neilhewitt

I think it might be a case that they could keep selling their stuff (or give it away) but they want to draw a line under P3D altogether and remove any doubt about their future plans. Message received, right?

There are two main factors that I can see driving third parties away from P3D: the cost of making add-ons, and the potential market size. If, for example, it were possible to build scenery or an aircraft and deploy the same, or substantially the same, code to both MSFS and P3D (which is not totally far-fetched in theory given that they are both ultimately based on FSX/ESP) then it would reduce the development cost for P3D, and sales for P3D would be desirable additional revenue, provided the support costs are in proportion to those of MSFS per-sale on average. But it's not possible because the two have diverged too far. If v6 were to make P3D compatible with MSFS scenery, or at least make it easy for developers to build for both at the same time, that could potentially turn the tap back on for airports etc. I could see UK2000, for example, opting to make their new MSFS stuff P3Dv6-compatible if it was easy and enjoyable for Gary to do so without needing to operate two sets of tooling and doing two lots of testing. The potential return per unit of investment on a product needs to be high enough to justify the investment. That depends on how much it costs to build and support it vs the number of sales you make. Because the audience is just much larger on MSFS (10 million players vs maybe hundreds or even tens of thousands for P3D), the potential return is much greater and so given limited funds to invest and limited people to do the work, companies are voting with their wallets. I don't believe you'll see this trend reverse unless it becomes possible to develop products for both sims at the same time with one set of tooling. There is simply no conceivable shape for a v6 which will increase the sim's user numbers to even 10% of what MSFS has right now, and make it commercially worthwhile to develop for P3D as a completely separate platform. It's not that P3D is dead. It clearly isn't. It's that P3D is more expensive to develop for. Mass-market beats niche every time unless you can charge much more for niche.

I think their commercial customers tend not to upgrade a working simulator unless there's a clear reason (and budget) for doing so. The software is usually tightly integrated with the hardware and upgrading the sim is therefore a big job. One of the reasons Mindstar has continually given for still not having a 64-bit version of their G1000 and thus being limited to P3D v3 and below is that the vast majority of their commercial customers are still running on 32-bit and so it's not worth their while investing the time to develop it for their much smaller hobbyist customer base.

CIGI support is only available in the Professional Plus edition of Prepar3d at present, so it's absolutely true that to get this support from LM you have to license Pro Plus. It's possible LM could choose to release the functionality for the Professional edition, but unlikely as these kinds of features intended primarily for commercial sim builders have always been in the Pro Plus edition only. https://www.prepar3d.com/SDKv5/prepar3d/network/common_image_generator_interface/cigi_overview.html This needn't stop someone else building a gateway to interface P3D with the Blackshark UE world generator, of course. It ought to be technically possible.

Doesn't seem like that agreement is exclusive, though. Their generated world product for Unreal Engine uses different source maps and ground textures, of course, but the output looks very similar to that other flight sim platform. If someone were to write a CIGI image generator based on the Blackshark world simulation that you could connect a CIGI-compliant simulator to, you could in theory achieve very similar results to that other sim. Right?

Disagreeing is fair enough 🙂. I have an MSFS cockpit that's workable, but far from ideal and very far from what I used to have in P3D. To be honest, I'm talking about things like the advanced display support needed for blended, perspective-corrected multi-projector displays. P3D's ViewGroup system lets you do this easily (with additional software for projector setups of course) but it's more fundamental than that. FSX/P3D supports having multiple view windows on one or more monitors, each of which can be positioned where you want, sized as you want, overlapped as needed, and (crucially) each can show a different view from a different camera. The camera system supports creating entirely custom cameras (not just custom views from a single camera as in MSFS) and in P3D with ViewGroups you can create arbitrary, asymmetric view frustums for each camera. The MSFS view system does not work like this at all and the multi-monitor solution currently provided is fundamentally inadequate for the use cases I'm talking about. The core issue here is that the sim was built for a single display because that was the only use case Asobo considered, and everything about the rendering engine design is biased towards this; which is why the multi-monitor support looks and works like it does, because it was all they could do without completely re-designing the display system. Until and unless they do we're stuck with at best the 3-monitors-at-45-degrees setup and needing to use Air Manager to export anything other than the screens of avionics out to other displays. It's utterly inadequate and there's no indication that it will ever get any better because, to be fair, people like me are a tiny % of the MSFS user base. This is a key advantage that P3D and X-Plane have and is the reason I'll probably go back to P3D for my new sim build, when it eventually (!) happens. But then I'm stuck on a burning platform and that makes me very uncomfortable. Anyway... I'm way off topic here so I shall stop!

