HughesMDflyer4

That was a show discount. It was a gift for those that made the effort to attend the show and support us by visiting our booth. We feel that the 717 is still in its prime time and is priced accordingly with what we feel it is worth. Other companies sell products for over double the cost of ours.

The intensity of the rain in the simulator affects the density of rain you see on the windshield. The "Gray and Rainy" weather theme has lighter rain by default, which many are using in videos.

Hi Simeon, thank you for the kind words! We're in the process of talking with developers to come up with licensing/distribution methods, so feel free to reach out! We'd love to see TrueGlass in the Dash 8. We had been focusing on developing the technology and getting it ready to show up until today. There'd be no interest if the tech wasn't there. :)

To add to what Josh said, we've developed this technology from scratch, actually back in early 2016. We tested and developed it in FSX, however it couldn't handle it efficiently. Newer technologies in P3D v4 allow us to do it very efficiently, with minimal to no performance impact. It's entirely separate from the v4 native rain effects. LM did indeed add their own effects in v4.0, but we found them to be a bit lacking. 4.1 is only adding that effect to more default aircraft (a common misconception that has been floating around in community discussions). TrueGlass is more than just rain - it includes icing and fog effects as well, and windshield wipers have a purpose now. TrueGlass is also version independent, in that you can use it in 4.0 and up.

This was fixed some time ago, however there's a tradeoff for the old lighting system, and it is that the textures rendered more blotchy than before. It is for that reason that we created the RealLight system to render textures much clearer.

They are static. RealLight still uses textures like before, but is rendered using newer technology. We had hoped to be able to use dynamic lights in Prepar3D v4 in the cockpit. However, their brightness cannot be controlled by code and they cast no shadows. RealLight has variable dimming just as the cockpit lighting from the original release had, however it is much clearer now. The preview video in the first post on this thread shows both variable flood lights going from off to full bright. You can also likely find some videos by others on YouTube.

Huh? FSL Spotlights is the only lighting addon that simmers can buy and use in all products. Ours is a technology for other developers to license and use, and functions entirely differently. I'm sort of confused as to what the issue is that you guys are talking about. Are you saying that because you would only use these lights on the ground, we shouldn't have them at all and it's unrealistic for them to exist? Just a reminder, we did recreate a real aircraft - we didn't make up fictional lights. There has also been backlighting since release in December. Not sure what exactly you're referring to?

I was wondering about this, too. All of the aircraft from Flight (with cockpits, anyway) would be great to have in FSW.

If it helps, 500x125 is the max size of signature images here.

Satellite imagery is only a part of the puzzle. You're not going to achieve a GTA V-like world with that alone. GTA doesn't actually use satellite imagery. Much of the actual detail is done with re-usable low resolution textures combined with detail textures laid over - similar to how landclasses are done in MSFS and Flight. There's more than one way to get authentic looking world scenery - it does not require imagery or the much outdated landclass concept. A significant amount of the world's buildings are mapped out through various sources. While you may not get GTA-quality scenery from this, with the right building models, you could get something much more believable than even P3D and X-Plane (heck, I believe there are already addon developers utilizing this data in XP). This combined with efficient LOD-ing, mip-mapping, and memory management could yield a much nicer set of world scenery than what we have today. DCS is a great example of this. Many of the commonly mentioned performance killing features don't need to be as demanding as they are (boats and other AI might as well just be some extra buildings if they are LOD'd properly). GTA V might not have as high of a draw distance as our simulators, but there are a TON of extremely high detail objects and textures in a very small radius. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying an entire world like GTA V is possible. There are way too many hand-placed and hand-crafted details in that world for any automated system to come any where close. However, there's definitely still room for improvement, regardless of the platform (P3D, XP, FSW).

What stops them from just updating the rendering engine to use the new DirectX version just like Microsoft did for FSX? With Flight as modular as it was, it would have been an even easier task, if I had to take a guess. To my knowledge, these systems were in the code for Flight, just disabled as they needed to be reworked for the new engine. Time could have been spent improving these systems instead of reworking the entire core.

It still surprises me that they didn't use Flight. Technology-wise, they could have started 5 years further ahead. With how modern and organized Flight supposedly was, it would have made upgrades much easier, I'd imagine. As well, to my understanding, code for AI traffic and ATC was there, just disabled as it needed to be reworked to work with the new engine. Time could have instead been spent reworking these systems and improving them rather than trying to modernize 10 year old code. However I'm sure there's reasons that they chose to use FSX (likely they were already familiar with it due to Steam Edition).

Indeed. Developers who do lots of hooks/hacks to get the data they need will have to spend some extra time updating their code, as would be the case for any 64 bit platform. However, if the code strictly uses the SimConnect API, it will be a much quicker process, assuming SimConnect hasn't changed much (I don't know if it has, so this is just guessing). Visual assets such as models and textures would likely require a bit of reworking due to the addition of PBR - at least to take advantage of the new visual effects.

Which would be why the product page and release announcement even stated that we'd be releasing updates over time. The issues you mention are fixed. Whether you choose to install the build that contains those fixes is entirely up to you.

