Future of p3d ?

[Ray Proudfoot 8,963]

19 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

I have just checked the price of Nvidia RTX cards on Amazon UK, and it seems that "stupid" was an understatement

When you have an effective monopoly you can charge whatever you feel you can get away with.

[sim4life 24]

5 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Why not list them so we can cross check? I’ll tell you the ones they have fixed…

1) Takeoff and landing options for both ends of a runway can now be chosen.

2) Vehicle road traffic no longer causes stutters every few seconds.

3) The pause as you cross the Prime Meridian in London has been fixed.

4) The load of the simulator has been spread across 3 primary cores instead of just one.

I’ll leave you to post the rest.

So after about 13 years, those are your highlights regarding the 20 year old bugs. Yeah you kind of proof my point here.

At my work I would be expected to fix all of the above and more on an afternoon or I'd be fired for slacking.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,963]

2 minutes ago, sim4life said:

So after about 13 years, those are your highlights regarding the 20 year old bugs. Yeah you kind of proof my point here.

At my work I would be expected to fix all of the above and more on an afternoon or I'd be fired for slacking.

I’m still waiting for you to list the bugs you feel should be fixed. Perhaps you can’t find them. You know what they say about empty barrels.

[sim4life 24]

5 hours ago, Juliet Alpha said:

Hummmmmmmmmmm.............................

Alright, prove me wrong then. 

You know, people left P3D not necessarily because the developers of the other sims were so outstanding. They left because LM was so terrible.

People in here should target their anger and disappointment against LM, not against the other sims or at the 3rd party developers who left.

It was LM who caused this, not the other sims.

 

[shivers9 1,174]

I have to wonder what would happen if we all went over to the MS 2020 forum and started to badmouth Bill Gates and Microsoft and how they have dumped their customers two or three times over the years. I suspect that the moderators would not let that go on. The fact that we are mature enough here in this forum that we would not do that makes me believe the future of P 3-D will continue to be very bright.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,963]

15 minutes ago, sim4life said:

Again, your illusion that no FSX bugs remains just proves my point.

You’ve had two opportunities now to list the bugs and have failed to do so. Then you post yet another diatribe against P3D and LM. I’ve hidden your latest post and any repetition will earn you a holiday.

[jlohrenz 133]

Here's an idea how about we lock this until we know more?  My guess is within the next 30 days we will know what the future if p3d is.  60 pages of conjecture and arguments seems to only prove that not all people can act like adults 😒

[PavlinS 179]

I agree too. I spend too much time focusing on drama. No more, I promise. 

Edited May 6, 2023 by PavlinS

[Rogen 1,092]

2 hours ago, jlohrenz said:

Here's an idea how about we lock this until we know more?  My guess is within the next 30 days we will know what the future if p3d is.  60 pages of conjecture and arguments seems to only prove that not all people can act like adults 😒

Nar... what's the point of doing that ?

There will always be conjecture and speculation given LM being a mostly defence orientiated company who keep their mouth shut.

And it's interesting to read what people come up with, even those MSFS zealots do on occasion manage to hit a point.

But whoever that fellow was, saying that bugs were not fixed as compared to FSX is pretty wrong, you've only got to take a fly in FSX vs. P3D to see, and on occasion I do do just that to remind myself of the problems of FSX given there is a tendancy to take for granted what there currently is in P3D.

I mean there are massive differences between FSX and P3D coding wise.

Unfortuantely the one difference that's in your face is the default scenery, which I'm sad to say hasn't improved to any meaningful extent since FSX (and in some instances has even gone backwards - e.g. parking allowances at default airports in the current 5 release and various other shortcomings).

Software does always become stale and I've seen many enterprise software products fall by the wayside, typically where they've been resold, the original developers are gone and the new company is unable to bring the software up to date, at which point a new upstart will arrive and start taking the business of the incumbernt.

LM at least did it right from the very beginning with the ESP code base, i.e. they had some of the original developers on board, they spent a lot of initial time in code review and recoding (I believe some of the hardest was the removel of pieces of assembler code), while still keeping an extremely high level of backwards compatibility, which is no feat to be dismissed.

Personally I'm hoping for a "fixed 5.3" that resolves the current outstanding and introduced issues of 5.3, along with a redeveloped set of dev tools (because once you've done some dev work with P3D you realise how dreadfully primitive they are) and an improved dev pipeline (so you don't have to constantly exit and restart just to see a single change).

And I'd welcome an intelligent scenery alignment method that aligns the textures of landclass to roads instead of just overlaying streets on top of textures.

Or perhaps LM could use their vast resources to create ortho like that of @MatthiasKNU as a download option, even as a subscription base would be good.

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/633675-photosceneries-and-autogen-for-the-p3d-world/

 

And of course there is the complete new sim option based on the UnReal engine v5. Such a change would suit LMs new customers given the sim would be commercially built for a specific purpose and probably with a budget in the 10s of millions of $$.

