24 minutes ago, coastaldriver said:

I think we are overlooking the fact that they have taken a very good simulator (the FSX ESP engine) that was designed for a 32 bit environment and then rebuilt it to suit 64 bit computing

As someone who is still using P3Dv3 exclusively for FS Labs Concorde I can assure everyone it is an absolute pain having to keep the sliders so far left to ensure I don’t hit the VAS limit of 4Gb. I’m only using a fraction of my computing power.

The move to 64-bit was enormous especially in the quality of the graphics that became available. One of the defining moments in flight simming for the home user.

An excellent analysis @coastaldriver. 👏

I wish I could look forward to a completely reworked ai traffic: AI a/c following reasonable procedures on landing and T/O and an improved logic of moving on ground. Flying study-level airliners is one, if not the only, strength of P3D over MSFS. If P3D wants to keep this position improved ai traffic is essential imo.

Rome Fiumicino and Porto from MK Studios.

EHAM v2/for v5 from FlyTampa.

And I need an El Tepual (Puerto Montt, Chile).

4 hours ago, Nemo said:

I wish I could look forward to a completely reworked ai traffic: AI a/c following reasonable procedures on landing and T/O and an improved logic of moving on ground. Flying study-level airliners is one, if not the only, strength of P3D over MSFS. If P3D wants to keep this position improved ai traffic is essential imo.

The AI traffic management on MSFS is awful too.. I would say even worse than P3D.

I have a project on hold for P3D which does SID / STARs, and other things for AI. However I must admit I am considering canceling it all together at this point in time. I will keep it still on hold for another 6 months and see how the P3D market behave after that.

The difficulty with a project like this, is the complexity and time you need to put into it to make it work correctly and keep 100% performance unaffected in the Sim. Now with the current market shift, it would be very hard to justify a project of such dimension and complexity since you would never see any return of investment.

S.

4 minutes ago, simbol said:

The AI traffic management on MSFS is awful too.. I would say even worse than P3D.

Fully agreed.

4 minutes ago, simbol said:

The difficulty with a project like this, is the complexity and time you need to put into it to make it work correctly and keep 100% performance unaffected in the Sim. Now with the current market shift, it would be very hard to justify a project of such dimension and complexity since you would never see any return of investment.

Fully understandable. That's why I think LM itself should improve AI to a new level just to keep their advantage over MSFS at least in study level a/c and AI traffic. I think both are two sides of the same medal.

 

On 8/5/2021 at 7:25 AM, Gary1124 said:

I would be happy if Orbx started to add to their freeware airport file again. Some of the small and mid-size fields are really nice and very accurate. At least the Pennsylvania ones look like their counter parts. That would mean a lot to me and others who's largest plane they fly is a King Air or a Premeir or Citation. 

I believe most of that freeware was done by the prolific Neil Hill, who passed away in 2018, so unfortunately I don't think a resurgence of new production is going to happen.  Due to popular demand, Orbx created an installer for the freeware package for P3Dv5, but it comes with a caveat that the sceneries within come as-is and some of the sceneries will have issues with v5--and some do, as a result of mesh/altitude changes in v5 and use of some default autogen and scenery object bgls from v4 that were deprecated or had their GUIDs changed in v5.

A lot of my v4.5 flying is done to take advantage of those airports.  There are a bunch of them, and they are nicely done.

On topic: lots of this... max settings,oodles of performance and fun 😉

Squalls in EA anyone? 😉

Edited August 6, 20214 yr by kevinfirth

3 minutes ago, kevinfirth said:

Squalls in EA anyone? 😉

Kevin, I haven’t spotted those yet but the most impressive thing I’ve seen so far were pools of sunlit ground in an otherwise cloudy landscape. I had to look twice to convince myself it was really there.

3 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Kevin, I haven’t spotted those yet but the most impressive thing I’ve seen so far were pools of sunlit ground in an otherwise cloudy landscape. I had to look twice to convince myself it was really there.

