RALF9636

Have you tried M.A. Realturb together with Active Sky? It enhances turbulence significantly in P3D.

If it is done accurately, not just some random bumps and vibrations but accurate change of forces needed to move the controls according to type of aircraft, speed, altitude etc., then yes, absolutely. I'd love to have that in the new sim. I always find the discussions about realistic flight models kind if weird when we move the control surfaces with joysticks or yokes that in no way represent the feel of the real thing. The flight model and the forces felt in the stick or yoke must work together to simulate how it feels in the real aircraft. So any flight model should include a kind of calibration preset for the force feedback device. So an in-house solution by Microsoft should be a good start. I would highly appreciate that.

Why is this going on until page 9?

If you apply basic rules of logic it is easy to see that the statement quoted by the OP says nothing about the claim the OP concludes from it. It's like saying :"There are green apples. So red apples don't exist".

Yes, things like that are going to be interesting...

A road network overlay without the AI analyzing the imagery for roads can be problematic when the road data and the imagery are from different times. I assume the Bing road data tends to be more up to date than the imagery. So you might have cars running where there is no road in the imagery yet. Tunnels might also be a problem. I've seen these things in P3D with photoreal scenery and vectored roads.

You might also want to consider that P3D V4.5 is a very mature software. All kinds of addons are available, there are no major issues and it runs very stable. P3D V5 on the other hand is quite new, not every new feature seems completed, there are still issues up to CTDs and not everything is compatible yet. It might take some time until P3D V5 can be considered a complete and stable sim. Personally I am quite happy with 4.5 for what it is. It's loaded with addons and runs smooth and stable. I won't consider getting V5 before V5.1 or 5.2. With your CPU at 3.4 be prepared for some compromises with settings as soon as you add things like PMDG, FSL, Orbx , detailed airports and AI traffic.

I'm also not sure what you mean by 3D road network. Shouldn't the AI be able to recognize roads in the imagery and put cars onto them without the need of a vector-like road overlay? Apart from that, good find of the cars. It seems they improved the cars and they fit in much better into the scenery now than in the earlier videos where they looked more like leftovers from FSX.

There seems to be a tendency here to be overly enthusiastic towards P3D and to immediately shout down any criticism. Just as an example, in the thread about FFTF Dynamic someone points out that such a basic functionality like having an optimal balance between FPS and texture loading any time by dynamically adjusting the FFTF value should be included in the base sim and shouldn't require to buy an addon. He immediately was shouted down from all sides, even by a moderator who blamed him for having an agenda and told him to move on. He was told that a default blank P3D runs smooth out of the box and it's the users fault to install all kinds of addons. Well, but how does a default blank P3D look like? It looks like a software from a decade ago, so P3D just relies on the plethora of addons most of us are using. In other threads users post screenshots and videos praising what a great sim P3D V5 is, while the video shows a constant texture and mesh morphing right in front of the user's aircraft and autogen popping up in patches all the time further away. Screenshots show a harsh straight and rectangle line between a snow covered winter wonderland and lush green meadows and trees right next to it. There are screenshots of San Francisco which were posted to praise the new truesky technology, where the rendition of the city itself could as well have been from FS2004. Apart from a handful of users who keep pointing to these and many other long standing issues from time to time nobody seems to care. When it comes to unfinished features or bugs of P3D V5 most people seem to be happy with P3D V5 having "a great potential". Users post about an external addon to be used to organize their addons, the tweaks they use to make the sim run better or the affinity mask that is needed with HT on or off, without exposing the question why these things aren't included in the base sim after all these years. To the contrary most of the time those who keep criticising P3D are being massively attacked like they were fouling their own nest. Someone posted in a thread that MSFS looks too good, so it looks more like a game and not like a simulator. This is were the sluggish evolution of flight simulation over the last 15 years has led us to: People think a software must look bad to be considered a flight sim. If it looks anywhere near the graphical standards of the gaming industry in 2020, it can't be a flight simulator. What's wrong with pointing out the shortcomings of P3D with the goal to make the developers improve that software? Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with enjoying what we have and with applauding for the improvements P3D has made all the while, and I don't want to bash P3D. But sometimes it seems any criticism here is regarded as a lèse majesté. How can we expect LM to finally adress all the long standing issues and bring P3D closer to today's standards of the gaming industry if we just praise the status quo and suppress all the critique?