Given the recent statement from LM about not planning to break compatibility with their existing stuff, it's almost certainly just wishful thinking and the UE stuff Lockheed is working on is for one of their military sim platforms and not for P3D. Though the potential of a UE + Blackshark based image generator fed by P3D via CIGI would be undeniable.

I think the mixed-reality approach where your cockpit environment is real and viewed via pass-through, but the outside view is virtual, such as has been done with the Varjo headsets and could be done with the Quest Pro easily enough, has a lot of potential. But for that you still need a 'real' cockpit and full integration of the hardware into your sim. Having a VR-only cockpit looks type-accurate and is immersive, but I personally hate the idea of manipulating imaginary controls using a pointing device or even your hands in mid-air. I want to flip switches and turn knobs. A few people have gone to the lengths of creating 'blank' hardware cockpits with switches and knobs in the right places and they carefully match their VR view and zoom to fit that, so when they 'touch' a switch in VR they physically touch it in real life... but that's a lot of effort and it's easily broken by sim changes. For me, personally, I can't stomach wearing a VR headset for more than about 30 minutes at a time. It gets painful (and a bit queasy) after that. And I speak as a VR early adopter - I have many headsets, I just don't use them for simming.

I strongly disagree. The future is bright for certain types of simming. If what you want to do and how you want to use the sims fits within the boundaries of what each sim does and the ecosystem it supports, sure. But otherwise you're increasingly out in the cold. Put it this way, I'm a cockpit builder, and worse, I'm a generic cockpit builder, so it's not like I can just buy all the 737 bits off the shelf, install ProSim, and call it a day. For me: P3D supports advanced display systems, hardware integration and software integration scenarios that MSFS does not, and historically better than XP as well. But it has a dying ecosystem, add-ons that are not being and will not be updated for new versions, and is not comparable in terms of weather depiction with either of the other main sim platforms. People above are talking about being 'stuck' on P3D and it's true - eventually, if 3rd parties abandon the platform, and they already largely have, the base sim will be all there is, and the base sim is not good enough for most people. MSFS has fantastic graphics and weather depiction, but doesn't do advanced display systems and its hardware and software integration capabilities are way behind P3D and XP and are likely to stay that way because the core audience for the sim, who are the ones paying the bills, don't much care about those things. It has a thriving 3rd party ecosystem but that does you no good if you can't get the base sim to do what you need it to do. Great weather depiction is meaningless if it's 'live or nothing'. XP has always been a great platform in terms of the aircraft simulation, and it has gotten much better over the years in terms of integrations and advanced hardware scenarios so that it is a viable home cockpit platform. But its 3rd party ecosystem is in even worse shape than P3Ds and the freeware community that has traditionally supported it seems to be shrinking too. If you want to fly on a desktop, with a single monitor and some basic controllers like a yoke and throttle and pedals, then it's happy days. MSFS is targeted squarely at you and P3D and XP cater for you just as well, because this is the basic use case for all simulators. If you want to go beyond that, your choices are now very limited. P3D and XP used to be great solutions, and they still work fine right now, but they are burning platforms without the 3rd party support, and the one platform that has the 3rd party support is limited by its very nature and design as a cross-platform sim that runs on consoles, and is very unlikely to ever be as open a platform as it would need to be to replace what P3D and XP can do for people like me. When simming was a strictly niche hobby, it suited developers to cater to particular sub-niches like home cockpit builders because there was money to be made that you couldn't make otherwise. People like me benefited from that tremendously. Now that simming is more mainstream thanks to MSFS being on Xbox and Cloud Gaming and PC, the big money is to be made catering for the basic use case and people like me are increasingly out in the cold. Hopefully you can see why for me, personally, the future of simming is not bright at all.

