Stavros

I'd quite enjoy a Long Island Macarthur or a Portland Jetport (KPWM), as they would both a nice addition both as GA fields in the busy northeast, and to complete the regional commercial fields in both the NYC or Boston areas.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Does MSFS still have issues? Of course. But I've been flying darn* near every day for several weeks now in SU9 and now on the SU10 beta. Not only has the SU10 beta been rock solid stability wise, the update was painless and all addons have worked flawlessly (even better than flawlessly, really, with SU10s performance improvements). I have done 3 flights over 5 hours in the past week and have had excellent performance without any of the increasing lag that previous versions of the sim had. Never since P3D v4 first gave us 64bit have I been so pleased with the performance of a sim. Even more to the point, I have not been so mesmerized with the immersion and fidelity of a simulator since the first time I launched FSX over 10 years ago. I have done more sim flying in the past 3 months than I have since P3D v4 first came out, and even then I was not nearly as mesmerized by the experience as I have been in MSFS. Are there things I miss from P3D? Sure, I miss weather radar (but that's coming soon), I miss chaseplane (but I've gotten pretty used to the camera system so this is hardly a complaint), and I miss longhaul aircraft (but when they come I know they will be incredible). But now that I have experienced 60fps with the visual fidelity of MSFS I have lost all interest in even starting up P3D.

I'm 3/3 on 5+ hour flights in the SU10 beta in the past two weeks and I have to say that I am really happy with MSFS. It has completely reinvigorated my enjoyment of simming and I cannot wait to see what the next few years hold in terms of new aircraft and scenery. Certainly for the children of the magenta line MSFS is head and shoulders above P3D and X-Plane in terms of visual fidelity, ease of setup and use, and overall enjoyment factor. The PMDG and Fenix aren't perfect, but they're way better than 'good enough' and the weather, scenery, and atmosphere of the sim are absolutely breathtaking. Every day I have the urge to fly somewhere and see somewhere new.

It's hard to fly a visual pattern when you can't turn your head because you're using a 2d panel 😉 That said, have you seen some of the new laser-scanned cockpit models such as the Fenix A320 or Heatblur F-14? They really look like the real thing.

Okay, the title is a little bit clickbait-y. This is Air China 1215, daily service from Beijing to Kashgar, an ancient silk road city. This flight will take us across China and the deserts of Inner Mongolia, Gansu, and Xinjiang. Join as at Beijing Capital Airport, where we begin boarding at gate C33 ahead of our 7:05am departure: We've got a good passenger and cargo load, and fueled up for this 5-hour flight we are bumping right up against our MTOW of 79,300kg as we enter 18L for Departure: Takeoff and Climbout from Beijing Capital: Over the Yan Mountains, the landscape becomes much more arid: Crossing into Inner Mongolia, it's cloudy and the mountains are creating some moderate turbulence. We are now over the Gobi Desert. Now over Gansu Province, the terrain is harsh, dry, and mountainous. Whispy desert clouds pass below. About 3 hours into our 5 hour flight, we cross into Xinjiang over Lop Nur, the site of the first Chinese Nuclear Test in 1964. As the Gobi Desert turns into the Taklamakan desert, we see a vast expanse of sand dunes, with the Tian mountains far in the distance. We are truly alone up here, and despite being over land, this is Class II airspace. As we approach the western edge of the Taklan Desert, we pass over Aksu and the Kunlun Mountains. As we begin our descent into Kashgar the clouds thicken. Kashgar feels like an Oasis after hours over the northern deserts of China. Lush, and rainy. We touch down in Kashgar just after 12:30pm, 5:05 minutes after wheels up out of Beijing. And we're at the gate after a quick taxi in. No doubt my favorite part of MSFS has been the ability to fly and explore parts of the world neglected in P3D and FSX. What a treat this flight was!

It's certainly worse when you're flying very low, but for airliner flying it's generally not an issue. That said, you can always turn it off and stick to the autogen anyway. It's easy to overanalyze screenshots as well - they offer the luxury of time and zoom to look over every pixel. When you're actually flying I find that the smaller issues get lost in the details in both P3D and MSFS.