I am super impressed with how P3D is stacking up against MSFS at the moment still, when it has decent PR scenery to work with.  Yes, default scenery could do with some improvements in comparison, of that there's no doubt, but when loaded up, I'm finding that I actually prefer EA.  However, this is a price of admission game, you need a beefy machine to get smoothness AND quality.  Not everyone can afford that, and I think that's where the strategic mindset of P3D and MSFS is diverging.  P3D to me seems to be built for tomorrow's performance, MSFS seems to be (for the time being at least) more oriented towards the middle end of the hardware spectrum.

10 minutes ago, kevinfirth said:

P3D to me seems to be built for tomorrow's performance, MSFS seems to be (for the time being at least) more oriented towards the middle end of the hardware spectrum.

Ironic, because people used to complain about how each version of Classic MSFS was designed for machines 3 years in the future - FSX was a pig on current machines when it launched. 

LM is consistently improving performance with each release. That's no small thing. I can now run with higher settings at a given FPS level than I could in 5.1, which was better than 5.0, which was leagues ahead of 4.5. But a great platform isn't a complete experience. You need add-ons. 

1 hour ago, Nemo said:

That's why I think LM itself should improve AI to a new level just to keep their advantage over MSFS at least in study level a/c and AI traffic.

I just don't think that'll happen. How often in training scenarios do you need comprehensive real-world AI & ATC? From what I can see, when ATC is required for a training simulation, they tend to just have a person in the back at the sim station communicating over the headset. 

1 minute ago, neilhewitt said:

LM is consistently improving performance with each release. That's no small thing. I can now run with higher settings at a given FPS level than I could in 5.1, which was better than 5.0, which was leagues ahead of 4.5. But a great platform isn't a complete experience. You need add-ons. 

100% agree.  I wouldnt have dreamed of VFR flying at solid 50fps all settings maxed even a couple of years ago.  Or getting solid 30fps in the NGXu inc traffic with some to spare.  And we have a great set of addons already available to trick it out.  Even if development stopped for new addons completely, P3D will remain a viable sim for years to come. [and a good job because having invested in a 3090 my significant other will roast me alive if I spend any more on hardware 😉 ]

5 hours ago, Nemo said:

I wish I could look forward to a completely reworked ai traffic: AI a/c following reasonable procedures on landing and T/O and an improved logic of moving on ground. Flying study-level airliners is one, if not the only, strength of P3D over MSFS. If P3D wants to keep this position improved ai traffic is essential imo.

VOXATC already provided this.

24 minutes ago, neilhewitt said:

From what I can see, when ATC is required for a training simulation, they tend to just have a person in the back at the sim station communicating over the headset. 

In P3d5 multiplayer, a user can act as a tower air traffic controller rather than a pilot. The implementation is somewhat clunky but it does work.

1 hour ago, kevinfirth said:

I am super impressed with how P3D is stacking up against MSFS at the moment still, when it has decent PR scenery to work with.  Yes, default scenery could do with some improvements in comparison, of that there's no doubt, but when loaded up, I'm finding that I actually prefer EA.  However, this is a price of admission game, you need a beefy machine to get smoothness AND quality.  Not everyone can afford that, and I think that's where the strategic mindset of P3D and MSFS is diverging.  P3D to me seems to be built for tomorrow's performance, MSFS seems to be (for the time being at least) more oriented towards the middle end of the hardware spectrum.

I tried EA a few times but judged it purely from the point of how the skies looked from the ground. I never flew and judged the effect of the ground with the change in lighting. It is mostly impressive but I’m still struggling with the VC being too dark. How are you coping with that?

I’ve not noticed any impact on fps. It seems to remain at 30 throughout. Maybe I need to try some serious weather like that over England today.

Don’t remind me of FSX when it first appeared. At a show in Birmingham the computers in the Microsoft stand could barely hit double figures. It was the worst performing release I can remember. In comparison today’s machines can handle it with ease.

11 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

How are you coping with that?

I use biologicalnanobot's hdr.hlsl shader mod from the P3D forum. Easy to do, just backup a file then cut and paste some code. 

https://www.prepar3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6312&t=142594&start=15

Alternatively, before that, or even in conjunction, I sometimes use FSLabs spotlights to get any VC just how I like it.

Edited August 6, 20214 yr by kevinfirth