Interested in buying Prepar3d.

[Yuval350 2]

Hello everyone!😁

I bought X-Plane 11 about a year ago, I have been flying ever since but except for the Zibo I was very disappointed. I do not like how X-Plane 11 looks and I'm Not happy at all about the aircraft addons of X-Plane 11. My main interest in flying is commercial aviation. I always looked at P3D streams with envy, I just love the crispiness of the graphics (I'm sorry if you don't understand what I mean) I also like how P3D looks a little dark all the time. but of course what I'm really interested in P3D is the aircraft addons and the better weather. I ordered a Honeycomb yoke a few days ago It is currently on It's way. I know that Microsoft will be releasing MSFS2020 soon but I am still thinking about buying P3D as well.

1. If I decide that I do want to buy P3D, do I buy v5, or v4 because I looked as some videos of v5 and for It looks more similar to X-Plane 11 and that's is something I deeply don't want.

2. Does the Honeycomb yoke work well with P3D?

3. Will my PC be able to handle P3D and the addons that I'm thinking about buying. and do you think I need any other addons?

(PMDG 777, Active sky, Orbx Global base, GSX).

(Windows 10, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 ARMOR 8GB OC MSI, 16GB RAM, Intel i7- 4770 3.40GHz, 220GB on SSD).

Thank you very much.

Yuval😃✈️

[NightOfDreams 370]

I bought P3D last month despite FS2020 supposedly on the horizon. There's no guarantee FS2020 will even come out this year and I've been really wanting to upgrade from FSX. Totally worth it.

Edited May 12, 2020 by NightOfDreams

[wwdavis 44]

MSFS2021....

[vrdubin6 184]

1 hour ago, Yuval350 said:

1. If I decide that I do want to buy P3D, do I buy v5, or v4 because I looked as some videos of v5 and for It looks more similar to X-Plane 11 and that's is something I deeply don't want. 

v5. It looks very similar to v4 if you use the legacy weather/atmosphere. You don't have to enable Truesky.

2. Does the Honeycomb yoke work well with P3D?

Yes. I don't know if they have released an official fix yet but there is a topic on here discussing how to add an entry to your v5 add-ons.cfg that allows it to work just like it did in v4.

3. Will my PC be able to handle P3D and the addons that I'm thinking about buying. and do you think I need any other addons?

Your PC will be fine.

 

 

Edited May 12, 2020 by vrdubin6

[Quasimodo 505]

If you are very disappointed with XP11 then after the initial novelty of something new wares off, I'll hazard a guess that you'll also be very disappointed with Prepar3D V4 or V5

Edit: Also you get far more bang for you buck with XP11. XP11 can be made to look totally awesome with freeware. Prepar3D V4 or V5 looks like 💩out of the box. You'll have to spend hundred and hundreds of dollars on addons to make it look like those videos your watching.

Edited May 12, 2020 by Quasimodo

[cwburnett 1,809]

1 hour ago, Yuval350 said:

1. If I decide that I do want to buy P3D, do I buy v5, or v4 because I looked as some videos of v5 and for It looks more similar to X-Plane 11 and that's is something I deeply don't want.

2. Does the Honeycomb yoke work well with P3D?

3. Will my PC be able to handle P3D and the addons that I'm thinking about buying. and do you think I need any other addons?

1. At this point I'd buy v5. As far as looking like X-Plane, the thing about all of these simulators is that they don't look good without add-ons.  But vanilla v4 and vanilla v5 will look basically the same, with the exception that the beta enhanced atmospherics feature in v5 makes the skies look fantastic without add-ons (in my opinion).  For ground textures you really must have Orbx or similar packages to replace the landclass textures, or deploy photoreal if that's your thing.  But if you do an apples to apples comparison of how Orbx TE regions look in XP videos vs P3D videos, to my eye, the P3D experience is much more crisp and is the reason, despite all the other problems, I've stuck with P3D - having tested XP multiple times.

2. Yes, that's what I use.

3. Yes, but as most of us do, you'll have to be thoughtful about your settings. You won't be able to max out all your settings.  Start with conservative settings and move things up until you find the sweet spot between performance and quality.  In v5 you need to be more aware of your VRAM utilization.

LM does have a 14 day refund policy and there are ORBX demos available, so you might want to just try it out and see what you think for a week or so before you delete your XP folder. 😉

[NightOfDreams 370]

Rex Skyforce 3D is a nice add on, since the enhanced atmospherics in V5 is glitchy and doesn't seem to work with ActiveSky. Plus it's on sale now for only $17.48

[Chock 17,769]

P3D (and FSX too) has always been a little better for simulating airliner operations. You can do it with XPlane, but the fact is, and as you noted, there are more and better flight planners, weather apps, ATC apps, co-pilot apps, EFBs, airliners etc available for P3D and FSX, which are suited to airliner operations than has ever been the case for XPlane. I know, because I've tried the MS sims for this and the Laminar ones and found that XPlane, in spite of the many good things it offers, is nowhere near as suited to airliner operations as the alternatives because of the lack of associated add-ons. It's not as bad as it used to be, but P3D in particular is just way better suited to such things.

