Afterburner

You are showing the autogen draw distance from a high altitude (which one if I may ask you) with unlimited visibility that is absolutely devoid of any haze. Under these conditions, you will always see a border, no matter how large the autogen radius is (and I think that it's quite large compared to other sims). I agree that the sharp border does not look nice and that it could be made less noticeable, but the atmospheric conditions on the picture (on which you see everything in perfect clarity up to infinity) is simply unrealistic.

Judging by the screenshot posted on the official P3D website, I don't know... This doesn't look bad, but I hope that the colors change from day to day and don't always look this golden. The cloud resolution on this photo is unsatisfactory, though (but maybe it's due to a lower resolution cloud setting).

I find it disappointing that while the new flight simulator has made tremendous strides on the scenery front, the realism of clouds and weather in general is still somewhat lacking. Although both P3Dv5 and MSFS use "true" 3D clouds, all of them suffer from similar symptoms: They look either blurry, pixelated, blobby, grainy, like waffles or cotton balls, or they are too orange during sunset/sunrise. Yes, you can have scenarios where they look good, but it's unfortunately very inconsistent. The cloud sprites used by the old weather engine in P3Dv4 and in v5 with EA off may not be true 3D, but at least they are more consistent. Yesterday, I compared the depiction according to live weather at 7:30 UTC at airport UUEE in both sims. Here are the pics: MSFS: P3Dv4 using ASP3D and Envtex/Envshade: Real-life picture taken at that time 8 miles southwest of UUEE: No question, MSFS can produce lovely and beautifully looking clouds, but they often fall victim to the accuracy of cloud coverage and coloration. And this is one aspect, by which many people are deluded into assuming that if clouds look just beautiful or romantic that they are automatically realistic. If you compare the above pictures, I would say that P3D's cloud color and coverage is much more natural under the given conditions, while MSFS' coloration is way off (and no add-on can currently correct that). In this regard, I find that P3Dv4's weather (with the said add-ons) is still most well-rounded despite the clouds being just sprites. Compared to what I have seen in the internet from MSFS and P3Dv5 with EA on, I find the following cloud situations quite realistic: To answer the question of the OP, no, unfortunately you can't use ENVTEX clouds/sky colors if you run P3Dv5 with EA on. This is a bummer because by default, P3D's sunset colors are always the same with EA on, and they make the atmosphere look like on Mars (as some users stated it). Compared to that, the old atmospherics engine allows for a much greater variety. Here are some of the ones I have seen (with Envtex):

While scenery add-ons that enhance a region (such as the ORBX FTX series) are no longer a selling point for P3D (since photorealistic scenery is available by default at no additional cost for MSFS), I hope that 3rd party developers will keep making new airports for both sims. After all, each simulator will equally benefit from improved airports (as their default versions are not that detailed). This is where P3D shill shines in my opinion: With realistic and consistent weather thanks to Active Sky (without the problems reported by users in the sub-forum of the other sim), study-level airplane add-ons and a rich and diverse AI-traffic environment provided by AIG, it is a big joy to land at a high-quality airport that lets you see its life and complexity. I don't care about checking the location of my house beneath me during approach or cruise flight, but I love to get my passengers and baggage unloaded after parking via GSX and to spot other airplanes at that airport. (And maybe to right-click and select the AI plane to follow it a little bit). In a nutshell, you can't beat MSFS if you want sightseeing, but when it comes to the experience of landing a jet at a big quality airport, P3D still has the edge if you use the above add-ons. For that, I still see some demand for good airports for P3D.

The ability of clouds to grow and expand is indeed nice, but this is something that was already introduced in basic form in FS2004 ("Dynamic weather change"), although it happened mostly with FS' own weather, not live weather. As far as clouds moving in different directions at different altitudes, I did a test in P3Dv4 and created two different wind layers with different directions and placed a cloud layer within each wind layer. And what did I see? The clouds moved in different directions with the wind. As such, I don't see what is so super complex about the MSFS weather engine that HiFi would have a serious issue with. Also, I can't help to think how this complexity goes in vain when I see some pictures of the pixelated and grainy clouds from SU7 that have been posted on the MSFS forum. This is something that should be worked on first IMO.

How do you know that the "techniques they use in those platforms will not work in MSFS" if the unrestricted access to weather is sealed to 3rd party weather add-ons? To make that claim would require one to know the internals of the sim's weather engine. The guys at HiFi have over 20 years of experience, and so far they have been able to push the weather depiction to the limits of all sims (including X-Plane). Remember how they overcame the problem with sudden changes in wind direction in FSX with the release of Active Sky Next in year 2013 - something that other weather programs failed at? Yes, right now their expertise is in the sims you mentioned, but if MS opened up to them, I am sure that they would make a heck out of the weather in MSFS, which may look lovely under some conditions, but still lacks in consistency.

Indeed, 19 months was the time period between the release of v3 in October 2015 and v4 in May 2017, with four point updates and three hotfixes in-between. It feels like P3D had its heydays during v3 and v4. Now, not only are updates coming slower, but they add fewer major features, and no one has an idea what they are currently working on. I think that adding satellite image streaming (like in the other simulator) is the only way LM will be able to attract new and old customers in future versions. I just don't see many simmers willing to shell out another $200 for v6 Professional version that will bring marginal improvements.

