32 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

P3D ( and I am flying it right now while my new PC is in the shop), and X Plane which I have recently tried, look like 15 year old sims, compared to MSFS. There is no comparison. Looking at the scenery in P3D while flying at 4,000 feet is like watching paint dry. 

I always depended on FSCaptain to keep my head in the P3D game, and it helps to fly from dusk to dawn when looking at the cockpit matters more than watching paint dry outside.

A common comment for MSFS from those still glued to the competition is calling what's outside of the plane as 'pretty' or 'eye candy' or 'has better graphics'.  What struck me from day 1 on is not so much pretty as it is real.  P3D even w/ ORBX regional sceneries is just plain not realist.  It's a crude facsimile, but it's just not like looking down and recognizing exactly where you are even when you're only vague familiar.  For example I just took off from KRDD where I went to a couple of air shows at, heading for KPDX, and I tell you even w/ the default airport I knew exactly where I was just from panning 360 degrees.  It's 'pretty' to the extent its real world counterpart is.  And it's ugly in spots where the real world is ugly too!

Edited May 22, 20215 yr by Noel

4 minutes ago, Noel said:

I always depended on FSCaptain to keep my head in the P3D game, and it helps to fly from dusk to dawn when looking at the cockpit matters more than watching paint dry outside.

That's one way to hide the ugly terrain. 

4 hours ago, jarmstro said:

Absolute nonsense. There is airflow affected by terrain

This is absolutely true, and I really love this feature about MSFS 2020 and appreciate that you mentioned it and the fact that they, MS/Asobo cared to build and offer it right out of the box without asking for extra money.

It’s not totally impossible to recreate this feature - this “mechanical turbulence” - in previous versions if one is willing to spend quite a lot of money, and even then it would be a little bit half-baked so to speak.

Realturb for P3D, in conjunction with Active Sky, can model the mountains and thus generate turbulence caused by them. But it doesn’t take into account buildings, trees, towers, oceans, rivers etc like how MSFS 2020 does, and could cost as much as $100 extra.

Active XP for XP11 doesn’t need addons like Realturb cause it offers “terrain-based wind effects”, and it takes into account mountains only, like Realturb does. And Active XP, like Active Sky, costs extra money.

So this is one area where I’m very grateful to MS/Asobo that they cared about such a feature, that MSFS 2020 is taking everything on the ground into account. Coming in to land at my local EGGP runway 27 where in front of it there’s a bit of a forest area and the aircraft in MSFS 2020 goes through a short bout of turbulence as it flies over that area, which I have to be aware of and deal with, which is something some of my friends who train at that airport’s flight school have verified to be realistic. It makes me feel proud.

 

Edited May 22, 20215 yr by EvidencePlz

33 minutes ago, Alpine Scenery said:

Here we go again. P3D and Xplane are not even in the same stratosphere, as P3D can barely even process aerial imagery without massive texture reloading, and it cannot handle high poly counts like Xplane can.

Well this is simply not true either. Aerial imagery looks and works perfectly fine, also with optimized add-ons it has no issues with high amount of polygons. Only main difference of P3D compared to X-Plane is impact of dynamic lighting, which is not surprising given that X-Plane uses deferred rendering and P3D uses forward rendering.

33 minutes ago, Alpine Scenery said:

You can get pretty close to the same level of graphics in MSFS and Xplane. You have to mod it heavily. This isn't conjecture or supposition, it's just a fact. If you claim that EVERY part of MSFS is so much better looking than Xplane, then the fact is you didn't know how to MOD it, period.

When flying True Earth Great Britain, it is hardly any step back from MSFS, in some areas it looks better. Also, a giant chunk of the US is really messed up aerial wise from the Bing imagery, in Xplane you have choices to the provider. Furhtermore, MSFS is using the equivalent of ABOUT 80 cm imagery across most of the world, whereas with Xplane you can use 60cm and it looks FAR FAR better in some areas, especially if you use shader tweaks. 

I am not sure why you think 80cm looks better than 30-60cm, even flying low 30cm will blow 80cm away, and so does 60cm if the source is good. I'm sorry, but 30-60 cm with the better Mesh in Xplane blows away the look of mountains in MSFS. If you are flying over mountains with good aerial in Xplane, MSFS is going to look like the dated sim, not Xplane.

But obviously liking something means making false claims about others, I guess.

39 minutes ago, SAPilot said:

Started with a PMDG announcement .. and here we are on page 16 with the biggest thread drift I have EVER seen.... tst tst tst ..

