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Future of p3d ?

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All we know is LM wants V6 to be backwards compatible.  So we’ll have a to wait and see what that means exactly 


Orman

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On 5/1/2023 at 1:37 AM, PavlinS said:

It was me. But I think I caused it, because I shared negative opinion about the need to have 3 NZ sceneries for P3D when clearly whole Asia sits and does not have a single terrain scenery for it. 

Pavlin, I note a large number of posts from you about your scenery project, and it seems you’re suggesting it as either a community or commercial project.

From your other post, it seems you’re a beginner-level user of Ortho4P3D.

It’s worth clarifying from the outset that if you’re using Ortho4P3D, it’s a personal project and not really of relevance to other simmers. You can’t distribute the scenery you make.

I’ve been building scenery with FSEarthTiles and Ortho4XP for many years, probably have 20 gig including much of Asia - but it doesn’t really help anyone here, because to distribute it I’d need to acquire rights to the aerial imagery, which would be impossibly expensive. Even commercial photoscenery providers can’t usually licence Ortho4XP-quality imagery due to the cost, they typically need to use lower-quality imagery.

 

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No more questions to @PavlinSon his project please. @PavlinS start a new topic please. Any more posts on your project in this topic will be hidden.


Ray (Cheshire, England).
System: P3D v5.3HF2, Intel i9-13900K, MSI 4090 GAMING X TRIO 24G, Crucial T700 4Tb M.2 SSD, Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Hero, 32Gb Corsair Vengeance DDR5 6000Mhz RAM, Win 11 Pro 64-bit, BenQ PD3200U 32” UHD monitor, Fulcrum One yoke.
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PavlinS’s last post has been moved here.

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/633603-my-p3d-ortho-project/

 


Ray (Cheshire, England).
System: P3D v5.3HF2, Intel i9-13900K, MSI 4090 GAMING X TRIO 24G, Crucial T700 4Tb M.2 SSD, Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Hero, 32Gb Corsair Vengeance DDR5 6000Mhz RAM, Win 11 Pro 64-bit, BenQ PD3200U 32” UHD monitor, Fulcrum One yoke.
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5 hours ago, okupton said:

All we know is LM wants V6 to be backwards compatible.  So we’ll have a to wait and see what that means exactly 

Laminar said this about xp12,  it's far from backwards compatible 

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I'm good either way in terms of compatibility but whatever way that gets developers coming back is the route I am hoping for. It will be monetary pain but whatever. lol


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17 hours ago, David Vega said:

@Baber20, there is an article saying that LM is "... engaged in long-term R&D efforts to create next-gen simulation solutions based on Unreal Engine." This, combined with wishful thinking, led to the speculations about P3Dv6 using UE5, but there are no indications either way.

I didn't know LM were focusing on creating something around Unreal Engine, that's a fascinating article.  A flight simulator developed using Unreal Engine has been wished by many in the flight simulator community for years.  If they actually do it, whether it be P3Dv6 or P3Dv7 I'm all in.

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10 hours ago, ywg256 said:

I'm good either way in terms of compatibility but whatever way that gets developers coming back is the route I am hoping for. It will be monetary pain but whatever. lol

This!!

if it has backward compatibility we will not spend to much money because whatever we already have will work. Which is great for us, but, is it going to bring developers back?


Ramon De Valencia

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Personally I don’t think LM will go with the Unreal Engine for v6. They’ll be aware developers have deserted P3D for MSFS. Two reasons. 1) Far greater number of customers and 2) scenery is much easier to create than for P3D and looks better and is cheaper.

If they did go for the radical change we’d be faced with the nightmare scenario of no backward compatibility and very few developers prepared to make their products work with it.

As I see it the only way LM can attract more users and developers back is to make P3D (or whatever it would be called) more attractive than MSFS.

That would mean full third party involvement for the weather engine. Scenery being close to satellite imagery and crucially, not streamed, and no forced updates. Now how you do that is beyond my comprehension. Better scenery design tools would be important too.

It’s quite a task. But unless sufficient improvements are made to v6 over v5.3 then people will be reluctant to buy. The magic point is significant improvements but retaining backward compatibility. Tricky!

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Ray (Cheshire, England).
System: P3D v5.3HF2, Intel i9-13900K, MSI 4090 GAMING X TRIO 24G, Crucial T700 4Tb M.2 SSD, Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Hero, 32Gb Corsair Vengeance DDR5 6000Mhz RAM, Win 11 Pro 64-bit, BenQ PD3200U 32” UHD monitor, Fulcrum One yoke.
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Basically, the problem is this: P3D was never intended to be a mass-market entertainment product, and it never was. The simming community latched onto it (after a while) as a replacement for FSX, and the developer community around FSX gradually moved to P3D, and for a long time your choice as a hobby simmer was P3D or X-Plane. People who came to P3D were generally either existing simmers moving from an earlier platform, or people deliberately getting into the hobby after research. You couldn't go to the games store and buy P3D. You couldn't buy it on Steam. You couldn't order it on Amazon. You had to know it existed, go to prepar3d.com, and buy online. Developers made products for P3D because it was the main game in town post-FSX. Now it isn't, which is why they've abandoned it.

