neilhewitt

Apparently, according to the developer over at the ORBX forum, the ground poly needs a major rebuild for P3Dv5 at it was done in a tricky way as a port from the XP11 scenery for P3Dv4 and no longer works properly. The implication from his post is that it'll be months before he gets to it. And it's been months already since P3Dv5 came out, so I have to say this is starting to feel like a job that'll never get done. The Whiskey Jet A220 seems to have disappeared from view after lots of preview images posted to Facebook last year. I just want a decent, but not study-level, FPS-friendly airliner that actually flies out of EGLC today that I can use without dropping to single-figure FPS (FeelThere E-Jets v3, I'm looking at you). I was hoping the A220 might be it. +1 for FlyTampa EHAM v2, provided it actually improves the FPS. Amsterdam is worse than London for me. Edit: and what do you know... Whiskey Jet has posted an image to its Facebook page indicating that it's doing the A220 for MSFS, while there's no news at all on the P3D version. Oh well.

Check the display settings - have you somehow ended up with 'black-out desktop' checked? That would produce the symptoms you're describing.

I also hear good things about Pilot2ATC, but of course every ATC platform has its fans and detractors. Despite its issues I use Pro-ATC/X because it's straightforward to use, works via the standard simconnect menus, and can be operated with just a numeric keypad (I have mounted a door-style keypad onto my glareshield for this purpose so I don't have to touch the PC keyboard). I also use PF3 for VFR flying as Pro-ATC/X doesn't do VFR. I don't get along as well with it as I do with Pro-ATC/X but TBH for VFR all I really need is flight following / de-confliction.

Currently using the FeelThere E-Jets v3, and they work OK (still a frame-rate hog, though!). I've got Carenado's Phenom 300 installed but I haven't tried it under 5.1 yet. Ditto their C172 G1000. Will probably try both over the next few days. Personally I've got EA off as it's too buggy and it kills my FPS in complex scenery areas and that's pretty much all I'm flying in at the moment. Did you do a client-only install or a full install? Have you tried re-installing the affected aircraft? 5.1 changes a lot but I don't think it's changed any of the aircraft modelling etc. I would have expected most aircraft that have been ported to v5 already to just work.

There was an announcement that they would be making a new version of Pro-ATC/X for MSFS, but it also said not to expect that any time soon. No comment on updates for the P3D/FSX version other than that they won't say anything at all until they have something to announce. This 'you'll just have to wait' attitude is pretty rife in Flight Sim development, I find. Not that it isn't common in other kinds of commercial software development too. Supposedly the reason why everything just stopped is that the actual developer of Pro-ATC/X had a serious accident of some kind and has been recovering. But it's been years since even a point update. I guess it must have been a very bad accident, and if so, obviously I feel bad for the guy, but total radio silence for months on end is not really acceptable for a commercial product. The project manager says not to expect any updates of any kind before Q2 2021 and that's all they will say. But as rmeier notes, the forum is run by volunteers who don't know any more than anyone else, and the PM appears only very occasionally and almost never says anything about the future of the product. Then, when the developer is back working, I imagine that all the effort will go into the MSFS version and P3D users will just have to wait... again. I'm honestly starting to feel like a 2nd class citizen these days. Really, this is a big problem - so many crucial tools that we need to make our sims go are built by 3rd party developers where it's just one person (often as a hobby project), or there's just one developer with a commercial org like Flight1 etc in front of them (UTLive). So if that one developer has a major life issue or passes away unexpectedly, the product is basically gone. That's not a good situation for any of us. I like and use Pro-ATC/X still but it has some really noticeable issues and there's no hope of getting them fixed any time soon. (I realise I sort-of hijacked the thread here... but I needed a moan 🙂)

That's great to hear, and sorry if I appeared to suggest otherwise. I do love ASP3D and if you can make it work in a multichannel environment then I'm absolutely back in. I miss the voice ATIS so much it hurts 🙂