Yeah it sucks.

9 minutes ago, Funky D said:

IMHO, as a leader of these forums, with a bright red admin tag next to your name and highlighted posts, you hold a responsibility to set the tone within topics. Also, similar to a respected journalist, you should be posting impartial facts without hyperbole. When you list your credentials and then proceed to vent your own personal problems with the sim, as well as make inferences to future development and stability, I personally feel that is abusing the status you hold and is indeed "spreading negativity".

I'm glad you will go back and test some of your findings, but honestly you should have done that before your initial post.

I am the lead gatekeeper here, not a journalist. 

I am also a long-time avid simmer, a former freeware developer,  a professionally trained computer programmer, and a career pilot, and I bring insights and observations of my own.  I have been posting personal commentary and making contributions to these forums ever since the site's beginnings.  That's not going to change based on your personal feelings about how you think I should comport myself.

Unfortunately, I cannot go back and recreate and demonstrate the tests I ran that produced my findings, since this blasted sim has repeatedly forced modification upon modification since then.

1 hour ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

Well this is simply not true either. Aerial imagery looks and works perfectly fine, also with optimized add-ons it has no issues with high amount of polygons. Only main difference of P3D compared to X-Plane is impact of dynamic lighting, which is not surprising given that X-Plane uses deferred rendering and P3D uses forward rendering.

But obviously liking something means making false claims about others, I guess.

It may now on a fast enough video card, P3D v4 did not 2 years ago last I used it. It worked "Barely good enough", but not fine. As far as Poly counts go, no way, Vulkan easily beats both Poly count capabilities and texture memory management, as the memory management has issues in P3D as well as multi-core usage (last I checked). 

Edited May 22, 20215 yr by Alpine Scenery

After watching all the tutorials on the DC-6, it looks very much like a full fat PMDG product, it looks far from some cash grab , jumping on the train because they see people buying CS 777. The suggestions that this is a quick dip into MSFS and comparing it to XP were they said all along there where testing that platform is so funny. It’s because we are all desperate. Right!
The SDK is far from finished but PMDG have worked with Asobo and bought us what looks like a stunning DC-6. Robert talk a lot about the SDK and it must be moving along for him to say the NG will be here this year. 
If people spend  there time putting Asobo down and the sim down when ever they can it’s no surprise that there not first in line to get the help like Rob (wt)talked about how they open talks and seem to try and help out as much as they can.

I find it incredible that someone can say they want the sim to deliver and with every sentence they come out with nothing but put down and condescending comments on that very sim. Also belittle PMDG for wanting to bring all there products to MSFS. Robert has said a few times he was going to send his team over to France to work closely with Asobo. No small commitment. But hey let’s try and imply it’s quick jump on the train cash grab.

Also like others have pointed out with live weather I find the weather effects around hills and mountains to be great. 
 

 

Edited May 22, 20215 yr by Nyxx

5 minutes ago, Nyxx said:

Also like others have pointed out with live weather I find the weather effects around hills and mountains to be great. 

DC-6 is a perfect airliner for MSFS - extremely complex but also can do bush flights and explore the world of MSFS.

Edited May 22, 20215 yr by BiologicalNanobot

11 minutes ago, Alpine Scenery said:

as no modern game engine uses a pure form of either anymore (I am a Blender developer and a graphics programmer).

While indeed most of the time they are not used in pure forms, it is still called that way in programming context, probably because there is nothing else to call it. Even X-Plane itself calls it "deferred rendering pipeline" and you can see its core aspects (the G-Buffer etc.) in the framebuffers menu.

Edited May 22, 20215 yr by BiologicalNanobot

6 minutes ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

While indeed most of the time they are not used in pure forms, it is still called that way in programming context, probably because there is nothing else to call it. Even X-Plane itself calls it "deferred rendering pipeline" and you can see its core aspects (the G-Buffer etc.) in the framebuffers menu.

Yah, but not sure what that has to do with development unless you are working on the engine itself, as it never comes up. There are so many reasons P3D is lagged, it can do ok with small # of buildings at an airport, but try loading a giant project. Both Xplane and MSFS can handle huge high-res areas, both buildings and aerial imagery.

Edited May 22, 20215 yr by Alpine Scenery

9 minutes ago, Alpine Scenery said:

Yah, but not sure what that has to do with development unless you are working on the engine itself, as it never comes up. There are so many reasons P3D is lagged, it can do ok with small # of buildings at an airport, but try loading a giant project. Both Xplane and MSFS can handle huge high-res areas, both buildings and aerial imagery.