I agree. But the water looked a little disappointing in some of the newer screenshots, worse than in the early trailers. I assume that means that water is still very much work in progress, so I am confident that Asobo won't disappoint in that regard as well eventually. Nevertheless we can keep encouraging them in doing so. 😉

I guess it might as well be just a generic tropical waterclass texture like we already have in P3D.

I agree. What has already been said in the thread about rivers is also true for ocean shores and shallows. All their appeal gets lost in these bare water class textures. I'd like to see sandbars, coral reefs, different colors according to depth and currents. And these things do not only exist in tropical waters. And while we are at it: What about tidewater mudflats like at the north sea? It is a totally different landscape at high tide resp. low tide. Would be great to see that correctly depicted in the sim according to the actual tides. I seem to remember we've seen a shot of Mont-Saint-Michel but I can't find it right now (it's probably somewhere in this thread?). Not sure how the tidewater looked in that image. Anyway this is not what I expect on release. It's something for subsequent improvements of the sim.

I agree. I have no idea how Azure AI works in detail and I only understood a fraction of what you explained in this thread 😉 But how I understood Azure AI from the beginning is that it is meant to get data from different sources (images, "footprints", OSM, whatever...) and use these data to create a plausible representation of the scenery worldwide. The operative word here is "plausible", which is not "accurate". Some seem to expect a worldwide accuracy by default created by the AI. I don't think this is going to happen in the foreseeable future. Total accuracy will always take some manual editing. That cannot be done on a global scope. Still I have no doubt there will be lots of third party developers who will create more accurate regional addons. And I am perfectly fine with that. I think it is fantastic what the Azure AI can already do to create a worldwide scenery which looks most convincing all around the globe. There might be a building where it should be a wall, buildings too small or too large, a banyan tree when it should be a palm or even a wrong colour of a roof. So what? I want to fly above the scenery mostly at minimum 1000 ft with at least 100 kts and won't take notice of every single object on the ground. Most important for me is the overall plausibility of the scenery, creating the immersion of being there when flying an aircraft at an adequate altitude and speed. I am not interested in shooting still images of an accurate virtual world to compare them with reality. That doesn't mean that the AI cannot or should not get better over time. But let's not forget where we are coming from. This is still supposed to be a flight simulator, not a virtual earth. And we all know how the flight simulators we have now look compared to what we have seen from MSFS so far.

The discussion if - and possibly to what extent - P3D still uses the ESP engine like FSX comes up every now and then. To me that is a purely academic discussion. What I see when I look at the latest version of P3D is that it still pretty much looks similar to FSX. It is improved, for sure. But to a large extent many aspects of how the scenery is displayed are easily recognizable from FSX. MSFS on the other hand looks - different.

Just to clarify the obvious: The P3D shot isn't Bangkok but San Francisco of course. I just posted it to display the general scenery quality we have so far. And I think to have low quality textured skyscrapers standing in the middle of roads really is "seriously wrong"... Of course accuracy would be better than plausibility as the end result (and the more famous a location is the more important that would be). But I don't think we can expect global accuracy from the AI in the foreseeable future. So these famous places will need to be custom made (if not covered by photogrammetry) which will take a lot of time and effort for a global scope. I would be fine if that would come subsequently be it by Asobo or third parties. Of course there's nothing wrong with reporting shortcomings to improve the sim and I didn't meant to say that. But getting too perfectionist will delay the release - and I really can't wait for MSFS to be released. 😉