The biggest problem is that most simmers don't not even really know what P3D is for or what LM does. P3D was never focused on us either way, its main market is military simulation and of course for their in-house fighter jet simulators. They are still going to manufacture one of the most advanced fighter jets in the world and the United States will keep funding and buying it and selling them all over the world worth billions. Do you really think they will stop the development of their platform due to another game in the market? 😛 (No am not mocking MSFS by calling it GAME, but that's how anyone outside the world of "simming" will refer to it as). We were just like an uninvited guests to the party. We pushed on to P3D since there was no other option for us.

Same goes for XPlane, their primary market is flight schools. While they "try" to show to us that they care about our interests, its clear by looking at the platform only that they don't, the primary reason why Austin spent 265693892 hours only on its flight model. One sale of a professional license of XPlane equals to 100s of sim/casual users.

With regards to the backward compatibility, nobody can guarantee you that in the real world. What works today might not work tomorrow, that's how things are. But be assured, looking at the history of P3D, even the older FSX airports still work in the latest version of P3D (they just don't look that good haha), so you do not have to worry about that at all. ORBX is still making new products for P3D and they will/should continue to do so.

Edited June 24, 20223 yr by Nocturnal

34 minutes ago, Nocturnal said:

We were just like an uninvited guests to the party

Sorry, but this is total nonsense !!!

8 hours ago, ggerolamo said:

what does outdated mean in your terminology ?
Buggy ? not pretty enough ? ....?
 

Outdated.  Santa Rosa is a good example.  The RWY was extended many many years ago but ORBX scenery didn’t  incorporated any updates for it…and this was well before MSFS was released. 

I frequently read about this idea that P3D is only about military customers, so don't expect Lockheed Martin to cater to a non-military market.

Sorry, but I just don't buy that for 2 main reasons:

1. They offer an academic license which costs a lot less.  This is not aimed at commercial defense-related customers.

2. They have an active forum and respond to non-military customers, adding features and fixing bugs that are asked for and reported by non-military customers.

In fact, I believe that they actual benefit from the knowledge and experience of thousands of non-professional flightsimmers, and leverage that to improve the product for their military customers.

Dave

While it's true LM do sell to the airforces of the world and make a lot of income doing so.

The sim itself is an approved and licensed for commercial use product and is used in practically all small / medium commercial flight simulators.

e.g. https://melbourne.flightexperience.com.au/pages/experiences

I remember the somewhat desponsive feeling when MS wound up dev on FSX, and the uplift when I found out LM took over and output P3D.

Then fell back into despondancy when the pricing was announced, which initally was clearly aimed at commercial enterprises and way beyond my affordabilty.

Then along came the Academic version, at just the right price point and feature set to be a viable replacement for FSX, and here we are 🙂

 

Also the thing about commecial use software is change is often undesirable in the short term.

• Change brings additional training and documentation requirements.
• Change would have a need for acceptance testing and potential recifications in both the software itself and in third party components.
• Change brings downtime that needs to be minimimised as it prevents the product and it's users earning income the business needs to survive and flourish.

Essentually in the commercial world change brings unknowns that have to be costed and budgeted for, meaning change does happen, just not at pace that would overwhelm the  available resources.

The firm I work for releases software updates almost weekly, however customers typically update in 5 year intervals, usually when there are hardware refreshes or major operating system updates are forced upon them.

 

LM's airforce side of things produces sims like the below pic, I believe the package is in the 10 ~40 million $$ range in todays $$

If a company make in excess of 400 million $$ a year selling and supporting these beasts I would think they would likely be continuing such product advancement.

https://aviationphotodigest.com/raaf-the-next-generation/

Personally i have taken advantage of a few of their products during the sale ( EFHK/LYBE/LDSP/EIDW and ORBX Ireland) being a long time FSX user and recently started using P3D 4.5 on my other rig its nice to see some products that have been designed with P3D in mind at a great price. 

I must admit I have been looking at EU Germany North/South but am still on the fence on this one.

 

 

20 hours ago, Dazkent said:

Personally i have taken advantage of a few of their products during the sale ( EFHK/LYBE/LDSP/EIDW and ORBX Ireland) being a long time FSX user and recently started using P3D 4.5 on my other rig its nice to see some products that have been designed with P3D in mind at a great price. 

I must admit I have been looking at EU Germany North/South but am still on the fence on this one.

 

 

I own Germany North and South since they were released. I didn't regret it. 

Thank you all for your replies. My original post was about the buying decision for the orbx sale. I pulled my wallet and bought TE GB North and I think next week I will buy 1 or 2 airports. 

And still hoping for a P3D v5.4 coming soon with improvements for vol. clouds and a few other things. For the most I am a happy P3D user.