Best JFK airport scenery for V5

[virtuali 4,421]

1 hour ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Is it really true that FSDT are no longer developing large airports for P3D?

Not really.

We are only been very busy in first learning MSFS, then bringing several products out for it, to have a new line of products that can sustain our business in the future.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,966]

2 minutes ago, virtuali said:

Not really.

We are only been very busy in first learning MSFS, then bringing several products out for it, to have a new line of products that can sustain our business in the future.

Understood. It would appear the scenery part of the MFS SDK is sufficiently completed to allow airports to be built for it. Is it much of a job to convert them for P3D v4/5?

[Benjamin J 751]

On 10/13/2020 at 5:12 PM, virtuali said:

I was sure somebody would have brought up DD but no, they are not a factor, not in the slightest. They also have a product which includes New York with 3 airports which more recent and competes with our JFK that came out in 2013 as a half-remake of the original version from 2009, and it never had ANY effect ( not even in the slightest ), to our sales of KJFK. Is as if that scenery never existed.

So no, there's no difference between JFK and KORD, they both have a competitor with "more value" ( although somebody here said that our KJFK from 2013 looks better than DD from 2018... ), the ONLY difference is that JFK is available for FSX and P3D, while KORD V2 is P3D4 only. Which makes it the BEST product for P3D users.

Well, I'm actually one person that bought DD's Chicago Airports and because of that did not consider FSDT KORD. Of course I have no idea how others were affected by DD's earlier release. But this definitely played a role in my decision making.

I will also add that DD's NYC airports is not a great comparison, because they really are worse in quality than their Chicago airports. If DD would have brought out a Chicago Airports that was of the same quality as their NYC Airports, I would have bought FSDT's KORD for sure. And as it stands, if FSDT were to come out with a new and improved KJFK, then DD or not, I'd be one of the first to buy it! But, if DD were to release an updated NYC Airports three months or so before FSDT... then I'd probably stick with DD yet again as it would also include KEWR, which is a vastly neglected airport.

A better comparison might be DD's Seattle airports with T2G's KSEA. Despite the fact that DD's is more up-to-date, is made to be compatible with their Seattle city scenery, and includes two more airports, there's still a seemingly fairly large number of people that stick with T2G's. Though personally I have no idea why because here I too switched to DD pretty soon after it came out.

I'm not meaning to say that the community does what I do, but I'm not sure one can dismiss DD's influence outright either. Then again, I have no insight into your sales figures of course, so I can only tell what my decision making looked like. Whether that aligns with anything or anybody, I have no idea.

[Benjamin J 751]

19 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Understood. It would appear the scenery part of the MFS SDK is sufficiently completed to allow airports to be built for it. Is it much of a job to convert them for P3D v4/5?

That's what seems to be the case indeed. That said, developers have to stick with a fair amount of default elements in order to make use of MSFS features, such as slopes and native lights. I have not looked into the MSFS SDK so I'm not sure what flexibility there is, but it probably does explain the sort of 'same-y' look many MSFS sceneries seem to have. 

[virtuali 4,421]

19 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Understood. It would appear the scenery part of the MFS SDK is sufficiently completed to allow airports to be built for it. Is it much of a job to convert them for P3D v4/5?

If you use the MSFS SDK *properly*, it's quite complex, because there are many design decision that should be made at the start of a project that, if you know the scenery will be made natively for MSFS, you can do some things entirely differently, and spare lots of work.

It's much easier to convert from P3D to MSFS than the other way around.

[virtuali 4,421]

3 minutes ago, Benjamin J said:

That's what seems to be the case indeed. That said, developers have to stick with a fair amount of default elements in order to make use of MSFS features, such as slopes and native lights. I have not looked into the MSFS SDK so I'm not sure what flexibility there is, but it probably does explain the sort of 'same-y' look many MSFS sceneries seem to have. 

We surely hope it will possible to customize such things with a future update of the SDK. However, at least for 3d lights, the quality of the default object is fairly high, I'd say higher than anything we did for FSX/P3D.

Edited October 17, 2020 by virtuali

[Ray Proudfoot 8,966]

10 minutes ago, virtuali said:

If you use the MSFS SDK *properly*, it's quite complex, because there are many design decision that should be made at the start of a project that, if you know the scenery will be made natively for MSFS, you can do some things entirely differently, and spare lots of work.

It's much easier to convert from P3D to MSFS than the other way around.

Then is there a case for continuing to develop for P3D and then convert them for MFS? Many people who fly IFR use larger aircraft and will fly out of major airports like JFK.

Given its going to be a while before the MFS SDK is finished and then a further period before PMDG737, FSL and the like  have their serious aircraft available it seems to me there is still a healthy market for large airports.

I have not been buying 3rd party airports for P3D v4 because I’ve been waiting for FS Labs to announce which sim they will develop Concorde for. Now I know it’s P3D v4/5 the wallet will be opened again. I have most of the FSDT airports and the excellent GSX so I look forward to seeing more of your products when resources permit.

Just one question about MFS airports. If you design them ‘properly’ is performance better than converting from a P3D one?

[virtuali 4,421]

1 hour ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Then is there a case for continuing to develop for P3D and then convert them for MFS?

Converted sceneries work now, but later on MSFS users will demand things specifically made for MSFS. 