I have, in the past, had Active Sky effectively working over a multi-PC Wideview network by having a (licensed) copy of AS on each machine showing visuals as well as the host. As long as all the settings are identical and (this is critical) they are all started *at the same time*, you would get identical weather depiction on each machine. The refresh intervals all came up at the same time, so they changed weather in sync too. The big issue is precipitation - if it's showers vs full-time, AS seems to use a random timer to turn the rain on /off and this timer will be different on each machine, so you get rain on one display but not another. Not ideal. Also, over time, they would drift out of sync a little bit (and if you paused the host sim, everything would get out of sync). It's a bit of a faff but it was worth it to me to get AS working in my sim. It stopped working with EA in ASP3D beta - for whatever reason, the weather downloads would have different conditions, despite being for the same live or historical sim time, and even if they were identical, when overcast, I would get different cloud cover on each machine. I will try out the new RC and see if it's working better for this hack, but more recently I've switched to FSGRW and I'm pretty happy with it. It caused stutters in P3D v5 HF2 for me, but those have gone in 5.1. From my experience with SimConnect programming it doesn't seem like it would take a huge effort to make the AS host push commands to multiple PCs each with the connector installed, but Hifi have said multiple times that there's not enough demand for the feature for them to spend time on it. Which is a shame.

LM has acknowledged this issue on the P3D forums and have said they plan to fix it in the next release.

Sadly (for me) it's just the 146 and not the Avro RJ with the more advanced avionics. I'm not a steam gauge person. Cool for those that want to fly the 146 specifically, though. The Quality Wings 146 includes the Avro RJ and I've been flying that for years, but it's showing its age and QW is never quick to update it for new versions of P3D.

6 pages in and no-one has pointed out the lack of multi-view / multi-monitor capability (and no, Nvidia Surround isn't true multi-monitor) and the ability to create views with precise camera control and put them on to different screens to get a wraparound view. This is vital for anyone with multiple screens in any kind of angled config, let alone those with multi-projector setups. And being able to pop-out instruments (G1000 etc) and undock them onto separate screens. This is stuff 'classic' MSFS was able to do for years. Hugely disappointing that these were not must-have requirements when Asobo was building the rendering engine. They even said in the discovery videos that they wanted to support home cockpit builders, but we have essentially nothing in the released version. I get it, this is a minimal viable product they've released here (and probably rather earlier than the dev team wanted - I'm very familiar with pressure to release early coming from the product owner in software projects). There will be more frequent updates than in the classic era. But they won't share any kind of meaningful roadmap as to what features are coming when and so we're left wondering when, if ever, we'll get what we need. At least the VR and helicopter crowd have confirmation that their requirements are coming. Oh well... guess we'll just have to wait. And meantime, this sim sets a new bar in terms of what's possible with scenery and weather and hopefully Laminar Research and LM will step up to it in years to come.

As Asobo has given AVSIM an interview where this was answered I don't think it's a breach of the NDA to say that no, you cannot have multiple view windows like you could with FSX. It's a feature they'd like to add in future but don't have now (and will not be in at release). Nor can you pop out 2D panels (like the G1000 PFD/MFD) from the cockpit. You can pop out windows from the UI system (VFR map, weather settings etc) and put them on separate monitors, but that's all.

There's a transcript of that interview on another thread (see the last page). Based on what the team said there, there is no multi-view support at release. They have played with a 3-projector 180-degree view as part of their in-house cockpit project. That means they must have the capability to do proper view frustums (or multi-channel, or both), but I don't imagine any of that code will be in the release branch or be anything close to ready, since they say it's something they would 'like to do' and is 'doable', which suggests it was just a side-project. They imply that the ability to put things like the glass cockpit elements on other viewports exists now, but the only thing that's actually been publicly documented is dragging UI panels from the menu system onto another screen in windowed mode. We've not seen that that can be done in full-screen mode (ie multiple DX viewports). I think you can take it as read that if you could do any of this with the Beta build, one of the YouTubers would have done it already. They haven't. Draw your own conclusions. I'm quite certain the team remembers its promise to support cockpit builders, and the support will be coming eventually. But when, and to what extent... anyone's guess is as good as anyone elses' right now. Guessing wildly I wouldn't be surprised if there's eventually a 'Cockpit Builder Edition' of the sim (at a suitable price) with the extras that we need. (Actually, what I'd love to see is an external host program for gauges outside the main sim. AIUI based on the limited SDK information released, gauge code is compiled to WebAssembly and hosted in a sandbox in-sim, and as WASM is standardised it shouldn't be hard to create a sandbox application that can run the gauges outside the sim on whatever displays you like and communicate with SimConnect etc. If we start to get the really detailed avionics implementations from 3rd parties on top of the base FMS code (something we never really got in FSX world beyond the likes of Mindstar), they will start to slow things down just like they do in FSX/P3D etc, and being able to run them out-of-process, and ideally on a networked 2nd machine, as a built-in capability of the sim platform, would be seriously awesome for cockpit builders.)