All speculation of course :-)

Cheers

[David Vega 348]

I think P3D has a future as long as LM's main customers have a need for it. Let's call those customers Joe and Jane. If we could ask them what they would like to see in P3D they may give us a strange look since it's most likely they think of their training devices where P3D is only a component. We know it's likely they would like to keep their cost low (no new super-duper PC to power it), good VR, reasonable outside visuals, and lean. I'm sure they're not interested in accumulating achievements or seeing which one gets the smoothest landing rate, etc. Joe and Jane fly these airplanes for real, so they really are not interested in having a training device that depicts every blade of grass, every hole on the taxiway. While they would find a simulation of arriving and departing passengers into their simulated aircraft silly, they would want to see a smooth visual representation of other aircraft in their airspace (the aircraft of the other pilots sitting on training devices physically in the same room, or miles away). Would they want comprehensive simulated ATC? No. Would it really matter if simulated aircraft have correct airline liveries? No. Weather with clouds that one could use to hide from other aircraft, yes. An accurate simulation of the pneumatic system in a B747-400F? No. 

I think this is why LM saw good potential in the ESP platform. They needed to add a little to satisfy Joe and Jane's requirements, and that's what they have been doing. 

We, on the other hand, are a bunch of demanding nuts that want our simulator to model the world and the airplanes that we fly in it as real as it gets (have you seen the flushing toilets in some of the commercial addons?) Since MS abandoned us when they stopped FSX, we ran to P3D because it offered hope. Of course, the developers cheered us into it too. Recall when they started saying that they were not going to support FSX and would exclusively support P3D? Thought there are still some happy FSX users, I think the majority was influenced to switch to P3D or XP. I switched from FSX to P3Dv4 because I was tired of the FSX CTDs. Remember how cool it was not to worry anymore about memory limitations? MS didn't help itself when they introduced MS Fly and a weird subscription model. Influential developers also balked at Flight Sim World effectively killing it. 

Some folks left P3D for other simulators that best satisfy their requirements. Some of those even come back here to tell P3D users what they're missing. They, of course assume that all our requirements are the same. Some P3D users are content with their current setup and would like to see what P3D brings, but would continue using P3D, even if there's no future for it. I think it's great that we have the freedom to decide. We don't have to be  monosimulator users (I'm making this up). For example, as I write this, I'm simulating a cargo flight for a virtual airline on a B747-400F from KMIA to SAEZ. It's an 8hr flight time, but I'm free to leave the simulator running, confident that it will automatically pause about 10 miles before TOD. I mean a complete pause, including the passage of time. Other simulators don't have this feature or don't have it yet. 

If you read this far, thank you. I think P3D will be around for a while and I hope we have the freedom to purchase future licenses. 

 

[bofhlusr 453]

10 hours ago, jlohrenz said:

Here's an idea how about we lock this until we know more?  My guess is within the next 30 days we will know what the future if p3d is.  60 pages of conjecture and arguments seems to only prove that not all people can act like adults 😒

A thought just occurred to me.

Let's really think about what it could mean to lock this topic with a title of "The Future of P3D". Talk about dreams or nightmares coming true.

 Don't lock this topic. Wouldn't it be highly symbolic if this topic is locked or frozen? 🙂

[Luke 782]

21 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Really? I still have P3D v3 and the stuttering as I approach UK2000 Gatwick is dreadful. In comparison the performance approaching the same airport in v5.3 is transformed.

Try setting your AffinityMask to 1, 2, 4 (or any other power of two) to force it onto a single core and let me know if things stay the same 🙂

I don't disagree that things have improved significantly in P3Dv5 but it's a process and didn't just start then. The challenge of breaking up a single-threaded monolith like FS9 and early FSX into using multiple threads is discovering the data dependencies and locks/stalls created when you move something out.

If you're seeing fewer stalls when approaching an airport it does make me believe that they've added scenery loading onto its own async thread which should make a huge difference. I don't think it was (as much of) a problem in the FS9 days because scenery complexity was so much lower.

Cheers

[Ray Proudfoot 8,963]

10 minutes ago, Luke said:

Try setting your AffinityMask to 1, 2, 4 (or any other power of two) to force it onto a single core and let me know if things stay the same 🙂

Sorry, but I have no real desire to experiment like this. Here's my current AM settings.

[JobScheduler]
AffinityMask=4053
P3DCoreAffinityMask=4053
MainThreadScheduler=0
RenderThreadScheduler=1
FrameWorkerThreadScheduler=2

[QuaxTheSnoopie 16]

Assuming P3D V6 is based on Unreal Engine, I would expect

• the need to buy all airports, aircraft, tools again (I suppose "we have no plans to make major architectural changes" doesn't mean, addons don't have to be rebuild by the developer - and mostly payed again as history has shown)
• fiddling with performance settings without historical knowledge from FSX or P3D V3,4,5
• wasting time to get hardware (controllers) and software working again

It will be interesting what advantages and what realism will be delivered for flying an aircraft, thinking about

• Turboprob behaviour
• Heli flying
• VOR as ATIS
• Other bugs since FSX times resolved

Or will V6 contain mainly optical enhancements or (worst of all) will it be more like one of these UE based games ("missions") ?

We will see...

Edited May 7, 2023 by QuaxTheSnoopie

[DD_Arthur 1,050]

37 minutes ago, sim4life said:

You really can't see what's going on?

I haven’t got a horse in this race but I really can’t see what any of the above has to do with ‘Future of p3d?’