LM doesn't need to make P3D an MSFS-killer in order to sell it to their primary customer base, so IMHO it's wishful thinking to assume they're spending their time doing that. They don't need a thriving after-market of scenery developers and aircraft developers, either. The big P3D customers generally either provide their own content or they hire a 3rd party to develop it for them. Milviz, Mindstar etc used to make most of their money that way AIUI. Those products were rarely made available to us, so the simmer product market was mostly separate. Whether it lives or dies, P3D goes on. Even if they wanted to, and they don't, LM can't sell it as a mass-market entertainment product. Their license with Microsoft doesn't allow it. So that route to competing for mindshare and market share is closed.

Let's suppose LM does make P3D significantly better than any other platform out there. Suppose they have integrated UE5 and transformed the graphics, and have full ortho world scenery and AI buildings, and a better weather simulation, and all of those things. I'm quite certain they haven't, but suppose they have. Who's going to come back to P3D? Simmers. People like us. Not gamers who are invested in the Xbox ecosystem, or casual players who might be streaming MSFS on cloud gaming, or people who bought it because they were curious or had GamePass, and maybe play a little bit now and then. What % of the MSFS market do fully-invested simmers make up? I have no hard numbers, but I'd be surprised if it's more than a third. So, maybe a third of the market decamps back to P3D overnight, two thirds remain on MSFS; what are developers going to do then? These would be completely different platforms. They would need more teams, more people, different tools, more investment up-front to cover both platforms. If they were smart, they would stick with the basket they already have their eggs in and wait for simmers to realise that while New P3D might be technically better (like Betamax), it still doesn't have the developer support, and migrate back. 

I know that all sounds terribly bleak, but I believe it's the truth. I believe v6 will be an incremental improvement over v5 with one or two major new features (no idea what they will be) and those who choose to stick with the platform will be able to use whatever add-ons they have that still work with it, but that's it. There's not going to be a huge migration of developers back to P3D. I cannot see anything LM could do that would bring them back as long as there's a mass-market alternative with hundreds of thousands of regular users and millions of casual ones. 

I cancelled my developer subscription to P3D last month, so I no longer have a license to run the product, and I don't see me coming back for v6. After the time and money I've invested in it over the years, that sucks, but for me at least, it's just no longer worth it. TBH I'll probably stop posting here since I no longer have much relevant to say about P3D (this essay notwithstanding). But this is a great community and I hope it continues for a long time. I hope v6 is brilliant. But I don't think it can possibly live up to the hype.

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32 minutes ago, neilhewitt said:

I believe v6 will be an incremental improvement over v5 with one or two major new features (no idea what they will be) and those who choose to stick with the platform will be able to use whatever add-ons they have that still work with it, but that's it.

I also believe this, and I believe this is the best-cast scenario. LM won't want to, and aren't allowed to, make a product that appeals more to the masses than MSFS does. So let them build on the strengths that P3D has and improve the overall package.


Best regards, Dimitrios

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22 minutes ago, d.tsakiris said:

I also believe this, and I believe this is the best-cast scenario. LM won't want to, and aren't allowed to, make a product that appeals more to the masses than MSFS does. So let them build on the strengths that P3D has and improve the overall package.

For one, I don't like fs 2020.

Unlike it's predecessor FSX, fs 2020 is not accessible to we who need to use a screen reader program to interact with our computer.

So, I can't wait to see what p3d v6 has to offer to we the blind.

Also, for we rich playboy flight sim pilots, here's hoping that someone can design a Dassault Falcon 8X.

In the real world the DF8X is the successor to the older df7x.

Why would one want to upgrade to the newer 8x?

1. it's newer. SMILES.

2. The fuel is 35 percent more efficient onbord the 8x over the 7X.

3. The DF8X flies 500 NM further than the DF7x.

I have a awesome Pittsburgh Steelers football tem paint job on my 7x that I'd love to revise if someone could help me out.

Very Thankfully Yours, 

Ron Kolesar

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1 hour ago, neilhewitt said:

I cancelled my developer subscription to P3D last month, so I no longer have a license to run the product, and I don't see me coming back for v6. After the time and money I've invested in it over the years, that sucks, but for me at least, it's just no longer worth it.

Neil, I’ve always thought of you as a P3D stalwart. Why have you stopped using it? XP perhaps? Surely not to MSFS. Or have you run out of love with flight simming in general?


Ray (Cheshire, England).
System: P3D v5.3HF2, Intel i9-13900K, MSI 4090 GAMING X TRIO 24G, Crucial T700 4Tb M.2 SSD, Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Hero, 32Gb Corsair Vengeance DDR5 6000Mhz RAM, Win 11 Pro 64-bit, BenQ PD3200U 32” UHD monitor, Fulcrum One yoke.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but if LM built its next-gen flight sim on Unreal engine or some non-ESP platform, wouldn't that solve the "can't compete with Microsoft" restrictions?

Regardless, I think Neil is correct that LM isn't worrying itself about the niche simmer market.  It obviously has major contracts where it is busy fulling those requirements and not those of simmers.  Heck, maybe LM doesn't even sell the next gen sim to the public.

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