF should be needed at all, that is an entirely different point, and another part of your post. I agree that for many folks it isn't needed at all. In my case I am using two 4K projectors with a 200 degree FOV which needs two wide angle views (windows) from P3D. This is supported well by P3D (unlike MSFS so far), but at a cost in performance.  I also want to use Orbx True Earth sceneries, lots of autogen buildings, detailed airports and a realistic level of AI -- and at London Heathrow that amounts to several hundred aircraft.

This you may think is overloading the Sim, but P3D5 now, at last, does support such a load, still managing to give me 25 fps (my VSync). However, to manage this I need an FFTF of 0.01. When flying, however, this value can easily cause blurring as the relevant parts understandably can't keep up with such a small portion of frame time. FFTF fixes this by automatically raising the FFTF value as I climb.

To sum up, Dynamic FFTF allows me to load up the sim far more than I otherwise could.

If you are happy with P3D with no addons then that's good for you, but a lot of us do like to enhance our simming experience.

Anyway, that's my final word in this thread. It is pointless saying anything further.

Pete

 

[NickBo 102]

42 minutes ago, AnkH said:

Besides that you do even not use your so called definition of bug consequently yourself. ATC, clouds and missing AI traffic are no bugs. Neither are outdated navdata, airport data etc.

Alright, let's call those issues seriously misleading marketing instead of bugs then, because i paid to get what was included in the list of features. They did not market it as squared clouds flashing in front of buildings on the ground and they did not market it as having flying cars at 35000ft and all the other good stuff.

This is getting off topic but let me give you a more clear example. In stock V5 many of us see these cute little autogen buildings allover the runways and other places where they shouldn't be. I consider this a bug. Me and many others have reported them to LM. What was their response? Nothing, absolutely nothing. We reported it again and again with the same result. Just as most other known bugs.

This is not my biggest problem though. Do you know what the standard response from the Prepar3D community is? Pretty much the same as in this thread.

"This is to be expected. You must buy an addon airport which has an autogen exclusion area defined."

And they call me crazy? For not wanting buildings on the runways? I guess you're right, I don't get it.

 

[d.tsakiris 418]

A building on a runway in a (successful) standard installation is a bug. They happen, and it's probable most of them will be corrected by LM. Show me a piece of software that doesn't have bugs. But that's not what FFTF is about. It doesn't rectify a bug, it enhances performance.

[NickBo 102]

You're not getting my point. I can accept bugs. I never ever said I expect anything to be bug free. What I did say is that the right thing to do is to report bugs to the developer who can then fix them. This is not what's happening in Prepar3d. We see a plethora of bugs being reported to LM over and over and over again for years and years without ever getting fixed. It has happened for so long now that the community actually think that a good solution to this is to buy a ton of 3rd party software that does little more than fix bugs or implement basic functionality that we already paid for. I know it feels good to pay a few dollars and see a problem go away but sometime you need to stop and think about what's really going on.

The buildings on the runways will likely not go away. Why? Because the majority of the community think that the few of us who report such bugs are stupid for not buying hundreds of addon airports just to get rid of the buildings. "That's just the way it is", they say. "That's why we have 3rd party developers", they say. Same thing with all other bugs. If we don't question this it will just keep getting worse and your wallet and flying experience will suffer.

[NickBo 102]

35 minutes ago, d.tsakiris said:

But that's not what FFTF is about. It doesn't rectify a bug, it enhances performance.

If it's a known fact that a simple value within the sim can be adjusted to enhance the performance greatly, don't you think that the developers of that software should take the 15 minutes or so that it takes to implement that instead of deribelately releasing a non-smooth sim over and over again where we have to pay (multiple times) to have this known fix implemented?

 

 

[Achilles Philippopoulos 115]

FFTF 0.33 works just perfect for out of the box product. If you wanna have extra sceneries or advanced aircrafts that make your sim more beautiful and professional then you have to pay the cost of performance. So, you have 3 solutions

1.) Buy new hardware.

2.) Set FFTF by your own (But it will be static for all cases -> Stutters or blurries depending on cpu load)

3.)  A thing that adjust something, somehow, to keep things balanced.

Lockheed Martin is not able to know if you gonna install a professional scenery or a medium quality scenery with bad performance or even a well designed model. 

As you stated an example with a car, I would simply say that adding extras to your car makes it more heavy. There are extras with low weight but expensive and heavy weight ones but cheaper.

So, the market gives you plenty of options to choose. Then its simply up to you. 

 

[vcarlo 529]

15 hours ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

I’ve got it set at .34

What happens up to 2?! 