You realize the point of a community opt-in beta, right? The aircraft is not in beta. An update for it is. Look at the Community Test Environment for the Battlefield series, for example. The game has been fully playable for months, but the Community Test Environment is used as a platform for testing new additions before pushing them to all. The same concept applies to the 717. One cannot release a flawless product first try, as no amount of internal testing will find every single bug in every single hardware/software configuration.

Many addons don't have a very robust activation/installation system, which makes it difficult to enforce the removal of the product post-refund (especially if a product is not online-only). In theory, a bunch of users could start requesting refunds, but keep using the product. I've never requested a refund through the App Store, but I'd imagine it forces you to uninstall the app.

"Beta" had a different meaning in our eyes. Beta was a final quick integrity check to ensure that the plane was ready - and, well...it was. We've flown this plane internally for probably a year and a half because of shared cockpit. This accounted for 10-20 people over the course of development. Once we hit beta, we brought in many more. Not once during development did our testers experience (most of) the issues being reported now (performance issue included). We can't fix what we don't know about. Our testers are not at fault, as if they don't have the issues, we can't fix them. They did a fantastic job of testing, really. The true test of any product is to give it to the masses. Otherwise, it can be nearly impossible to catch some issues. We're doing our best to collect as much feedback as we can. It's quite overwhelming - we have Facebook, our forums, our support ticket system, and any other websites our guys check frequently (Avsim and Reddit included). We have lots more planned for this aircraft and we will be delivering frequent updates whenever we can. The performance issue is top priority right now. It's very strange and hard to track down. We thought it was the weather radar integration, but it's seeming like that wasn't it, sadly. To add, keeping our 2016 promise was arguably more important to us than delivering a 100% perfect product. In the world of software, perfect is not possible.

Not entirely true. A junction can work just fine. It's essentially a shortcut, but instead redirects a folder to another location. What you can do is as follows: 1. Move your P3D folder to the new drive in a folder of your choice (close P3D prior to this, of course). You can copy it, but delete/rename the folder in the original location before moving on to step 2. Copying and renaming the original folder is safer if this is your first time creating junctions, just to be safe. 2. Open an Administrative Command Prompt. You can do so by right-clicking on your Start menu icon and clicking "Command Prompt (Admin)." 3. In the command prompt, type the following below. Replace path_to_original_P3D_folder and path_to_new_P3D_folder with the respective folders. Be sure to include quotes around a path if it includes spaces. Example: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Example" mklink /j path_to_original_P3D_folder path_to_new_P3D_folder 4. Once entering the command, hit enter. If there are no warnings/errors, close the command prompt. If there are any errors, fix them or post them here so we can help further. You should now have a shortcut at the location of the original folder that, if double clicked, opens up into the P3D folder just as the original folder did. When installing future addons, you can install them to the same location as the original folder/junction, however the files will reside in the new P3D folder on your other drive. Space taken up by the new folder will not affect your original drive.

No, this is in FSX, too. It toggles the rain effect on 2D cockpit views.

Waltham is the other one.

A new OS is required for new hardware. I don't see what's scary about moving forward. For years, motherboards haven't been much different when it comes to CPU upgrades - and that's not a free upgrade.

How is it controlled by Steam? Thousands of games are sold on Steam that allow user created content and such. Steam is only a distributor. They have no control over what studios do with their games (FSX:SE being a prime example, as most standard FSX addons work with it).

Will the Orbx scenery be optional? I personally am not a fan of the overly green saturation in their products. Also, I noticed that the top section of this screenshot (http://285.dbd.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/05.jpg) has a sharp change of color. Was this a small editing mistake or is something else causing this?

More like the series "re-imagined," which is exactly what it should be and what we need after 10 years of very little advancement. Automation is great, but it's unlikely that this would work so well due to the nature of addon complexity. There is so much custom work done that it's nearly impossible to account for all potential situations. It will likely yield better results if us developers go through and manually update our products. Breaking backwards compatibility means better tools, better development methods, new technology, and a more efficient work-flow. As someone who has years of experience working with the development tools for FSX/P3D, those thousands of hours can be (somewhat) reduced if modern standards are followed and better tools created. Our hobby is so unique because because it is indeed stuck in the past. People don't like change as nothing much ever changes and when it does, it's usually not good and not enough. The gaming industry is booming around us with some seriously amazing innovations. We need a game company to give a fresh look at this hobby and bring it up to today's standards. Whether or not that will happen is yet to be seen, but it really needs to. The key to success will be providing developers the tools they need to make their products better than ever before. 3D models can have new materials applied, code can be linked to new libraries/APIs (assuming the code is well written and modular), and scenery object/texture references updated and recompiled. We don't need conversion tools to have great content. Sure, we'll have to redo some stuff, but that SHOULD be expected if we're heading in the right direction. In the end, we'll be able to product better content. That's what I (and hopefully other developers) want.

When your tools and development techniques, and rendering techniques (look at what Physically Based Rendering does for Unreal Engine 4) are over 10 years old, you can't move forward. The key to success moving forward is...to move forward - forget the past. Even Prepar3D is still holding developers back and has the same numerous, time consuming quirks that FSX has. Why? It has to support legacy addons. Not having to worry about legacy content will let the platform expand significantly further than ever before. The improvements we'll see from this alone, in theory, should be enough to persuade developers and users to at least give it a try.