Matt Sheil's full-motion 747 sim is based on PSX + P3D (I think... it was FSX) as an image generator. The most recent content I could find on it is a video on EEVBlog's channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug7xa-7sako&t=670s

Only if it will make them enough money to be worth spending the time on development. Once upon a time, developers serving P3D would have clear expectations about the number of copies they could expect to sell, and decided if a particular product was worth the investment on that basis. Now, they have access to a platform where potentially (and I use that word advisedly), for roughly the same amount of work, they can sell orders of magnitude more copies, even if usually for a lower price. Which do you think they will pick? In an ideal world they would do both but in the real world people and time are expensive and there's little to no downside in terms of revenue or reputation in abandoning P3D, especially if they don't hang out in forums like this one to hear the complaints of the users they abandoned. The developers are never coming back unless the mass market comes to P3D or the other sim closes down. That's (sadly) my opinion.

What I'd want to see in any v6 is, frankly, similar performance on similar hardware to The Other Sim That Shall Not Be Named, at a similar level of complexity in terms of scenery. Not expecting as-good-as visuals, but P3D chokes on far fewer simobjects. And since it's likely that new scenery add-ons will be few and far between, better base scenery is a must. Better weather depiction is also a must, true evolving weather depiction is vital. Flying along in overcast and then suddenly the sky is clear because you've changed METARs doesn't cut it any more, and the best ActiveSky can do in terms of transitions now is frankly not good enough given the competition, the sim needs to provide a way for 3rd parties to control the weather in exquisite detail. Not sure TrueSky can handle that. At the end of the day, though, the 3rd party developer market has largely collapsed for P3D and I fear nothing is going to fix that short of The Other Sim closing down. Too much money to be made doing add-ons for that platform vs much less money to be made in P3D even if it were at its peak in terms of user numbers and those users were buying stuff like billy-oh. Neither of which is true. If, as I fear, existing add-ons become incompatible and never get updated, then we'll reach a point where the base sim is all there is. P3D has never done well on that basis for our user group. It's fine for commercial customers who either don't want those add-ons or can pay people like Milviz to do them privately, which we will never get to see. What I *really* want is the best features from P3D (display system, windowing, easy automation, customisability, fully open to 3rd parties, cockpit-builder-friendly features) with the best features of The Other Sim (visuals, performance, weather depiction, AI-generated whole-world scenery) combined into one. Plus a vibrant and committed community of 3rd party add-on builders keeping their stuff up to date and refreshed year on year. But I'm not foolish enough to think that that will ever happen. I really hope to be surprised, but I won't be surprised if I'm not.

Or it could be that their emails are blocked by a sender policy, or by your ISP. For example, I am unable to send mail from a domain I own to anyone on AT&T's network (or sub-networks, of which there are many) because my email provider's servers seem to be on their blocklist (even though it is a long-established ISP and I have all the correct domain keys and sender ID set up for the domain). AT&T support simply doesn't respond to emails about it, so I've had to give up. Some email servers can't send email to gmail accounts, because Google has them on a blocklist on suspicion of spamming (false positives happen all the time), and good luck getting them to respond to a query about it either. If the sender doesn't realise it, they may not even know they have a problem with customers not receiving emails. See if they have some other contact method (like Discord) and ask them there. Edit: Having had a look at their site and forum I see the developer last posted there well over a year ago after promising a new forum 'real soon now', so it looks like they might well be dead in the water. Shame, but a common story. Way too many flight sim products are produced by a solo developer and can literally vanish overnight (Ultimate Traffic Live, anyone?).

I forgot to mention - MeteoBlue already has historical weather data. You can buy access to it just like the live forecast data. The true cost for MS would be running an arbitrary number of weather simulations in the cloud for as many users as they had not on live time. That's untenable. What they need to be able to do is generate a 'live-like' weather simulation directly from historical data on your PC; but based on what I know I think that might not be possible due to the computational complexity. METAR-style generation of the kind that REX does based on the weather theme tech may be all that's possible there. Which, in point of fact, is what P3D does too with ActiveSky etc.

Not if you have a home cockpit setup with many screens and hardware panels. I don't want or need to see a VC, pan around, or use the mouse to click on something. At all. My use case is fundamentally different. In fact, everyone's use case is potentially different. We should all respect the ways each of us wants to use the sim, and the sim (and 3rd party products) should cater for as many use cases as possible. It's not hard to provide 2D pop-ups in addition to a VC. It's unfortunate that many developers have already stopped providing 2D panels. It's exclusionary and annoying. Like many, I had to resort to using an extra touch-screen for VC panels and Chaseplane to move the camera between them. REX has had historical weather on their roadmap for WeatherForce for years. It was due to appear in the last update, and indeed a historical weather tab did appear, but the feature is not enabled yet. You can get more info on their Discord server.

