1 hour ago, Doug47 said:

I could think of dozens. At the moment most MSFS airplanes are toy planes for the gamers. It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence to switch right now. 

Use what you like best. All about which one gives you the most enjoyment. 

38 minutes ago, mwilk said:

Commercial customers as a rule aren't interested in scenery. They're interested in aircraft fidelity and interaction with the environment around the airplane. Every see the graphics of a Level-D simulator? 

Exactly, and hence why P3D is still king when it comes to being a true flight simulator. 
Add in some add-on global scenery. Regional scenery. Airport scenery. HD trees, clouds and water, and along with a far better choice of quality airplane add-ons, and now you have the best of everything. 
 

4 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

P3D or XP will remain the sim of choice for those with low download speeds and there are many of those in the UK and around the world. And there will be some quality aircraft that will never make it into MSFS.

The biggest downside to MSFS for me is them not allowing 3rd party developers access to the weather engine. Why are they so protective?

You know me Ray, I am no f*nboy, just an old simmer who knows, like you, what is best for him. Proselytism is not my cup of tea. Slightly distasteful.  Allow me some comments on what you said : 

- a minimum of 10/15 Mbps is indeed necessary, at 2 Mbps and under 15 Mbps anyway, MFS is unplayable IMHO . I had to change my ADLS 3/5 Mbps end-of-the-line connection to a 4G connection. Not only rural England, rural France too ! 

- Enforced updates : they are annoying indeed but they come with the territory, I suppose, I mean streaming. All the clients need to be on the same page or at least it is easier to manage for the vendor. This wouldn't be such a big issue if MS had not released several  bugged updates in a row !  Things seem to be a little better now 🤞. 

- Weather engine : If I understand Asobo well, they consider that the weather engine belongs to the core of their sim along with the flight modeling architecture. One goes/interacts with the other. It then does not make sense to open it to third parties as it would dilute what they consider structural. And if I have enjoyed ASN for years, the MFS weather with its glitches, bugs and lack of some features that I regularly call out on the forum, is very good.   

If I was a little polemical, I'd ask  why Lockheed martin has not yet integrated a weather engine in P3D. ASN as good as it is, is at the end of the day, a palliative because LM decided to give up the weather engine when they took over from FSX. The Asobo philosophy makes more sense to me. Aerodynamics and weather go hands in hand. 

- Clouds : one can see here and there disgraceful ashen clouds like out of a volcano or weird doomsday formations but most of the time the cloudscape is superb like anything we have ever seen in a sim. Some wow moments I never had in P3D. 

- Quality aircraft : No Concord anytime soon I'm afraid. But all the others are coming, they are coming fast, actually some have already landed. The scaremongers who have told us that no serious aircraft could be made with the SDK and the programming framework before years have been proven wrong by at least PMDG, Aerosoft, Carenado, Just Flight, Milviz  and Flying Iron. And we see promising youngsters like Big Radials and few others budding along.

I will spare you my thoughts about the future of flight simulation if you don't mind 😁 !  I do hope to see P3D and XP continue to prosper. You never know... 

Edited July 9, 20214 yr by Dominique_K

1 hour ago, Hamilton_ said:

What?!  

Turning online features off, including Photogrammetry in MSFS is far WORST than P3D v5.2. I did and I saw it.

Who on earth would turn online features off in MSFS 2020???

1 hour ago, RobJC said:

No paid scenery add-ons for P3D, right?

P3D scenery is like flying over wall paper with flatten buildings and vegetation pasted on it. 

28 minutes ago, Doug47 said:

Exactly, and hence why P3D is still king when it comes to being a true flight simulator. 
Add in some add-on global scenery. Regional scenery. Airport scenery. HD trees, clouds and water, and along with a far better choice of quality airplane add-ons, and now you have the best of everything. 
 

And all that costs a fortune. And it still looks like a 15 year old sim. 

2 hours ago, Doug47 said:

I could think of dozens. At the moment most MSFS airplanes are toy planes for the gamers. It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence to switch right now. 

The other sims default airplanes are like toy airplanes also, what does that prove? 

1 hour ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

In the real world not many, the modern world lives on phones and internet.

In flight simming. where the average user is actually older than the average Harley owner ... possibly quite a lot.

Though if P3D survives because your average "study level" simmer is old and has ancient internet all the more kudos to P3D .

That's some pretty gerontophobic stereotyping.  What relation do you assume exists between someone's age and the speed of their internet connection?  A lot of the older gents in my mainly tech-centric hobbies (flight simming, ham radio, computers and electronics) are far more savvy (and well-equipped) when it comes to technology than many plug-n-play youngsters that have little to no understanding of the technology they use.  The people behind the add-ons we all love, regardless of the sim platform, are for the most part not a bunch of spring chickens.

P3D is a training and education platform, and its survival hinges on how well it functions in that role for its target customer base (which I truly believe is not, and never was us).  A platform that won't allow simple basics like setting visibility or determining enroute winds and weather will not replace P3D as a training platform no matter how pretty it is.  Development of microsimulation as a training tool--in other words, P3D--is focused on things like procedural training, including basic operating and emergency procedures (hence the emphasis on "study-level" high fidelity systems simulations), part-task training (e.g. interconnected simulations used by air and ground elements to practice coordination of close air support), mission sandboxing (e.g. flying a low-level mission profile to suss out terrain, detection, and ground threat avoidance), etc.  The presence of the Justflights of the world served the purpose of helping advance and test the tools...but make no mistake about it, the survival of the platform does not depend on its (or our) presence.

