EnQ

I can't remember any noticeable performance hit when I used FSLSpotlights v1 in P3D v3. Also, I'm not aware that there's a large performance hit (at least not on modern hardware) when using RealLight - after all I know, it does basically the same as PMDG's texture blending technique, just better (higher resolution/color-depth).

I'd hope for some improvement to night lighting as well but was that ever announced? BTW, every addon I've seen so far which uses TFDi's RealLight looks just excellent. May be worth the licensing cost, I'd even be willing to pay for an upgrade of night lighting to my PMDG fleet (737, 747 & 777)... I'm still not entirely sure how FSLSpotlights achieves dynamic lights in VC - my guess is they hack the DirectX rendering pipeline which explains why it causes crashes when used with certain addons. From what I read in the public P3D SDK documentation there is a strict 1m clamp on camera rendering for scenery which cannot be penetrated (most-likely to protect users from seeing outside scenery objects peek into the cockpit). Otherwise it would be trivial to write a small plugin which can replace FSLSpotlights. Maybe we should petition FSLabs to release their Spotlights source code, now that it is free (as in beer), anyway? I still can't trust them enough to reinstall Spotlights, but it's tempting... P3D v4.4 again introduced changes to the graphics engine (PBR) but unfortunately missed to allow light sources into that doomed clipping area. 😞

Unfortunately, as FSLabs seem to have gone mad, I don't want to use and especially cannot recommend FSLSpotlights as a workaround any more. @rsrandazzo I'd like to take this chance to renew my appeal to PMDG to please get lighting in all aircraft up to modern standards. Your aircraft remain the ultimate reference in systems depth and the 738 is still my absolute favourite but the dithered night lighting textures (not only on the 738!) just look terrible and break immersion every time. As a result, I avoid night lighting completely except for panel backlights. TFDi's RealLight seems like it would be the next best option to finally get pleasant-looking night-lighting into PMDG aircraft without hacking the rendering pipeline to do things the API doesn't allow yet but, unlike FSLSpotlights, it has to be licensed and implemented by the aircraft developer, so we users are unable to help ourselves in this situation. I was hoping for P3D v4.2 to extend dynamic lighting support to the VC but it seems 4.2 was a pure VR and SLI update. It may very well be that PMDG has insights into the ongoing development of P3D they are not allowed to share but since there are alternatives to actual lights in API by Lockheed Martin (see TFDi) I think it would be safe for PMDG to just let us know if improving cockpit lighting was just "being worked on" or "being considered". So far I am not aware that PMDG would have considered improving VC night lighting in the past few years. Some small feedback would be nice. :)

Maybe not: https://blog.tfdidesign.com/2017/08/11/tfdi-design-717-introducing-reallight/ TFDi says they are open to sell licenses to other addon developers. If it works well, maybe that's an option? Otherwise, FSLabs is working on v4 compatibility of their spotlights addon. But it's still a difference between being able to turn knobs in a 3D cockpit (RealLight?) to turn up/down predefined lights and using a 2D overlay menu (FSLSpotlights) to set up custom user-defined lights (which may not have been set to accurate places).

I had very high hopes when reading "dynamic lighting" on the feature list that it would finally include real cockpit lighting. But either it's still not supported or developers haven't upgraded their aircraft yet. :( With P3Dv3 I would have recommended FSLSpotlights as a workaround but unfortunately it's not yet available for v4...

That was just for demonstration purpose - I don't usually turn it that much up but the issue is apparent even on smaller "steps". There is. But I'm not sure discussing it won't violate AVSIM policies... :rolleyes: Check the website of the developer who sells the expensive Airbus; they've also developed a hack that adds custom light sources. May spontaneously stop working on any P3D update though. I'll send you a PM.