The strong belief in the community is that this is due to their agreement with Meteoblue. The weather is one of their 'crown jewels' with which they will brook no messing. No official statement has ever addressed it other than to repeatedly say that they have no plans to open up weather to 3rd parties. At the same time they haven't acted to cut off REX's solution, which they could easily do I imagine. Some of us remember the days of 'DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run'. I think this reflects the fact that FSX and ancestors were always much more open because they were seen as hobbyist products that happened to be located in the games division, whereas MSFS is positioned as primarily a game product that is also used by hobbyist simmers. The priorities are reversed. The Xbox gaming platform (for both Xbox and PC gaming) is a much more closed and restricted environment generally. Everything about how the game is installed and runs, down to things like encrypted add-on files, reflects that different culture. P3D inherited FSX's openness, which suits LM fine because their true target market is people building training sims who usually need to integrate their own systems.

You need 3rd party software for this. P3D's viewgroup system allows you to define as many arbitrary asymmetric view frustums as you like but you really need some software like Fly-Elise NG's Immersive Display Pro or Immersive LCD Pro to turn your physical design into viewgroup definitions that work properly. But it definitely can be done. To bring the conversation back to something barely approximating the topic, I'd like to see future P3D absorb the capabilities of something like Immersive Display Pro into the base product. But it would likely be a Pro Plus feature if it did.

There is a third position, of course... if you have multiple displays set up so that you have a 180+ degree FOV and can literally just look left and right to see what's out there, you don't need to pan the view and with enough 2D panels or hardware panels or some combination of the two, you don't need the VC at all because in that scenario it's essentially pointless. I appreciate that that isn't a common setup, but it's more common than I think people realise. You don't have to go all the way to a full home cockpit to be able to get rid of panning and mouse-clicking and for me, that's the most important step in immersion. Nothing more immersion breaking than using a mouse inflight, IMNSHO.

Yes, that's annoying. But since the big pivot to MSFS as the first platform seems to be more or less complete, and it doesn't support historical weather in any shape or form, live weather is now the default and it's just assumed that everyone wants to fly that way. At least it does claim to be able to read the weather from the sim (with the proviso that it's only up to 200km away) which would work with P3D if you were using ActiveSky, say, but I don't know if that applies beyond FSX/P3D because AFAIK you can't read the weather at all (beyond wind direction, speed, OAT and QNH at the current location) in Simconnect in MSFS. From what I can see it's mostly 'it has speech recognition and it works with MSFS'. I've not noticed any fundamentally new capabilities. That said, I only installed it yesterday.

I am a long-time (and often frustrated!) Pro-ATC/X user and I just bought /SR which I'm currently using with MSFS. Bear in mind that I also own Pilot2ATC and PF3 and VoxATC and I'm probably going to try out FSHud, so don't take my having purchased something as a recommendation 🙂 You can absolutely use it the 'usual' way via keyboard, but the UI has changed, at least for MSFS. I don't know if it still uses the SimConnect menu method in P3D, but in MSFS you get a new set of windows on your desktop. Because it isn't presenting via SimConnect the options are not numbered as they are usually, so you can only use those keys you have bound specifically to the program, which basically means keyboard options for 'check-in / make next request', 'confirm instruction' and 'say again'. Anything else can only be done by clicking the option in the menu, which is a major annoyance for me since I try to avoid using the mouse at all in my cockpit setup, but I can use a touchscreen which is... not quite so annoying. If you select an airline from the built-in list (which is fairly extensive) as your callsign then it will read out the name per the callsign (although I don't think they have them all correct) provided that the voice set you're using has that callsign recorded. For example, if you pick British Airways then it will say Speedbird. This is the downside of pre-recorded voices. They sound more natural than TTS but can only say what is recorded, so new callsigns for new airlines won't be possible unless you get updated voices. At one point there was a tool to record new voice sets that they made available, which is how Mave made the extra voices (which are now included in the base SR product, BTW), but that isn't available any more. There are some new voices in /SR in several regional accents, so there's decent variety. You can configure which voices get used where for pilots and controllers. There's also a lot of regional ATC chatter (although you quickly get used to hearing the same things over and over again). I believe you can add your own there too. Another downside of pre-recorded voices is that if a voice is missing a word or phrase (and some of them are, particularly for checklists) you'll get a substitution where the missing word / phrase will be spoken in a default US-English voice instead. It's very jarring. 'Decimal' is a good example which is missing from a lot of the UK voices, which is odd since decimal instead of point is required by CAA and EASA phraseology standards. BTW, the product forum is entirely run by unpaid volunteer moderators who are usually as in the dark about product development, updates and fixes as we are. The developer is never on the forum, all official communication comes through the 'project manager' who sometimes disappears for literally years and has often said 'don't ask about new releases or new features or anything else, we simply will not discuss it and we will not give any estimates or schedules' which has led to some frustration among the community there, including the mods, when it looked like Pro-ATC/X had been abandoned. The lone developer had a major accident a few years back and basically stopped working on the product for 2+ years. This is the risk of single-developer products, which I've moaned about before on this forum! The point release schedule is almost always once-per-year, so if a release has a bug, you'll have to live with it for potentially 12 months plus, or multiple years if the developer becomes unavailable again. Although they did do a point update to /SR shortly after release since it had some nasty bugs, so maybe that's changing (I'm not holding my breath). That said, provided you jump through the hoops that the forum mods insist on, you'll get an answer. I just asked a question yesterday and I got an answer today. I will admit that Pro-ATC/X was my favourite of the ATC options I had and it was what I used for years. When I started using MSFS alongside P3D I ended up using Pilot2ATC since it was the best option that worked with MSFS at all; now that Pro-ATC/SR works with MSFS, chances are I'll go back to it full-time. I may try out the speech recognition at some point too. Hope some of that helps you decide 🙂