The marketing of MSFS tells us much about its purpose, and high-fidelity scenario-driven profiles ain't it.

I keep seeing people saying that once you try MSFS, you'll never go back.  As a sweeping broad generalization that's just not true.  It truly depends on what you consider important.  I have both P3D (v4 and v5) and MSFS installed on a powerful PC dedicated to flight simming, and MSFS is still just an arcade novelty to me, because I want the ability to fly legit training-like profiles that include flight planning, correct procedural operation of a variety of complex aircraft, IFR approach work down to minimums, missed approaches, diverts etc.  People keep saying MSFS will get there...perhaps it will...but it most definitely isn't there now.  Big pieces are still missing, like (especially) the dev stated refusal to allow weather manipulation and injection, and that shortcoming alone makes MSFS as a scenario-oriented platform pretty self-limiting.

Signed,

An old study-level simmer with ancient 1.2Gbps internet

 

12 hours ago, byork said:

At FS2Crew, we still sell some FSX / P3D programs, but the shift is clearly over to MSFS.

We expect MSFS addons to represent 90 plus percent of all sales within the next 12 months.

Once PMDG gets their 737 into MSFS and maybe the FS Labs Bus as well, then we think it'll be basically over for P3D/FSX.

FSX/P3D have had a great run and were brilliant in their day, but MSFS is clearly the future.

Thanks for sharing! This gives us more information about what is happening in the consumer flight sim market right now. Cheers!

13 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

Who on earth would turn online features off in MSFS 2020???

I have an 8 year old PC and find that online features negatively impacted my experience. Had too many stutters. Going to try again on the 27th to see if it is any better. If not i will run as is until i can upgrade my pc. 

4 hours ago, C2615 said:

I fly on FS9 until 2018, and currently still using Win7 (with P3Dv4 and XP11 in OPGL). I don't see why I couldn't hold them until like,er, 2030....

People still use FSX today.  But the market for add-on planes has long since left FSX.  Any 3rd party developer with common sense won't want to develop for FSX because they probably won't recuperate their costs if they release a product for it (unless that product is very fast & cheap to develop and somehow generates a lot of sales on the current tiny FSX market - which is unlikely).

I'm certain 10 years from now, there will still be people using P3D.  But that doesn't mean P3D will be a viable platform for developers to make money off of with new products.  Heck, we don't even need to wait 10 years for this to happen to P3D. JustFlight and other 3rd party developers are saying the market for P3D is already too small for them to make new products for.

5 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

P3D or XP will remain the sim of choice for those with low download speeds and there are many of those in the UK and around the world

You can download a manual cache for areas that you consistently fly around, in MSFS. By creating a manual cache, even people on low speed internet can create a manual cache file for those areas so when they fly those areas, they won't have to rely on their internet connection as much.

In P3D I always just felt fortunate to be along for the ride as I was clearly not the main reason for P3D existing.  In MSFS I (and others like me) am/are the main reason it exists.

Edited July 9, 20214 yr by regis9

39 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

You know me Ray, I am no f*nboy, just an old simmer who knows, like you, what is best for him.

I know you well enough to know you can be very objective and will issue praise and criticism when deserved.

40 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

Enforced updates : they are annoying indeed

Which is why I still consider it in beta. I hope that one day they will be optional because if they aren’t then not having control of software on my PC that I have bought would be frustrating.

42 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

Weather engine : If I understand Asobo well, they consider that the weather engine belongs to the core of their sim along with the flight modeling

Then how do I fly out of Honolulu at 10:00 my time but 10:00 Honolulu time yesterday or even a month ago and get the local 10:00 weather? It has no historical weather as I understand it. That’s why P3D /ASP3D appeals so much.

45 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

Clouds : one can see here and there disgraceful ashen clouds like out of a volcano or weird doomsday formations but most of the time the cloudscape is superb like anything we have ever seen in a sim. Some wow moments I never had in P3D. 

I have yet to see clouds that excite me in MSFS but I admit I don’t actively seek screenshots out. I still love clouds with ASP3D / ASCA.

46 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

Quality aircraft : No Concord anytime soon I'm afraid.

Only FSL can do one good enough and they’ve already said there will only be one 64-bit which is being developed for P3D v4/5 - apparently.

48 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

I do hope to see P3D and XP continue to prosper. You never know..

There’s a place for all of them in our hobby. One for VFR, one for IFR. 👍

37 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

P3D scenery is like flying over wall paper with flatten buildings and vegetation pasted on it. 

Agreed but after adding FTX Global, UTX Europe, North America and the Caribbean it’s transformed. Have a look at the area NE of Cancun. All those little islands are accurately modelled in P3D just as they are in MSFS.

22 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

You can download a manual cache for areas that you consistently fly around, in MSFS. By creating a manual cache, even people on low speed internet can create a manual cache file for those areas so when they fly those areas, they won't have to rely on their internet connection as much.

I know but isn’t it cleared with forced updates? How many times have you had to download the same areas?