I'm not Ben but I feel like I could throw in my 2 cents here as I've had severe issues with OOMs in P3D lately. I've only started with P3D v3.0 one year ago, only had FSX for a month to test if that sim would be acceptable for me (I've flown with X-Plane 10 for a year before that), so I was careful to only buy addons which would be compatible with both FSX and P3D v3 up to that point. If I would have had any FSX-only addons I would have been very reluctant to switch to a 32 bit P3D version which is no longer compatible with many FSX products. While P3D certainly improves the OOM situation compared to FSX (although Dovetail's modified version FSX:SE appears to have been slightly improved over the old boxed versions as well), you're still able to run into issues unless you start to adjust your sim settings according to the aircraft and situation you are flying in. With one year of not missing out on sales and great new releases, I've accumulated enough addons to easily drive my P3D installation into OOMs. The probability of hitting OOMs even increased with release of P3D v3.4 and I'm now back to 3.3 as I could hardly complete any more flights in the PMDG 737 (OOMs always occured 10-15nm out, just around the FAF, when the arrival airport would be completely loaded together with all aircraft on ground). But even back at P3D client v3.3 I still had similar issues with increased memory consumption. I'm currently attempting to work around that issue using Aerosoft's SIMstarter NG. It's no silver bullet either but it allows you to save multiple custom presets for all kinds of simulator settings which you can assign to profiles. I've chosen those settings so that I have at least 1GB VAS free after loading up at an airport. If I want to fly VFR, the aircraft is less complex than a big airliner and I can increase scenery complexity and LOD/range which I need as I'm flying closer to the ground. PMDG's aircraft (and the newly released TFDi 717) are definitely most demanding in terms of VAS; using the 737 as baseline for "benchmarking" VAS usage on my system, I noticed that it consumes about 600MB more VAS than the Dash 8 (the 777 appears to be 100MB less hungry than the 737, so just 500MB more than the Majestic). While P3D will attempt to unload scenery (a little less successfully on the latest versions), it can't get rid of that big chunk of memory the aircraft is occupying, so you are forced to lower your settings, optimize scenery config etc. While you can do that without any additional tool it's not really practical if you switch aircraft frequently and want to get the most out of your sim. SIMstarter NG allows to switch all of those settings by just a single click, once set up. When it comes to making a decision to buy P3D now I would highly recommend to save your money on P3D v4 when it will most-likely be released later this year (at least that's my guess from their previous release schedules; one major revision every 2 years whereas v3.0 released in summer 2015). Some developers, among them Orbx, have dropped clues that P3D may finally be switching to 64 bit which would actually solve OOMs (at some point, you can't optimize memory consumption any further and that point appears to have been reached with v3). However, keep in mind that transitioning from 32 to 64 bits will require updates to all addons using any type of program code (mostly aircraft and tools but even some highly complex scenery such as that from Orbx ship with some DLLs to enhance the sim with custom features). I would be very surprised if those upgrades are given away for free (although I hope I don't have to re-purchase every single addon I ever bought). (Edit: Just another point why it's a bad decision to switch to P3D now: LM will only allow to download the latest release available which now is the OOM-ridden version 3.4. You can no longer get the easier version 3.3, unfortunately. For that issue alone, I would rather wait until they will eventually fix those issues and check if 3.5 eases memory usage again when it comes along but then it will be just a few months until v4 releases, so no need to hurry here...) TL;DR: For the moment, I would rather take a look at SIMstarter NG if you don't have it yet and save the money for when P3D v4 (or maybe even Dovetail FS?) is being released and requires re-purchasing addons again which are available for v3 but will no longer work in v4 (you would have to purchase v3 versions for the migration from FSX to v3, then upgrade again in a year or so to get to v4 which just doubles the cost - so it never was a better moment to stay with the old platform and wait). @Ben: I've just finished watching part 2 of the training flight; it's yet another amazing program so far, hats off to Myron and you! Also, many thanks for including that setup video - it was really interesting to see some of the tools I read about but didn't try yet. As I've just got a new graphics card, it was also a great reminder to check Rob Ainscough's website again to compare Nvidia settings. While I'm unable to improve FPS on some airports (seems to be limited by CPU), trying Rob's settings at least finally improved sharpness in the PMDG's cockpit without any performance hit on the new card (switched from 750 Ti to 1070, great card but sadly not used efficiently by current flight simulators; XP10 has similar issues as soon as complex scenery gets involved).