It's not completely impossible to decompile a VB6 executable if that's all you have, though it depends on how it was built. There are some tools out there that can get back to something approximating the original source code, minus variable names etc. It would be a major job to turn that into useful code and then port it to something modern, as you mention. But ultimately, you couldn't do anything with it without permission from the owner of the code, and from what I can gather, he's not about to give it.

You can go here: Purchased Downloads – Prepar3D Log in with your customer account details - not your license ID details. You should have created a customer account when you first made a purchase of a P3D license. If you log in with license details you only see the downloads for the version that that license ID applies to, I believe. With your customer account login you will see download links for all the versions you've ever purchased. You can't download a version that you never had a license for, so if you never bought v3 then you won't be able to download any v3 point version, for example. Scroll down the page, you'll see a download section for each major version that looks like this one: https://ibb.co/ZxLy8Dg (sorry, I can't embed in the post for some reason) Click the 'Legacy Client Downloads' link at the bottom of the box and you'll see the list of client installer downloads for each minor version. If you download the full installer for the latest version (3.4, here) and the specific point version installer you want (say, 3.1), install 3.4 first and then install the 3.1 client over the top, you effectively have a working 3.1 install. All of this only works if you have an active license for the version you want to run, of course, otherwise you can install but it won't run. You can do this for 5.2 just as easily as for 4.1 or 3.3...

Me too. You can download the client installer for every point release from v2 onwards. What you can't do is download the full installer for those point releases; but you can download the full installer for the last update released for that major version (so 4.5, 3.4 etc), install that, then download the client installer for the specific point version you want (say, 4.3), and install that over the top. That gets you a working version of 4.3.

Actually, you can download previous versions of all the client installers right back to P3D v2, but not content and scenery, and also the full installer for the last released version of each major version (4.5, 3.4 etc). With those you can basically re-download and install any historical version of the sim. You can still buy licenses back to v3 if you need them, too. You can't download the historical SDKs, though, which I usually need for developing apps. In any case I have an archive of the installers + SDK for each version since 3.0 on my NAS, just in case. Good practice if you're heavily invested in the P3D platform.

I'm not on a 'convert Ray to MSFS' mission, honest 🙂. If I still had my old home cockpit setup I'd still be using P3D, and as it stands I'll be going back there when I build my new one. On historical weather specifically, REX is promising this in the next update of Weather Force, which they say is in testing now. They have been promising it for years, though, so I'll believe it once I see it. HiFi could offer the same thing once they have a mechanism for injecting weather into the sim. It seems the lack of an official method for doing it is stopping them, and that's perfectly reasonable for a commercial software vendor. I would pay a subscription for a good ActiveSky implementation on MSFS or P3D if it kept the product alive. 100%.