If you ask me, I find that the clouds on that picture look very blobby, blurry and somewhat like light volcanic ashes (which has been a problem since MSFS' debut). Nowhere near reality (where the clouds are white).

Have you used MyTraffic 6? I think yes if my memory serves me right. That traffic add-on brings its own AFCAD files for most major airports around the world, and although I bought the version MT5.4, I still use their AFCAD for most airports in P3Dv4, since they provide more parking slots with more accurate placement of terminals. Keep in mind that the default airports in P3Dv4 and earlier use very old data that goes back to the release of FSX in 2006. I am sure that it will work with v5 if it worked with v4 or v3.

Man, that sucks, and it affirms my stance that P3Dv5 was released prematurely with serious deficiencies in EA implementation, lighting - and now, as it turns out, in the number of gates at default airports. I am glad that I opted to buy v4 last year instead of v5, notwithstanding the lower performance (my GPU did not have enough VRAM for v5 anyway, haha). If the sim will continue heading in this direction, I will also not buy a new version in the future.

Hi Ray, I use the program "Airport Design Editor" to check the details of an airport. Here is the information it gives me about the parking assignments in the default version of LPPR in P3Dv4. I hope it will help you to compare:

This is an important point that is often overlooked (and which brings us to the inevitable laws of supply and demand). Those arguing that we need "free" education for everyone forget that there is already free education available in form of middle/high school, where students ought to acquire basic knowledge in most subjects. Whether public schools do a decent job of teaching is a separate topic (and it is unfortunate that rigor has been watered down over the years in the pursuit of accommodating every group of people), but unlike in some 3rd world countries where attending school is considered a privilege or luxury, there aren't any significant barriers in the western world for parents to send their kids to schools. College used to be a place reserved for a few talented people where you developed critical, analytical out-of-the-box thinking skills. These days, a college degree is required for most jobs that don't really demand any special academic abilities. As you stated, if more and more people get a bachelor's degree, its value will be degraded, so that employers raise their requirements to filter out candidates to a manageable number. In response, there are calls to make college accessible to everyone to be able to meet these requirements, which raises the number of graduates - and so the vicious cycle continues... Many people say that a bachelor's degree today is equivalent to a high school degree some decades ago. But at what cost! It is actually astonishing to me that college is becoming more expensive at a time when access to information and knowledge has never been so easy and inexpensive thanks to the internet, thus creating a substitute for university education. Before internet, the resources of knowledge were confined and exclusive to universities and libraries. These days, the internet offers an avalanche of information for free (well, if you exclude the cost of internet access). Of course, that information is not subject to the same quality control as textbooks, and there are many rotten apples, but good quality information is still possible to find. If anyone is passionately interested in the history of a country, just look up in the internet or go to the library - it costs you almost nothing! There is no need to get indebted into a five- or six figure amount for a degree in that subject. Things are different of course if you want to become an engineer or programmer, where going to college is much more advantageous.

I am satisfied with P3Dv4, and although MSFS has beautiful and realistic graphics, P3D is still #1 for me when it comes to simulating an environment for airliners thanks to tools like GSX, AIG AI and Active Sky (and of course the complex airplane add-ons). Unless and until MSFS will provide this environment, I will use P3D for airliner flights, and MSFS for sightseeing. However, LM's lack of communication with users (especially with regard to the DXGI error) and the bugged implementation of EA has put a dent on their credibility and potential to shine bright in the future. This is where I need to credit MSFS for their interaction with customers - at least they respond and put bugs that need to be fixed on their to-do list. However, I don't like to be forced to update the sim if I have concerns that it might screw some things up, and I don't like to be required to have a Microsoft account to run it,

I also don't think that free college "for everyone" is a good idea because someone else has to pay for it one way or another, and something that's seemingly free is not valued by students and their parents as much. You could also argue that this doesn't do any good to the quality of colleges, although in my observation, a lot of them tend to invest the money into aesthetics rather than in quality professors. However, college tuition in the United States has reached absurd levels in both nominal and real terms. Just find out how much of the cost of a semester a student working a summer job at a gas station could cover in the 60s and 70s, and how much now (almost nothing). This can't go on forever. Unfortunately, the price hikes are channeled to nourish the bloated administration and their undeserved salaries instead of rewarding good instructors who are the ones who motivate students. I do think that the top high school students who demonstrate high academic potential should be given assistance in form of scholarship, but this is something that already exists in the States.

The add-on has a 24 hour trial period, so you can test it before buying a subscription.

The Season Manager also does more than what I need. I just want to have an updated seasons.bgl file that provides a better representation of real seasons and not necessarily live conditions with the snow patches. On the other hand, the seasons file can be problematic in that there can be a big difference between the beginning and the end of November in mid-Europe, but the low temporal resolution of the file does not allow these differences to be reflected. In my experience, you can use the default seasons file from May to October, since the seasons are quite accurate then. I personally have used the Season Manager to downloaded historic files for September 1, September 15, October 1 ... up to April 15, which I inject during the respected month.