 

1 hour ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Just one question about MFS airports. If you design them ‘properly’ is performance better than converting from a P3D one?

Yes, and they'll look better too, and can do fairly easily things that are hard to do in P3D, like sloped airports.

Yes, P3D V5 supports sloped runways now, but they basically work only in the AFCAD ( all the rest of 3d modeling is not integrated with it, like MSFS ) and are made in a very convoluted way: each node of the AFCAD must have its height. MSFS is so much easier and elegant: the airport is made flat, and the simulator engine automatically adapts everything to the rolling terrain, which can be easily terraformed. A sloping airport is so difficult to do and comes with so many restrictions, that most large airports in FSX/P3D were made entirely flat for that reason.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,966]

@virtuali, thanks, very informative. I’ll leave you to enjoy the rest of your weekend. 👍

[Ray Proudfoot 8,966]

Sorry for resurrecting this topic but with FSL close to releasing their 64-bit Concorde it would be nice to fly it out of one of the world’s most popular airports.

@virtuali, you said earlier in this topic P3D production would definitely cease. Only that MSFS would be prioritised. Have your plans changed?

I ask because at some point the runway designations are going to change and that is going to affect products like Aivlasoft’s EFB which use real world data including SIDs and STARs.

You recently updated runway textures for Geneva and supplied a new AFCAD. Will you do the same for JFK and any other FSDT airports where runway designations change? That would keep me happy.

[Patco Lch 1,466]

And please please fix the elevation issue at Charlotte and Memphis.🙏

[BlueStar 323]

4 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Sorry for resurrecting this topic but with FSL close to releasing their 64-bit Concorde it would be nice to fly it out of one of the world’s most popular airports.

@virtuali, you said earlier in this topic P3D production would definitely cease. Only that MSFS would be prioritised. Have your plans changed?

I ask because at some point the runway designations are going to change and that is going to affect products like Aivlasoft’s EFB which use real world data including SIDs and STARs.

You recently updated runway textures for Geneva and supplied a new AFCAD. Will you do the same for JFK and any other FSDT airports where runway designations change? That would keep me happy.

This is the very reason I quit buying 3rd party sceneries.  With ADE I take the stock airports and update them.  There have been major changes to KJFK since FSDT has been released.  

[Ray Proudfoot 8,966]

33 minutes ago, BlueStar said:

This is the very reason I quit buying 3rd party sceneries.  With ADE I take the stock airports and update them.  There have been major changes to KJFK since FSDT has been released.  

You’re very clever if you can design all those terminal buildings. I flew JFK to Barbados this morning and I can happily accept the visuals. What the user doesn’t see he won’t be unhappy about. 😉

[virtuali 4,421]

20 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

you said earlier in this topic P3D production would definitely cease. Only that MSFS would be prioritised. Have your plans changed?

Changed ? In the two years since that post, were we correctly estimated MSFS would have took over the whole flight sim market, two main things have happened:

- MSFS really took over the market, and by an huge margin, exactly as predicted. P3D is not even the 2nd, that would be X-Plane, and we don't have time/resources to support that either. High end aircraft like Fenix, PMDG, Leonardo ( but even the free FBW A320 and the A310 included with MSFS can be considered high-end) came out so, compared to 2020, the MSFS position has only improved. All users are there, basically.

- For us, GSX Pro for MSFS came out, and supporting this it with new features and updates is taking all our available time, up to the point we hardly have any time left to work at airports for MSFS, let alone any other sim. We have KIAH for MSFS basically completed, but we couldn't find time to release it, because to do the finishing touches, we need to find spare time during the MSFS betas, were it might not be safe to release too many GSX updates.

In addition to that, we tried some experiments trying to port back some objects from MSFS to P3D, and going in that direction it's not as easy at it seems, it's a lot of work and it's just not worth the time/effort, considering how shrunken the user base has been.

A GSX Pro update with some new features, that takes very little time to do, if properly presented ( sometimes it takes more effort creating a promotional video than doing the actual feature ), is taking in more sales than a whole new airport scenery for P3D. That's how the market is today.

I'm sorry but, unless a future P3D version would came out, offering dramatically improved features, a whole new graphic engine, I can't see any chance to release new airports or new products in general. Yes, LM working with Unreal engine is interesting, but I don't think we'll see anything  really new before some years.

Just be happy that, the way GSX works, with almost all its code running externally and not much affected by the underlying simulator, almost every new feature related to its code logic or sounds or new operators we add to the MSFS version, will automatically go back to P3D, that's the only level of support we can think of for the foreseeable future.

So, to answer your original question, plans might have changed, but not in the direction you were hoping for, meaning if in October 2020, we still had some minor hope to be able to do something for P3D ( possibly converting back from MSFS ), in March 2023 that's no longer an option.

Obviously, plan can always change again due to changing outside conditions. If LM were to announce something like a brand new version, using the Unreal engine and the vast array of its capabilities and plug-ins, and perhaps a worldwide scenery based on, let's say, Google Earth, that would be something worth changing plans for. 

[Ray Proudfoot 8,966]

@virtuali, thanks for your post. I’m happy with the state of GSX and if it remained unchanged I could live with that.

My main concern is FSDT airports when runway designations change. Will you continue to update those airports when necessary? Editing the textures to show the new runway number plus taxiway signage and a revised AFCAD shouldn’t take up too much time should it?