P3D V7 in 2025 or 2026?

[dave2013]

3 hours ago, Beardyman said:

I would be delighted if LM finally fix broken time zones, seasons calendar

Yeah, the time zones would be an easy fix, but I guess LM doesn't consider this to be important.

The seasons are another matter.  It would take a tremendous amount of work to develop an accurate season map for every date and location on the planet.  The stock seasons file does a decent job to be fair, but it is far from accurate for much of the world.  I'm curious if MSFS2024 has accurate seasons and what it does to render the seasonal changes.

Dave

[Beardyman]

Honestly, taking into account how many years of active development has passed and what state of sim do we have, i doubt that V7 would be a major breakthrough - not with this team.

[CAP1234]

The biggest question will be - will V7 be good enough for simmers/developers to return to P3D. Unfortunately with V6 - it failed to attract many existing developers back. Mind you nowadays P3D main clients are commercial contractors (airlines/regulatory/FTO/military. Etc) But on non commercial side - it is highly unlikely to motivate simmers to return if developers don't return. Many simmers go where developers go unfortunately and that just how it goes. But I am keen to see what it brings. 

[CO2Neutral]

On 1/2/2025 at 12:01 AM, blaunarwal said:

This thread is just another try to ride a dead horse.

$1000 bet?  Or just BSing?  Money where your mouth is?

 

On 1/1/2025 at 10:45 PM, Beardyman said:

All possible bells and whistles are irrelevant if 3rd party developers will not come back.

Depends what comes out of the box and how good the SDK is.  MSFS had zero developer support on release.  If it is good … more accurately “selling well”, they will come … even more so if the SDK is far easier to use and leverages existing AAA title engines for graphics.

[blaunarwal]

13 hours ago, CO2Neutral said:

$1000 bet?  Or just BSing?  Money where your mouth is?

I should have explained myself a bit deeper but deleted my explanations after the statement from riding a dead horse.

I don't know how long you use Prepar3D but according to your profile, you did not see Prepar3D's developement the last 14 years. I know the story of FS since over 30 years and I can tell you, LM did not much improve FSX regarding the simulation of flight. The depiction of the scenery improved a bit but too little in 14 years. Without ORBX, Hifi Sim and TOGA P3D5 still looks like FSX from 2006. Under the hood is now DX12 and 64-bit and it's VR capable. But still the sim stutters from time to time because they did not manage to create a process to load scenery fluently. They probably didn't even look into it. The ATC is still the same as with FSX. Default airports are still looking like FSX. What we have are still Bruce Artwicks genious ideas, he had decades ago. Nobody came after him, to improve this sim.

So LM published v6 and the most v5 users did not buy it. Developers did not jump up the train. They just made some tests how much they could sell us for P3D6. It seems it was not enough, since the publishing of V6 addons ceased. Does it make sense to speculate on a version 7? The last four years were not that bad. From time to time new products were release for P3D5 from new developers but that came to a very slow pace now. 

A v7 may come but then it will not be something we want.

 

 

[vadriver]

22 minutes ago, blaunarwal said:

you did not see Prepar3D's developement the last 14 years

so ....

[Rimshot]

22 minutes ago, blaunarwal said:

A v7 may come but then it will not be something we want.

No way you could know that, unless you work for LM. If a P3D v7 would appear and it would be good, I think I and many others will be all over it.

[sloppysmusic]

1 hour ago, Rimshot said:

No way you could know that, unless you work for LM. If a P3D v7 would appear and it would be good, I think I and many others will be all over it.

I agree, I expect they'd do some market research during development to see what serious simmers and flight trainers want. Unless they pull off a graphical miracle or make a great deal with a live map service the success will depend entirely on how good the flight simulation itself is. 

I paid for the pro version of 5 this year (my first p3d) and decided to hold off 6 and wait for 7 as msfs satisfies my tourist flying (and not much else sadly).

 

[FPVSteve]

On 1/2/2025 at 6:45 AM, Beardyman said:

All possible bells and whistles are irrelevant if 3rd party developers will not come back.

Have to say given the frustration around MSFS 2024, the uncertainty going forwards and the similarity between 2020 and P3D SDKs it is probably the best time for P3D to become a consideration again. If you are, say, PMDG and hyper-focused on being realistic... do you really care that much about the consumer market of casual flyers? They seemed to make a decent living with the "niche" hobbyist for many years before MSFS existed...

[blaunarwal]

3 hours ago, Rimshot said:

No way you could know that, unless you work for LM. If a P3D v7 would appear and it would be good, I think I and many others will be all over it.

As a user not having gotten what I wanted for 14 years, I don't expect LM to change that way in future. They took a branch away from us with v6. Do you really expect them to pull back and make a new attempt, without breaking compatibility of all our addons. No way.

[Rimshot]

34 minutes ago, blaunarwal said:

I don't expect LM to change that way in future

Well ok then, it's your expectation. Previously you stated it as fact, saying:

4 hours ago, blaunarwal said:

it will not be something we want

That of course, no one knows. I do share your pessimism to be honest, but like I said, if there will be a v7 with significant improvements I'll be the first one to purchase.

[Luke]

2 hours ago, FPVSteve said:

If you are, say, PMDG and hyper-focused on being realistic... do you really care that much about the consumer market of casual flyers? They seemed to make a decent living with the "niche" hobbyist for many years before MSFS existed...

They care about people who give them money, not what they do with the aircraft. A casual flyer's money is worth just as much as the next guy's, and there's a lot more of it.

Cheers

[okupton]

41 minutes ago, Luke said:

They care about people who give them money, not what they do with the aircraft. A casual flyer's money is worth just as much as the next guy's, and there's a lot more of it.

Cheers

Agree with Luke here.  As much as I’d like to agree with Steve’s thoughts on this, PMDG or any other developer are businesses and are likely making far more money off of Msfs than they could have dreamed of from p3d.  They don’t care if people are flying their planes as intended or doing aerobatics. Money is money.

[Patco Lch]

Luke hit the nail on the head and this is why I’m happy to be content with my current P3DV5 with all my addons then following developers from one platform to another as a member of the cash cow league.

[UrgentSiesta]

On 1/1/2025 at 10:43 AM, CO2Neutral said:

Will it be available for Training, Entertainment, Commercial, or Military?

Will it bring streaming scenery?

What will it be based on, ESP or UE5 or something else?

Will it support multiple computers like P3D?

Will it be compatible with P3D V4.4+ products?

Will the SDK/PDK be easier to use and real-time updates in sim to avoided round-trips?

Will 3DSMax work look the same in V7 as it does in 3DSMax to avoid "adjustments" workflow?

Will SimConnect evolve into something far more sophisticated and leverage high performance networking?

I'm thinking V7 will be in 2026 on a entirely new engine ... not sure if it will be UE5 as I'm unclear if UE5 world partition is good enough to support flying the entire Earth.

Lets see how many MSFS users bring that "negativity" they so do hate to this thread.  Remember, you can hate every other platform, but not MSFS. 😉 

 

EDIT: before you say P3D V7 doesn't exist, I already know it does and no, I'm not going to give away my sources ... believe me or not, doesn't matter.

 

You've shared nothing that LM themselves haven't already confirmed.

The only question is, "will the next gen "P3D" be made available to consumers?"