Bob Scott

It's still a little early to declare victory, but I believe I found the problem--the intel Killer Performance Suite that came installed on my Acer gaming laptop. It intercepts internet comms on both WiFi and ethernet and attempts to prioritize traffic for games and some other applications...have had around 10 consecutive successful starts of P2ATC since removing it. 🤞🤞🤞

Thanks Dave...I have 1.2Gbps service here--everything else is humming along nicely. Program is explicitly allowed through the firewall. Any other ideas?

Lately it's taking me multiple attempts to get P2ATC to start. It sometimes takes 5-6 attempts to get the program to start...when it doesn't, I see an error page like this:

If you go past ~90%, writes to the SSD will slow down...read speeds are largely unaffected. So if the device is used for "write once read many times" (e.g. scenery/aircraft add-ons) you can fill it up, but putting something like the rolling cache on a full drive would be a problem. SSD storage is getting so cheap now that it's a crime to fill one up, anyway. I saw a 2TB Samsung 980 PCIe4 NVME drive on sale at Newegg for $134 the other day.

I definitely prefer to see progress reports, even those that indicate some lack of intended progress, rather than living in the cone of silence for a year or more.

Well KLAX actually has two pairs of parallel runways, so four runways in simultaneous operation, compared to KSFO's two pairs of crossed runways, which keeps things down to two operating at once. Can't speak specifically to the hows/whys of traffic SOPs at KSFO. I'd imagine wake turbulence separation requirements still make simultaneous arrival/departure ops on both runways more efficient in terms of throughput. You can launch a departure as soon as landing traffic clears the runway, where you have to wait 2-4 minutes between large/heavy/super acft departures. If you can interlace the arrivals and departures on a runway, you can realistically move an acft every minute, versus one every 2-4 minutes for departure or arrival-only ops when you have to observe 2-4 minutes departure separation and 4-8 mile arrival separation.

I keep P3Dv4.5 installed for a handful of add-on acft that use the Rex/Milviz radar (Flysimware bizjets, Milviz KingAir 350i et al), for the many nice Orbx freeware sceneries that were never updated to v5 (one of their most prolific freeware creators died), and for the Return to Misty Moorings sceneries up in the Pacific Northwest. P3Dv5's biggest benefit to me was mostly a performance gain when operating complex add-ons into busy, complex airport add-ons. v4.5 still works great in the less-populated areas, and applying the sheer horsepower of a 13900K and 4090 makes it work pretty well even in the busy places.

The WX Advantage Radar is incompatible with P3D versions after P3Dv5.1 due to LM making changes to the hooks into the P3D weather system and the developer's decision not to update it further. I actually discovered I still had a couple planes with that radar added in when I did my last rebuild, which I corrected at install time. The radar causes a CTD if you try and run it on v5.2 or later. The RealAir products are still available for download by previously licensed customers at http://realairsimulations.net/

OK, folks, this inevitably ended up in yet another variation of the same sim vs sim foodfight. Locked.

Because posting three photos of MSFS with commentary about fixing MSFS is nonresponsive to the question of why someone might use P3D. We're keeping this thread on a short leash--we do not want/need another "my sim vs your sim" Donnybrook.

Please do not hijack the thread. The topic is why people use P3D.

You can, of course, add it to your signature or to the member title in your profile. We have an admin-controlled tag for commercial product developers/marketers so that their status is visible to all--this minimizes potential for conflicts of interest. If I'm advocating for the FlySilly add-on, it's important for folks to know that I might be the developer of FlySilly...or if I'm harshly criticizing it, it might be good to know if I'm a dev associated with a competing product.

I can see how this might happen...tower controller calls for an IFR release on a jet holding for takeoff with another on final 10 miles out, departure controller tells him he'll have a release in a minute, tower clears the departing jet onto hold, and then approach doesn't come through with the IFR release due to other emerging traffic considerations. Having it happen twice to one jet is probably (hopefully) pretty rare. A go-around from 4 miles out on final is inconvenient, but not unsafe. But the alternative to dovetailing the traffic flow like that is a real slowdown in the throughput on the runway, which can become a big problem in its own right at a large busy airport. When you're trying to fit ten lbs of doo-doo into a five lb bag, you're gonna get some on ya from time to time.

I keep working installations of P3Dv5, P3Dv4, X-Plane12, X-Plane11, and MSFS installed across three different machines. What I look for most of the time in a sim is high-quality flight dynamics and avionics, and an accurate and user-controllable weather environment. In P3D I have a large hangar chock-full of very good aircraft to choose from...the PMDG 737/747/777, the FSL Scarebusses, RealAir Turbine Duke, Milviz Kingair 350i, Turbo Otter, Cessna 310, and T-38A, Majestic Dash-8, Leonardo Maddog MD-83/87/88, FSW Lear 35, Aerosoft DC-8 etc. X-Plane keeps my interest with some planes I don't have in P3D--the Hotstart Challenger 650, Flight Factor B757/767, FlyJSim B-727, Aerobask Phenom 300 and Lancair Legacy, Felis B747-200 etc. Hats off to Working Title for their AAU update in MSFS, which has put the Citation Longitude and TBM930 on my list of simulated airplanes I'm not embarassed to own. With ActiveSky, in P3D (and XPlane) I can set weather based on live real-time conditions or back to another point in time. I can fly a winter leg in Scandinavia during the dog days of August if I want. And if I want to fly a 747 at near max gross weight out of Dubai at an OAT of 41 deg C, I don't have to do it in the wee hours of the night in the US. I can fly challenging approaches in low ceiling and visibility conditions. I can re-create weather scenarios and fly multiple iterations of flights in them. If there's a weather-related issue, I can reproduce it. Weather is a huge deal to me. In P3D (and XPlane) I have ATC from the venerable (and free) Radar Contact v4--still arguably the best procedural IFR ATC simulation in existence. I've got 372 add-on airport sceneries (not counting hundreds more of enhanced small airports in my Orbx regions), and landclass/ground texture enhancements for P3D covering a large portion of the globe, making for a "plausible" world if not a photoreal one. I don't do flight simulation to sit around and admire the concrete ramps at airports. The stable installation I have can remain undisturbed in its current state for as long as I want to keep it that way, without being boogered-up by an unwanted forced update. I've flown a broad range of planes in the real world--sailplanes, single engine props, supersonic jets, business jets, and heavy transports. I know how they behave and handle. P3D does not offend my sensibilities in that regard by inducing excessive, constant turbulence, or blowing me sideways off a runway during takeoff/landing with a moderate crosswind. There's a lot for me in P3D still. And XPlane. And MSFS too. None of them packs all it takes to forego the others.

Oh no, I've tried transplanting my sim install to a new system several times before, and following day after frustrating day of playing whack-a-mole dealing with all the problems that cropped up (and kept cropping up), I decided to clear the decks and rebuild from scratch. There are few things more aggravating than planning a flight and then finding that the airport scenery won't load because the installer was never run on the new machine and the license is invalid. In the process, every time I've done it (about once every couple of years), I always find stuff I would have otherwise missed (e.g. sceneries that have been updated), and I leave out add-ons that were installed but proved underwhelming and unwanted. It does serve as a spring cleaning of sorts...can't imagine what my config would look like with 5-10 years of vestigial baggage dragged along from machine to machine. But...to each his own.