Yes, it does work with ORBX global textures and OpenLC, since - as you assumed - it just reads the season, and the textures and tree colors are provided by ORBX. There is no performance impact that I have noticed

Hi Stu, I know this problem, which is related to the low temporal resolution of the seasons.bgl scenery file that only changes seasonal information once a month. Up until October 30th, you had mostly autumn textures in mid-Europe, but from November 1st on, the file dictates to use winter or even hard winter textures as the "average" of November in this region. There is a solution to this problem, which costs a little money: SimElite Season manager https://simelite.com/seasonmanager.php This add-on provides real-time seasons around the world, and it generates patches of snow in regions that have them reported in the real-world. You should know that this add-on uses a subscription model. If you subscribe for 1 month, you pay $4. Subscribing for as long as 12 months costs $2 per month. In my opinion, it is a little expensive for the fact that it just updates seasons, but it also has a "historic seasons" function, meaning that you can download seasons for past dates and have them injected into the sim. What you could do is to download the seasons for some dates in the past, save them in separate folders and use them (by copying the files) when you fly during a specific month. For example, download and save a few files for October, November and December, etc. last year and activate the respective folder in the scenery library when it's the respective month. You can do it after the subscription has expired (one month is more than enough). With this add-on, you have still autumn textures in most of mid-Europe right now. The support is very responsive.

It's the Nvidia GTX 1660 Super with 6 GB Vram that I am using. Considering that I bought this card for only 219 € in August last year, while the current price is almost 500 €, I am very reluctant to consider an upgrade (which would be even more expensive), so I hope we will have the option to use DX11 for some time to come. MSFS and P3Dv4 with DX11 already leave a thin Vram margin under demanding conditions, but at least it doesn't OOM when there's a Vram overflow. Thank you to those who confirmed that DX12 will be optional.

Will we have an option to continue using DX11, or will the use of DX12 be enforced? My GPU only has 6 GB of Vram, which is just enough for most scenarios on high settings. As the general experience with P3Dv5 has shown, DX12 will likely increase the Vram usage and lead to out of memory errors if it's more than the GPU can handle. Does anyone know?

Then the EA implementation in P3d v5 was rushed if they haven't managed to program dynamic themes yet.

That's so lame... The last (Microsoft) flight simulator that was limited to global weather themes was FS2002 (and that was 20 years ago!) In that aspect, LM has made a backwards move that makes FS2004 even more progressive. Even if TrueSky is to blame for it (or not, who knows), it's just unacceptable that a simple thing like the buildup of storms or cloud fronts can't be implemented by a weather engine that calls itself modern in a simulator that was released in the same year as MSFS 2020. Add to it the waffle clouds that you see every now and then (in the default state). The legacy weather engine in P3D v4 is very well balanced in my opinion, especially if you use Active Sky and Envtex/Envshade. Unless significant improvements are made to weather in P3Dv5, I will treat its EA weather with skepticism.

Ray, I admire your patience and perserverance. I hope that you are getting some enjoyment out of your flights and do not limit them to bare test rides. When you complete a successful flight after changing a parameter, it doesn't tell you immediately whether the change will eliminate the DXGI errors in future flights or not, since you already had flights in the past after which you thought that you had found the culprit, only to be annoyed by the opposite. It's rather that the probability of getting this error is X%, and you need to have a large enough sample size to have some chance of getting that error. After Y flights, you may think that this problem is solved, but on the Y+1th flight you may get the dreaded error only to realize that the sample size wasn't large enough at all. To ensure that you have completely eliminated this error, you would need to do lots of flights to ensure a large enough sample size. (And since it NEVER happened with P3Dv3 and v4 on your system, it is safe to say that the error didn't appear with these sims). Seeing you tinkering inside some registry entries that are not part of standard procedure and trying so hard to find and eliminate the error while LM sits idle silently and doesn't bother to comment in the respective thread on their forum, is not fair. LM does not deserve this kind of dedication from a user, for they won't comment even if you find the holy grail. Maybe it's a good idea to stop testing too much and simply accept the fact that there is a small percentage that this error will occur (which may be acceptable to you).

The sad thing is that if you address your problem in the P3D forum, there are users who instead of doubling down on LM to make a statement, instead give you such ingenious tips like using the newest graphics driver or deactivating the Intel integrated graphics driver in BIOS... Yeah, or cleaning the GPU pins... The next user will soon recommend you to swap the screws of the computer case for a different color 😄

Good for you that you have found a fix! However, a working solution should not require digging into the depths of Windows registry and changing parameters that Windows itself doesn't recommend to do. This must be confusing especially for newcomers if they experience such error. Neither Microsoft nor Nvidia tell us what actually happens "behind the scene" when the DXGI error occurs. As far as LM, there was a time during the v2, v3 and v4 era when they were actually more responsive (especially when Wesley Bard and Adam Breed worked there). Right now it feels like no one has an idea what they are working at - the weather with EA on is still bugged, and they leave those affected by the DXGI error totally in the cold. Nvidia doesn't seem to care either when you look at their forums (and that error happens with some other games as well).