You'd need something like Wideview ported to MSFS. No idea if Luciano has plans to do that or not, or even if it's possible, especially given that the SDK is not released yet. P3D for example does have built-in 'multi-channel' support but only in the super-expensive Professional Plus edition, and it's generally seen as a 'pro' feature so I'd doubt it'll ever be natively supported in MSFS any more than it ever was in 'classic' MSFS before it. The more hardcore cockpit builders will need multi-channel support one way or another if MSFS is ever to become a viable platform for them. I expect a solution eventually but I'm certainly not holding my breath!

Content creators are now allowed to publish some real content including gameplay footage, but within set boundaries. This is par for the course for Microsoft (and most product launches). Microsoft still wants to control the message. These people are still under an NDA, it's just a different one than the testers. Obviously I'm not privy to the specific terms of the embargo so I don't know if for example one of the YouTubers could respond to your questions (because they will know the answers to them), but Alpha / Beta testers cannot answer you. It's been made very clear that the NDA still applies to us. As a fellow cockpit builder, I understand the frustration of not knowing whether or not you'll be able to use this new sim in your setup. However, what I can say without any fear because Asobo has already said it publicly is that this is not a new version of the previous FS family. Yes, there's FSX code in it. But it's not FSX vNext. It's a new sim, largely built from scratch. Home cockpit setups typically rely on lots of third-party add-ons and tools, as well as basic support from the sim itself. None of that usually exists on Day 1 of a new platform. The SDK is not complete yet (this was mentioned in the Development Updates so again it's public info). It will take time for the platform to be as well-supported as P3D and XP11 are today.

I would love to understand a bit more about this: given the rendering is now DX12 it would have been possible to take advantage of simultaneous multi-projection on GTX 10 and RTX 20 cards, which ought to be able to speed up multi-view rendering. Has anyone played about with multi-view setups to see if the FPS hit from each additional view is at all improved? For me, it's going to be a question of getting compatibility with the key add-ons - Wideview and FSUIPC principally, but also my F1Tech G1000 simulator and a few other bits and pieces like UT Live, most of which (other than FSUIPC) don't tend to update for a while after new P3D releases, if ever. Nice to see Fly-Elise has updated Immersive Display Pro to work properly with it. Based on what Simbol and others have said, I'd imagine a lot of existing add-ons will just work. LM is clearly aware of who the crucial developers are. I'll be buying this on day 1 just for compatibility testing, even if I don't move my actual main sim to it for a few weeks / months. Waiting for MSFS is all well and good but I see no reason to hold back.