Funny, my New York didn't look like this arriving into LGA... perhaps you're purposefully choosing terrible screenshots to prove some silly point? Somehow I don't think you want to engage in a game of 'find the worst scenery in the world' with P3D as your sim choice 😉

I am so, so excited for the FSL A330 is all I can say.

Since we've devolved into a full MSFS vs. P3D debate at this point and that's rather unproductive, I think it's worth circling back to the original point here. If you're happy with P3D, that's awesome, learning a new sim is certainly not easy and I still have P3D installed for Cross the Pond coming up. But I think it's worth keeping expectations in line with reality for the scope of updates that are likely coming in the future. Will there be meaningful performance and usability improvements? I think definitely. Weather depiction improvements? Possibly. Any large scale worldwide scenery improvements? Much less likely. One of the nice things about MSFS is that it's pretty easy to have both P3D and MSFS installed on your computer, and the barrier to entry for MSFS is quite low. Especially if you bought the NGXu for P3D and have your $100 credit to get the MSFS version. And I know that when longhaul time comes I can still load up P3D and be ready for Cross the Pond

I think you missed the point of my post and delineation of simmers; It has nothing to do with money. But I did need a way to break down the kinds of simmers that exist and what they are looking to get out of their chosen sim platform, and defining 'casual' and 'serious' simmers in the way that I did was an easy way to describe the kinds of people that P3D and MSFS respectively are looking to target. If you're a home cockpit builder or prosim user for example, it is unlikely that MSFS will ever truly meet your needs, at least in the next few years. For these 'serious' simmers, it's obvious that P3D will be their platform for a long time in the future. But I think it is worth mentioning the 'casual' simmer too, (I hate that word because everyone defines it differently, but it's obviously the best word to differentiate from the 'serious' simmer I've described above), and in contrast to the former, the 'casual' simmer would be the majority of people who post on Avsim or on the flightsim discord or the myriad other forums and discussion boards. People who still take their flights seriously, following procedures, maybe using Vatsim, and wether it be a 747 or a Piper Cherokee, they're following checklists and procedures as they would if it were real life. For these 'casual' simmers, I think P3D still provides a good experience, but it's clear that over the next few years the vast majority of developers who cater to these simmers (PMDG, FSLabs, A2A, etc.) will transition toward MSFS.

I think it's worth clarifying a bit of my previous post as well: I know these are loaded words, but 'casual' simmers here includes people flying PMDG, FSlabs, and other 'study level' addons. This is in contrast to 'serious' simmers, those who are using features that P3D supports that MSFS will likely not support anytime soon (if ever). For example, home cockpit building, training solutions, etc. I'm not suggesting P3D doesn't have a 'bright' future, but I do think its worth keeping expectations in line. If you spend most of your time flying things like PMDG airliners or A2A GA aircraft between sceneries offered by Orbx, Flightbeam, or the myriad other similar developers, and you look forward to new addons and airports coming to the sim in the future, then I predict the future will not be 'bright' for you. However, if you are a home cockpit builder who uses ProSim for example, or are specifically using P3D in a training environment, then I am positive P3D will continue to serve your needs for years to come with meaningful performance and usability updates.' I am happy to be proven wrong, but I think it's not hard to see where developers are budgeting their time and development effort. PMDG will likely be porting addons to MSFS until the end of 2023, at which point I will be *very* surprised if they release their 737MAX for P3D. FSLabs do have 2 aircraft coming to P3D - the Concorde and A330, but they have stated they will be bringing their product catalogue to MSFS as well. Eaglesoft seem to be the only major aircraft dev who have not shown interest in MSFS. There have been a couple Orbx scenery releases for P3D, and of course there are other new sceneries popping up on Simmarket for P3D. But it's definitely a slower pace and I see this trend continuing.