If we can get back on track, I would like to hear from the developer regarding the above question.  Thanks for a great product ! 

[AnkH 2,267]

47 minutes ago, NickBo said:

 instead of deribelately releasing a non-smooth sim over and over again where we have to pay (multiple times) to have this known fix implemented?

How many times one has to explain to you that LM did not release a sim that does not run smooth but your addons are responsible for this? Unbelievable...

[Achilles Philippopoulos 115]

3 minutes ago, vcarlo said:

If we can get back on track, I would like to hear from the developer regarding the above question.  Thanks for a great product ! 

Oups. Sorry. I missed that.

Actually I found that there is no limit to FFTF (I suppose the range is 0 to 256). I did some tests with value over 1 and I recorded some small increase at texture loading. Of cource the frames dropped a lot compared to value up to 1.

Probably at the near future, we will be able to use values over 1. So, I just implemented 🙂

[David Roch 1,982]

Super tool, very correct pricing for the benefit, thanks Achilles!

[Bob Scott 7,721]

4 hours ago, NickBo said:

If it's a known fact that a simple value within the sim can be adjusted to enhance the performance greatly, don't you think that the developers of that software should take the 15 minutes or so that it takes to implement that instead of deribelately releasing a non-smooth sim over and over again where we have to pay (multiple times) to have this known fix implemented?

The FFTF value can, in fact, be adjusted in default P3D, via a config file setting.  What FFTF adds is the ability to make real-time dynamic changes to the value.

The base sim doesn't really need dynamic FFTF adjustments to run smoothly.  I remember reading something Phil Taylor wrote when the FFTF setting was first discussed in FSX...that it was considered by the programmers to be unnecessary and superfluous in a multi-core CPU since it only affected the workload on the core running the main thread.  Setting a fixed FFTF was a design decision, not a bug.

The utility is not a fix, as has been pointed out to you multiple times.  It's an enhancement...one that's not necessary in the base product.  It's like the shocks in a pickup truck...they work as-designed in day-to-day use, but if you put a 4000 lb cabover camper on it, you may want to add air shocks for a smoother ride.  It'll still carry the load, but not as smoothly without the enhancement.

 

[Noel 4,503]

9 hours ago, NickBo said:

Ok, let's say this software is really advanced and required years of research and development.

That was not the main point though. The point was, if I buy a brand new car I expect all four wheels to spin.

I shouldn't have to tow the brand new car to another shop just to buy an expensive tool that will make the fourth wheel spin. Especially if I just did this a few months ago with my other brand new car. And the one before that. The car manufacturer should FIX their product. But if we as buyers just happily accept to get a 3 wheel car every time, why should the manufacturer bother to fix it? Nothing will improve.

In normal software you turn to the developer of that product to fix bugs. In Prepar3D on the other hand we always ask which 3rd party developer can sell us a fix. The fact that it seems to be a controversial opinion that the developer should fix their own bugs kind of explains why we still have all those well known 15 year old FS9/FSX bugs in Prepar3D.

Pay for extra features, yes. Pay to fix bugs and flaws, no way

 

I know what you're saying Nick but I think it doesn't apply to P3D as it might a 'game' title because LM is not particularly sensitive to the needs of non-commercial users which is why it's important to not entertain yourself w/ P3D because as you know it's strictly a training platform.  In fact, whenever I start to be entertained by using P3D I just simply shut it down and wait for the feeling of entertainment to pass then I'm good to fire it up again and commence to learning.  

Do I need this applet, the FFTF gizmo?  I use P3D 4.5, using the UNLIMITED/Vsync to 30Hz refresh, and all seems real good w/ my system w/ or w/o HT enabled.   What could the FFTF gizmo do for me?  I have clamored for decades for a realtime modulator of load.  I'm guessing this DOES NOT impact the more GPU dependent Lighting sliders, correct?  I always that what FSX/P3D needed was an app that modulates load based on realtime CPU and GPU loads, and that idea would have helped every single user of either platform since day 1.  Imagine you're flying into something which starts to stress your GPU and in the background the engine down-regulates for example cloud/terrain shadowing, reflections, or whatever to maintain a GPU load not >90% at all times.  For some weird reason it never happened by the sim devs nor no creative 3rd party devs.

Edited May 13, 2020 by Noel
Added a question

[ark 1,291]

6 hours ago, Achilles Philippopoulos said:

So, the market gives you plenty of options to choose. Then its simply up to you. 

Will the updated FFTF for P3Dv5HF1 be sent to stores like SimMarket from whom I originally purchased FFTF?

Thx,

Al

Edited May 13, 2020 by ark