I'd always do that - if it was. However, I was unable to find any P3D release for either the C-130 or 707. It would be very nice if there was one but if there isn't, developers should be happy to still earn money for something they didn't spend time for (making a product officially compatible with P3D). Of course, that's totally out of support but unless it's expressly forbidden to install into a successor product of the sim (as is with PMDG's products), it's not wrong unless you start patching or reverse engineering the original files. If just installing to a different sim and checking if everything works would be illegal, that tool I was speaking of should have been banned a long time ago. Anyway, good to know it's forbidden to discuss compatibility issues in this forum. I will keep out of this forum unless it's for support questions to developers who (unfortunately) put their official support forums in here.

I'll get the L-1011 for sure; had an eye on the JustFlight version but read that the CS version would be better at least compared to the regular JF one. Now there's also a "Professional" edition by JF but I couldn't find much about it. Just that the regular version wasn't up to the CS one, not for systems depth and especially not for modelling. There are two more aircraft I thought about getting from CS if they work with P3D v3.1 (using the "Estonian" Migration Tool): C-130 and the 707. From what I could find, installing the FSX versions would have worked on P3D v2 (unfortunately permanently crashing P3D, however the migration tool should have got a workaround for that). Did anyone try in v3(.1) yet and can report if there are any problems or everything works fine?

I'm new to both P3D and PMDG. Having bought the 737NGX this was one of the first things I noticed on that aircraft. I'm not talking about the moiré effect on the displays (actually, I can live with that as adjusting the display brightness helps) but only the grid pattern on the grey metal panels' textures which is incredibly annoying on night-time flights (which, flying online by the real clock, happens a lot). The pattern shows whenever the two light knobs behind the yoke (background and AFDS flood) are used, even in combination with daylight. When using just the dome lights (background & AFDS flood are off) at night, that pattern is not visible. My first guess was that it might be caused by a bug in HDR rendering (as is common for some issues in X-Plane) so I tried different graphics settings: Changing the HDR sliders, disabling HDR, disabling anti-aliasing, disabling VC mipmapping. Sadly, the panels still looked the same. I understand that PMDG felt the need to blend two textures together to accomplish fake lighting for performance reasons on low-end PCs but this actually feels like a major defect on a 90$ product in 2015, using a 200$ simulator. It would have been okay back when PCs had reduced color palettes (it actually looks like a dithering pattern for a 256 color palette to me) but today, with 32 bit resolution and rather powerful video cards, this should no longer be happening! I didn't notice such quality degradation with night-lighting on any default aircraft in P3D or the Majestic Dash 8, nor in other simulators, so why is it (still) there on the PMDG? @PMDG: Please either fix that texture or give us actual 3D lights instead of 2D texture hacks. I feel really disappointed having spent 90$ for an aircraft whose cockpit looks like the product has been released back in the 90s thanks to a fault in (presumably) one overlay texture. I had already seen plenty videos featuring the 737 NGX on YouTube before I bought it and the 737 even was one of the main reasons why I chose to buy P3D. However, that degradation was never visible; I guess I have been fooled by video compression... I also wanted to buy the 777 in the long-term but now I will surely stay clear until the issue has been fixed on the 737 - I don't want to risk spending another 135$ (!) just to see the same bad texturing all over again (and in case that issue is not present on the 777, then why do we have it on the 737?). I really expected higher graphics quality for the 3D cockpit (otherwise the aircraft is really nice, but having to see that dithering pattern whenever I look at any display or the MCP at night-time somewhat ruins it for me). Or maybe it's just me but I usually turn up panel lights during departure & approach instead of using the dome light. Not sure if it should all stay off in the real-world but using a simulator without a chance of your eyes adjusting to the light situation like in the real world I usually need a bit of light in the cockpit to be able to see everything. So, unfortunately, I see that annoying pattern all the time. Edit: Also, have a close look at how the lights blend into the shadows, above clock & PFD: http://www.energiequant.de/images/foren/pmdg737-lights/2015-12-28_18-22-20-449.png This really looks more like some sort of color palette dithering issue than just moiré (which would be bad enough, given it makes the metal panels look like they are made of rough draft quality plastic). Daniel Neugebauer