It is important because it explains how objects are rendered. For instance, dynamic lights (and high amount of polygons, to a much smaller degree) are slower in P3D because with forward rendering each light object requires a full shading pass, while with deferred rendering the shading is... deferred (hence the name) until all geometry information is calculated. On the other hand, VR in P3D is faster because of "resolve time" bottlenecks of deferred rendering. Either case, aerial imagery performs similar in both platforms (tested in P3D v5 and X-Plane 11.53)

Edited May 22, 20215 yr by BiologicalNanobot

1 hour ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

It is important because it explains how objects are rendered.  Either case, aerial imagery performs similar in both platforms (tested in P3D v5 and X-Plane 11.53)

How objects are rendered has too many variables to classify in one term. It's not meant to be "hey third party developers, take note, deferred rendering". As far as faster vs slower in deferred rendering vs. forward, that's one issue possibly, but I doubt it's the main reason as there are hardware optimizers in our graphics card that makes the difference much less than it used to be. P3D code is just based on too much ancient FSX rendering code. 

There is not really any possible 1:1 discussion based on deferred vs fwd rendering between 2 different graphics engines, as you'd have to describe the entire rendering process from scratch for it to refer to these two things properly between 2 engines. Now if you were comparing fwd vs. deferred in the same graphics engine, that would make a lot more sense than comparing 2 engines, and just saying it's a deferred vs. forward issue. I'm sure it's more FSX legacy choke code that is the real reason P3D has issues to this day.

 

 

Edited May 22, 20215 yr by Alpine Scenery

After reading the comments here from the same folks that keep spreading misinformation even before the sim has been released because Asobo didn't take them into their "close circle", it makes me happy that Microsoft and Asobo has created a new sim that want to be more  inclusive to many people and even gamers as some call them. I am done from these what so call "hard core simmer". I would rather stay as gamer and enjoy MSFS. 

5 minutes ago, Nyxx said:

After watching all the tutorials on the DC-6, it looks very much like a full fat PMDG product, it looks far from some cash grab , jumping on the train because they see people buying CS 777. The suggestions that this is a quick dip into MSFS and comparing it to XP were they said all along there where testing that platform is so funny. It’s because we are all desperate. Right!
The SDK is far from finished but PMDG have worked with Asobo and bought us what looks like a stunning DC-6. Robert talk a lot about the SDK and it must be moving along for him to say the NG will be here this year. 
If people spend  they time putting Asobo down and the sim down when ever they can it’s no surprise that there not first in line to get the help like Rob (wt)talked about how they open talks and seem to try and help out as much as they can.

I find it incredible that someone can say they want the sim to deliver and with every sentence they come out with nothing but put down and condescending comments on that very sim. Also belittle PMDG for wanting to bring all there products to MSFS. Robert has said a few times he was going to send his team over to France to work closely with Asobo. No small commitment. But hey let’s try and imply it’s quick jump on the train cash crab.

Also like others have pointed out with live weather I find the weather effects around hills and mountains to be great.

The development effort isn't what I wonder about, it's the timing.  Are the PMDG add-on and the MSFS platform both ready, or is the timeline being pushed up too aggressively?  Is this ready for prime-time, or are we getting ready to form another beta bucket brigade?  It's fair to ask, and we'll see, and soon it would now appear.

That the community has been willing to buy into (and defend even) an abomination like the CaptainSim 777 does indeed give off a very distinct whiff of desperation and maybe even a bit of ozone too (as bank notes disappear in a puff of smoke). It is reasonably seen as an indication that MSFS users are proving themselves willing to tolerate and/or look past things we wouldn't even dream about calling acceptable elsewhere.  In such an environment, taking the chance of releasing a lightly-tested addon to be run on an unstable, morphing platform might make sense...at least for the seller.   RSR has traditionally been pretty open about new products going into beta...anyone heard any announcements about the DC-6 going into beta for MSFS?  And how did that trivially short hyper-accelerated 6-week beta for MSFS last summer work out for us??  It kinda sorta looks like this may be getting rushed to market...but hey, nobody would ever do that would they??

I'm trying to understand PMDG's move in the context of what we currently observe about the sim, the SDK, and their limitations.  It's not belittling PMDG to wonder about the sudden readiness of this upcoming release when their observations and conclusions seem to contradict what many other talented and experienced developers are saying w/r/t the SDK and the sim's general readiness and stability.