Looking to love my sim...just enough (an open letter LM)

[hrhett01 12]

If anyone from LM's Prepar3d is listening, here it is.

The community has been abuzz surrounding the release of MSFS2020 this past week. There’s an interesting business read entitled “The innovator’s dilemma” by Clayton Christenson that came out some years ago. In a nutshell he talks about developing technologies and how they can be obsoleted before the technology matures as technology enables micro improvements during the product maturation life-cycle. I think the P3D product falls squarely in the what he describes as ‘sustaining technologies’ category it being a legacy product and that FS2020 is ‘disruptive’ because it’s solved problems previous platforms have been either unwilling or unable to. If no one on your team has read it then you need to.

The community as a whole has been awaiting and watching the release of MSFS2020. Arguably, the global scenery is pretty much what we’re all looking for and they’ve come close to nailing it. Not to mention the unbelievable detail in the graphics. With that said, this isn’t a poke P3D in-the-eye post. I would guess that many simmers, like myself, are heavily invested in the (a) platform. I have X-Plane, P3Dv4 & v5 and MSFS2020 all installed. But I virtually never use X-Plane because I have to buy all the add-ons all over again and the aircraft offerings just isn’t as robust as P3D. But I’m sure that there are many and who love it as much as your product. And while MSFS200 is a major leap forward, its not a slam dunk. The truth is that it’s just not done yet. They baked a really nice cake but no one has even started thinking about the frosting, decorations or lettering! Your cake, by comparison, tastes pretty good (you’re a lot further along) but it doesn’t look as nice as theirs.

So here’s my humble challenge if anyone is listening: Get 3D sat data into P3D, improve the graphics (as you’ve started to do in v5). You already have the publishers of many of the world’s most commonly flown airports in detail and most of the commercial and GA aircraft (which arguably will take MSFS publishers’ years to develop given their past release history). You have strong publishers (PMDG, Quality Wings, Carenado, Majestic, etc.) with mature products. If you care enough about the hard-core simmers (who I would guess make up a large contingent of your customer base?) make these changes and I, and more like me, would never have a reason to switch platforms.

Remember, most of us are here to simulate flight as close to real world as possible, not to own multiple simulation platforms. I’m financially committed to a single platform to date and aren’t interested in spending money on the same scenery I already have for another sim. If you want to see me (and those like me) stay, then up your game. Competition is good.

Howard

 

[1st fltsimguy 466]

Actually I recently posted over at XP about similar.

P3D and XP need to step up, huge investment needed to make the gaa, gaa, goo, goo scenery for the globe a reality or step aside.

Its all out there, we know the sources.

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

It would indeed be nice if we could combine the best of each sim... not that easy to do..

For now, I'll keep P3D for the nice airplanes/avionics and some custom scenery that I like, and fly MSFS for what it is good at, in the C172 G1000 (for now)..

[d.tsakiris 418]

25 minutes ago, hrhett01 said:

Get 3D sat data into P3D

This.

[cwburnett 1,809]

The idea of getting ortho into P3D on a mass scale is definitely interesting. I got into ortho earlier this year and ended up building over 2TB of ortho for Europe. I venture to say that if I posted one of these as being from MSFS, people would believe it...

But there is more to it than that...the graphics engines themselves seem to work quite differently - MSFS is much leaner with VRAM, and the autogen models and drawing is much cleaner (autogen doesn't pop, it fades in) and the models are much more detailed...and the procedurally drawn components are a critical component to this.

There's no real technical reason that ortho tiles couldn't be streamed, but the cost of a third party to have access to all that imagery, and the cost of the AI handling of all the imperfections in the imagery are probably the bigger barriers. Sat data is a mess, and some of that is obvious even in MSFS after all the time, effort and energy that was expended making that environment. It would be very interesting to participate in a discussion about how to improve the visual performance of P3D while keeping all the things in excels at.

[cwburnett 1,809]

1 hour ago, hrhett01 said:

If anyone from LM's Prepar3d is listening, here it is.

By the way, you should maybe put this in their forum...would be interesting to see if they even bother responding. I gave them a whole slew of suggestions for v5.1+ earlier this year, in a positive tone while congratulating them for their v5 success and, while it received positive comments from the community, nobody from LM reacted.