Anyone hoping for some mega update P3D v6 with scenery on the level of MSFS are delusional. Prepar3d was already a niche product, and it will only continue to grow more niche as the 'casual' simmers gravitate toward MSFS. These features are simply not important to the main customer base of P3D (who aren't people posting on this forum). P3D will not die, I'm positive, but I can imagine that 3rd party development will slow down significantly (already happening, it seems). The products that are developed will continue to target the most serious simmers (home cockpit builders and those willing to shell out $120+ for an addon). I suspect scenery development will largely stagnate as well as it simply cannot generate the revenue necessary with a smaller and more focused user base (and frankly, those who *do* care about scenery will no doubt prefer MSFS anyway). Those that still fall into the niche that P3D serves will no doubt continue to be served for years to come. But the more casual userbase who provided the income necessary to develop visual and scenery addons have already begun to move on and will no doubt continue to do so.

Not sure how consistently it's captured but flying out Delhi looked exactly like what I expected:

Yes it's $39.99 for 4 cycles - Navigraph give you every cycle for a similar price. If you want every realnav cycle (which you would if you fly on Vatsim) it's $1000. Nevermind that everyone is already paying for navigraph - I certainly have no interest in paying another $40 on top of that for a worse product. In other words: "We are saving cost and development time by using RealNav and will instead pass that cost onto our customers"

We're all already paying for Navigraph. If you seriously expect people to shell out $1000 a year for full nav updates then I can only say godspeed. I can only hope you have some lucrative corporate contracts! because if you can't please all simulation enthusiasts you've clearly decided that pleasing none is better than pleasing some.

Honestly I'm sure the systems modelling is great and justifies the price (if we're comparing to other full fidelity sim aircraft). Coming out with a product only compatible with 32bit in 2019? with MSFS 2020 around the corner? and not being compatible with Navigraph? Those are the dealbreakers.

Should just clarify the complaint here isn't that you guys are charging for navdata, it's that you aren't compatible with navigraph data like everyone else is, and that the data is only updated quarterly and not every 28 days like Navigraph do.

After a long hiatus Eaglesoft have finally released a new product, a Citation XLS+. http://www.eaglesoftdg.com/xlsplusG3.htm Obviously this would normally be very exciting, but for two caveats: It's only for 32bit platforms (P3D v3, FSX, FSX:SE). Given that even PMDG realize P3D V4 may not be long for this world, the idea of releasing something for v3 and FSX seems crazy. On top of this, it doesn't support Navigraph navdata and instead you have to use Eaglesoft's own navdata which is $40 a year and only updated quarterly. Genuinely do not understand how anyone came to the conclusion this is anything people wanted, even as desperate as we are for a proper business jet.

You're on a flight simulation forum so... this is the place where people care! 😛

They won't do 5ghz. Der8auer said he was only sometimes able to achieve 5ghz on liquid nitrogen. Don't expect more than 4.4-4.5ghz manually overclocked on the new Ryzen chips. Also in response to some others - posting Cinebench scores is absolutely pointless for flight sim comparisons. it's a highly multithreaded workload that tells you almost nothing about how it will perform in P3D and X-Plane. Also, Ryzen chips lose performance in single-threaded workloads very quickly as you move down the lineup, whereas the Intel chips maintain about the same single-threaded performance. The 9600K, 9700K, and 9900K will perform identically in P3D and X-Plane, and most other games.

I agree though not for the same reasons. If you want pure P3D performance, an overclocked 9600K will be within 1-2% of the 9900K for less than half the price, and should still beat the 3900X as well. Also, it's pretty much impossible to be GPU-bound in P3D at this pricepoint. It just does not run fast enough to outmatch a GPU capable of 60FPS at 4K.

Honestly it's a good thing it didn't survive as a Terminal - the World Port was so awful by the end that even I was happy to see it torn down and replaced.

Can't be too hard since we also have the Intrepid museum here.

I can never get over the size of the airports on this side of the world, and Guangzhou has to be one of the most impressive.

Sure, just need to wait for a real one to be painted.