In fairness, there are some good airliners available for XPlane, including ones you cannot get for P3D or FSX, such as the excellent FlightFactor-A350 and the Aerosoft CRJ-200, but without all the peripheral stuff you need to do airline stuff well, they are somewhat hamstrung. Part of this is that the developer of XPlane - Austin Meyer - is unashamedly interested in it being a good sim for his own GA aeroplane which he built (or at least had built for him). Austin is a nice guy, I know this because I've spoken to him and liked him very much to chat to, but he is very driven and determined to do things his way, so XPlane is better suited to GA operations and that's a fact.

To do things right in P3D with airliners, I would say you would need the following...

A decent weather add-on: There are many but I'd recommend HiFi Simulation's Active Sky, since it has been a consistently professionally created product for many years and it constantly improves too. Support is excellent for it as well.

A decent ATC simulation add-on: You can live with the default ATC but it is somewhat limited although it is improved a bit if you use FS++ Multi Crew Experience, since this will allow your virtual co-pilot to do the ATC communications (if you don't want to do this yourself via voice which it can do) and that gets past a bit of the naff phraseology of the default ATC, in addition to which, Multi Crew Experience also functions as a set of crew members to help operate your airliner with speech recognition for running checklists which are very realistic and since MCE also interacts with the default AI traffic, I like how it slots you into the simulated world's traffic, so this is the one I prefer to go with in spite of some of the procedures not being totally as per the real world. Support for MCE is excellent too. However, you may prefer one of the many other ATC add-ons which use more true to life procedures, such as Vox ATC or Radar Contact etc. There are lots of choices available.

A co-pilot add-on: Unless you are using MCE (as I do, since it give you a co-pilot with voice recognition) you'll find a co-pilot add-on is a big help as well as being far more realistic for airliner ops, since nobody flies an airliner solo. There are many of these too, but probably the best one is the FS2 Crew range of products, which are specific to each add-on airliner. I know these are very detailed because I did some of the voice acting for some of these products and they are very meticulously produced. Support is excellent for these products, right her on this forum.

A good airliner sim: This is where P3D and FSX have an embarrassment of riches, with PMDG, FSL, Majestic, TDFi, Aerosoft being just a small selection of the developers making truly excellent add-on aeroplanes, and these all work flawlessly in conjunction with things such as FS2 Crew and MCE.

Some scenery: For airliner ops, you don;t need to go mad with scenery since most of the time you are five miles above it at cruise altitude. Nevertheless, Orbx offer some good en masse solutions for this which improve the visuals a lot.

Some ground operation stuff: You can just go with the default pushbacks if you like, but products such as GSX and Ultimate Ground Crew will add a lot to the experience. There's another product on the way too which you might like which involves ground ops, but not sure I can say much about it at the moment.

Some add-on airports to fly in and out of: There's quite a lot of decent freebie ones around, as well as loads of really good payware ones, so this is no problem at all. you can use the default airports, but they are a bit lacklustre although they've been improved a bit in the latest version of P3D.

Finally, your PC looks good enough to handle things okay to me. P3D V5 in particular has improved performance a lot in this respect, so it should be no problem.

 

 

 

[Jetman67 506]

13 hours ago, vrdubin6 said:

 

There is official v5 honeycomb software, its an awesome piece of hardware

[Yuval350 2]

Thank you very much for everyone that replied I did not expect so many replies and help.

I don't think I need any ATC software or co-pilot software, I only fly on Vatsim so ATC is covered. When I started thinking about buying P3D V5 I thought that I don't need REX because the skies of V5 are improved. But if you do think I need it than I will look into It. I'm also interested in P3D because the new MSFS2020 for me looks a little bit too good, It looks to me more like a game and not a simulator. It's good to know that P3D has a refund policy.

Thank you eveyone! 

Yuval.

[Yuval350 2]

I was also wandering If there is any addon to improve the default airport in the sim.

 

[NightOfDreams 370]

3 hours ago, Yuval350 said:

I don't think I need any ATC software or co-pilot software, I only fly on Vatsim so ATC is covered. When I started thinking about buying P3D V5 I thought that I don't need REX because the skies of V5 are improved. But if you do think I need it than I will look into It.

I fly on VATSIM and dont use any ATC either.

You don't "need" REX, but it makes the skies look absolutely breathtaking sometimes especially at dusk.

P3D by default comes with TrueSky but it's in beta and causes issues with graphics, such as glitchy looking trees; it gave me a clear sky on a cloudy day while using ActiveSky; and TrueSky seems to impact my FPS a lot more than REX. Actually with REX I'm still able to maintain a consistent 30 FPS. So IMO, REX is worth the $17.48.

Edited May 13, 2020 by NightOfDreams

[Yuval350 2]

Alright seems like Rex is the right choice, If I buy P3D V5 now, I will be interested in buying active sky for weather but active sky doesn't yet have a product for V5 so am I supposed to wait or buy the product for V4 and join the beta?

Thank you

Yuval.

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

8 hours ago, suchw said:

There is official v5 honeycomb software, its an awesome piece of hardware

Is there? When was it released? 

[vrdubin6 184]

18 minutes ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

Is there? When was it released? 

Curious as well. I just checked the website and the Prepar3d download is still for v4.