I know it's been said before, but it bears repeating: Prepar3d, like FSX before it, does the majority of the work preparing each frame on a single core. Where work being done depends on the result of work done before it, it cannot be started until that previous work is finished. Most of the work rendering the scene happens in a serial fashion like this, and so can only happen on a single thread running on a single core of the CPU. That means that it's single-threaded CPU speed that is the most important determinant of performance with P3D, all other things being equal. The reason many people see 100% use of Core 0 (I certainly do) is that P3D has more than enough work to do to saturate the core - and it's the fact that the core cannot complete the work quickly enough (since single-core speed has improved maybe 15% in the last 10 years) that usually leads to low FPS, dropped frames and stutters in heavy areas. The CPU is doing as much work as it can, but it's not enough to keep the FPS up. The only time I see my CPU usage on Core 0 drop below 100% is if the GPU is saturated - and that never happens on my system unless there's a problem with the GPU, but on lower-end GPUs with high sliders, it might happen more often. In that case, the CPU is waiting for the GPU, not the other way around as it usually is. If you could offload some of that rendering work to other cores you might get a speed-up, but as soon as you parallelise work like that, you enter tricky programming territory where you have to start caring about things like multiple threads contending for access to shared memory, I/O devices etc. Suffice to say it's a hard problem. I'm a software developer in RL (not in games programming, admittedly) and the limited amount of multi-threaded code I've had to write has been some of the most challenging. That's not to say that other work doesn't get done on other threads in the simulator. As you see from Task Manager, P3D does use multiple cores. That's because it's using the other threads for things like loading textures. But the main job - putting together the next frame for the GPU to render - is inherently single-threaded. It certainly wouldn't be impossible to design a rendering engine to more effectively use multiple cores, but it's an area of rapidly diminishing returns. ISTR one of the X-Plane devs posting a blog about this very issue. If you're holding out hope that a 6-core machine could mean 6x the FPS, even theoretically, then I'm afraid that's just not going to happen. I'm sure a ground-up rewrite of the rendering engine with modern architecture and multi-threading in mind could perform substantially better on the same hardware. But that's a huge job and I doubt LM would ever do it for P3D. It does rather look like MSFS has a new rendering engine, though, and the performance looks pretty good for the levels of detail. For me, I run with vsync on and my displays at 30Hz and most sliders right except for detail and autogen. Detail I habitually run Sparse or Normal, because I have two outside views on two projectors and it's the only way I can get anything approaching flyable FPS in the London area, which is where I tend to fly. I've learned to live with it. That's an 8700K clocked at 5GHz with GTX1080Ti. My host PC (this is a Wideview setup) is a 9700K with 8 cores @ 5.2GHz. I use Process Lasso to dedicate 4 cores to P3D and its in-process add-ons, and reserve the other four for the system and out-of-process add-ons, notably the F1Tech G1000 software which eats CPU for breakfast and so gets two cores all to itself. Performance on that machine with a single outside view is pretty good at anything up to 40FPS at ORBX EGLC in TrueEarth GB South. At this point, I know there's nothing I can do that will magically get me an extra 10FPS. It's all about managing performance so it's as balanced as it can be and I get a decent experience wherever I fly.

Definitely good news for cockpit builders in this video. Multi-monitor, multi-window was what we needed to hear. SimConnect++ also great news. This should hopefully mean that a lot of add-ons will not need much porting. I knew that they had built a sim in their offices but until now we hadn't seen it. There's only a few frames of it in the video, but enough to see that they have a 180-degree wraparound screen which means the camera system must be able to do multiple outside views that can be warped and blended by something like Fly-Elise NG Immersive Display Pro. Which suggests that alpha testers with a multi-projector setup may be able to get the same visuals they can in P3D or X-Plane. Probably too much to hope for that they might add warping and blending capabilities to the product itself, but from my own POV if I can convert my existing P3D viewgroups then that will make things 1000% easier for me and others with the same kind of display systems. And given how good performance seems to be in general, perhaps multi-channel rendering won't even be needed for GA sims. Though the big sims - Boeings, Airbuses - will still need multiple PCs for avionics etc. Consider me a happy bunny after seeing this.

Yup, I know what you mean. Provided Simconnect has been upgraded rather than fundamentally changed, it should be easy enough for developers to do this once the SDK is out. I could do it myself, probably 🙂 I need a little more from my multi-channel setup, though. I fly with the VC on the external visuals (because I have no cockpit shell ATM) and I need the lights etc to be synced as well. But it's not rocket science. Wideview really needs some competition.

The plugin is a great idea, although I suppose that'd what Wideview already is - I hope the developer will port it to MSFS2020 as soon as practical, but given the slow speed of development on that project I'm not optimistic. I would really like one of the bigger 3rd party devs to build a proper multi-channel add-on. I've never been able to get OpusFSI to work and Wideview has its problems. P3D's built-in multi-channel works very well but performance is abysmal due to the frame-syncing technique they use, unless you have cards with hardware genlock, and you have to invest in the Pro Plus edition at over $2K. I could definitely see myself using MSFS as an image generator for a while, just for the better visuals. Obviously you want to get the new flight modelling etc so I'd move my whole setup over there once I could, but it would certainly take the pressure off. While I was thinking I also thought that it would be good for all the functions of the built-in FMS (on which all the avionics will be based) to be key-combination and joystick-assignable. In fact, literally everything needs to be assignable, and really I'd like it to be a requirement for building gauges for the system that all UI points must be assignable to keys / joysticks. Way too many custom gauges only accept mouse clicks and are useless to those of us who don't use point-and-click at all (Carenado, I'm looking at you).