[hrhett01 12]

There's no question that the technology isn't there (after all, MS just did it), It's just that starting from a clean slate you don't have the baggage that P3D does. After all, it's legacy MSFS from more than twenty years ago. I'd say LM has their work cut out for them. Rearchitecting legacy software isn't an easy thing to do (properly).

 

Those screen shots look sweet by the way...

 

Howard 

Edited August 21, 2020 by hrhett01

[GSalden 4,657]

LM will never do this.

Bing is from MS and Google Earth is from Google.

Like cwburnett I am having pr scenery + custom AG only for almost every country in Europe ( that is where I fly ) so with EA I am having a very realistic environment....

 

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

1 hour ago, hrhett01 said:

After all, it's legacy MSFS from more than twenty years ago. I'd say LM has their work cut out for them.

The render engine in P35 shares about as much in common with FSX as the render engine in MSFS does with FSX. At least P3d5 doesn't have popping autogen. MSFS and FSX share the trait.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

Rob,

MSFS has a considerable advantage over P3d5 because of the server-based scenery. But at the moment that is its only advantage, albeit a big one. The ATC and AI traffic are awful. The weather is erratic and the aircraft systems such as the autopilot are an insult to Otto and all other pilots. But MSFS is new and 3rd party developers will overcome whatever obstacles that Asobo can't. LM better look at the server-based scenery option or they will be left behind (not that they care about selling gazillions of copies like MS does).

Jay

[simbol 5,819]

In my view, server base scenery for a simulator is just a short solution.. And it will never work 100 percent well for a real time simulator.

There are other ways to overcome AG limitations and avoid the streaming of scenery, which in my opinion are better because in a simulator you do not want to limit your performance, flying speed and many other factors and variables for your simulation, things that unfortunately will always occur with streaming, in hence why with MSFS you have a cache and you can preload cache of areas you want to visit (so you avoid the streaming).

Just Google what Unreal Engine 5 is able to do with DX12 and terrain rendering, that is the real future in computing rather than relying on photo real pictures and large downloads.. Specially with how fast video cards are evolving over time... so streaming video games is not something I foresee taking the market long term, what I see in the future is worlds being rendered, highly accurate, detailed and with amazing lighting all done by your computer at runtime using your own processing power without the need to download anything..

Regards,

Simbol 

[1st fltsimguy 466]

2 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

From a hardware perspective, I think we'll hit 1PT storage capacity sooner than we'll have viable streaming data at high level of quality and performance ... not so sure about affordable VRAM.

Thank you for your summary on hardware and streaming, I had this "fear".  I have not yet bought a MSFS 2020 license for a number of reasons but your summaries above are fair and clear. 

I am reading as much as I can on folks posts and I am viewing videos and I clearly saw one video which was exception where all the objects were showing well into the distance and mountains in full relief, but most I've seen the autogen and objects are just not there in the middle distance and the mountains are not in full relief and pop in and there are mesh tears....these things would bug the heck out of me.

I fly in ortho with overlays and other freeware addons and I have many of my areas I like to fly covered and I do not have these issues because the data is on my drives.

I've been saying this for years, its all about data, I have a suite of 8 terabyte drives with my data and will continue to buy bigger and bigger drives.

Bryan

Edited August 22, 2020 by 1st fltsimguy

[Noel 4,502]

I think for what you get for the $$, there is no better value in a flight sim right now than what you get with MSFS.  Just by the basic version, and enjoy what they've done with it already.  I bought it just because of the history behind it full well believing its future is uncertain.  Heck, it's less than the cost of one PMDG bird, and it's pretty fun for what it is--it's just miles from the depth of mature sims.

Edited August 22, 2020 by Noel

[Patco Lch 1,465]

Please suffer my ignorance. What does it mean to fly in Ortho?

[F737MAX 5,604]

42 minutes ago, PATCO LCH said:

Please suffer my ignorance. What does it mean to fly in Ortho?

This...

Ok, it's not as sexy as MSFS. That said, ortho / photo scenery makes P3D look a lot more realistic than it does with landclass.

I have TBs and TBs of the stuff filling my SSDs - all of Western Europe, all PST and MST states in the USA, high level (lower res stuff) of eastern China *and* high level for parts of Oz😵, but it is worthwhile when (for me) it looks this good.
 

Edited August 22, 2020 by F737NG