I've not seen much input from the cockpit-building community in any of the 'what we want' threads, but there are a few things that our small group needs above all else. Of course, I realise we're a minority among the wider sim community, but P3D and FSX before it were platforms that we could use effectively because of some basic features of the product, plus the hard work of many add-on developers. Hopefully Microsoft intends the new sim to be such a platform too, for those that need it. My own setup is paltry compared to some of the sims out there - the likes of those that are used for Worldflight - so I can't pretend to know everything every cockpit builder needs in the new sim, but for me, these things are absolutely essential: The ability to use multiple displays - and not just via EyeFinity. Pop-out gauges (like the G1000) that can be placed on other displays. 2D panels would be ideal, but since practically no aircraft maker does them any more, I think that ship has sailed. Multiple outside views. This is critical, because for those with wrap-around displays of any kind, this can only be done using multiple outside views. Multi-channel support - so you can network multiple PCs together. This doesn't need to be in the actual product, given it's a niche requirement, although as an extension of multiplayer it ought not to be that hard to implement as Lockheed Martin has done. But it does need to be possible for something like Wideview to be ported to the sim, and ideally support for proper synchronisation of weather (clouds etc), AI traffic etc across channels. Short of unbelievable performance improvements that I just don't see being possible, it'll never be practical to run 3 or more views on a single PC in an area like London. All of the above features exist in FSX (except multi-channel) and P3D today, so releasing a successor platform without them would exclude the cockpit-building community and basically make the sim useless for us. In an ideal world, I'd like to see a Pro edition of the sim that supported the same kind of features that X-Plane's Pro with Projector Support includes - warping for cylindrical and spherical projection surfaces, edge-blending and so on. But there are 3rd party products that help us to do that and provided MSFS2020 works as above, then companies like Fly-Elise NG will undoubtedly support it. But the bottom line is we need multi-display with 2D pop-ups, and multiple views OR proper multi-channel, ideally both. Otherwise this sim will not be able to replace P3D in my setup and I suspect the same will apply for most other cockpit builders. Beyond that, I'm sure there are many things other cockpit builders would like to see.

That's a lot :-) Yeah, I figured it was that. By default I have a lot of liveries for each aircraft type, because I have Ultimate Traffic Live installed so I'm getting all its liveries from all its aircraft models. It's actually not super-important because one of the machines is a WidevieW host and usually only shows instrument panel views, nothing exterior. But I'll look at adding the registration codes at some point. I'm just sitting here now with my sim turned to the tower view and watching the traffic come and go at London Heathrow. It's quite relaxing :-) NH

Hi. Just wanted everyone to know that this works really well! I've got RealTraffic on both machines set up identically, PSXseecon traffic on both machines also set up identically, and have the same parked folder and liveries file on both. Traffic is synchronised perfectly - allowing for some lag in the RealTraffic data which means aircraft don't move absolutely smoothly (but pretty good nonetheless). I'm getting different liveries for the same aircraft on the two different machines, but the aircraft are the right types and so it's obviously just a config issue somewhere. And the performance is stunning, coming from Ultimate Traffic Live! Really happy - the immersion is back when operating from big airports like Heathrow. NH

OK, thanks Nico. I've downloaded RealTraffic and PSXseecon and I'll install on both machines and see what happens! NH

Hi. Apologies if this has already been covered - the main thread from before the sub-forum is 69 pages long and I haven't got time to read all of it in one go! I run a multi-machine setup using WidevieW to sync the visuals, and I've also got Widetraffic, but I'm having major problems with it since the move to 64 bits and right now, it's just not working. I've been using UTLive as a traffic source on the server machine. This hits the frame rate a little, but I've got it tuned reasonably well even for heavy airports like EGLL. I'm interested in PSXseecon as an alternative, especially given the lower impact on frames, but I need the AI traffic to be synchronised across server and client machines. I know that you can run RealTraffic and PSXseecon itself on a separate machine and target a simulator instance over the network using SimConnect, but can you target more than one instance at the same time - in other words, broadcast the traffic to multiple simulators at the same time? Failing that, if I were to run a copy of RealTraffic + PSXseecon on each machine, given that the real-time traffic data will be the same on all of them, and provided I've got the aircraft and airports set up properly etc, will all of the simulators display the same traffic in the same positions with low enough latency to be practically synchronised? NH