SimeonWilbury

I will be following this with great interest

Am one of those who previously has opted to stick with P3D - partly because I fly mostly in historical weather (and also I fly the 747-400 and FSLabs Concorde a lot).

Not 100% sure when I will pick up MSFS, or if I will wait till 2024 has settled in, but this is looking like the main barrier keeping me from upgrading so far being removed finally.

WIth it having been this long I think it's safe to say we've been abandoned at this point.

For an MD80 in P3D I can only recommend the Leonardo Maddog, still a really stellar aircraft.

A few thoughts on my end

• Iirc the shallower bank-rate was(?)/ is to maintain climb performance on the LHR-BAH routings? Or at least that was the intention. There doesn't seem to be much impact on climb performance with HDG-hold method in your case, but I'd be interested to see this on a heavier-loaded aircraft in case it makes any difference
• I think you might also be able to do the equivalent to the HDG-hold without engaging the Heading hold by setting the INS to 'manual' so it doesn't change waypoints as early. Same effect I think but no changing modes on the AFCS.
• I don't use an EFB (beyond navigraph charts) or anything that makes me worry about whether I get registered as 'hitting' waypoints or not so it doesn't bother me (and the curves look nice on the ground-track to me lol), so not much of an issue to me personally, but if they can get some fine-tuning into the next update that makes things more accurate I'm all for it. I've no idea how things were calibrated in the actual aircraft so I'm speaking from a certain level of ignorance.

Well, they intend to make a MSFS version and their dev effort seems to be primarily going into MSFS ports, I think I can gather that much, though they are unclear as to whether the bulk of the effort is going into Concorde or the A32x.

With FSL time-frames I wouldn't expect anything soon in the conventional sense; I imagine they will maybe try to push the airbusses out first before concorde but there is already a very saturated market for Airbusses on MSFS so I don't know how well that will turn out.

At least the GPS spoofing would be no problem for Concorde, given it doesn't have one 😆

I'll need to do a few more custom routes to have a look (so far just Bahrain to Hong Kong via Bangkok), though I haven't had too much problem resetting the accel/ decel points, the VCS seems to follow it more or less ok. The documentation does definitely still show the 'original' points, which I ignore.

2 hours ago, Coldbear said:

I'm also still waiting for supersonic over land

Supersonic over land was added a little back, you can modify the acceleration and decelration points in the HPLX when loading a custom route.

I had a problem a little while ago having not touched the sim for 6+ months where nothing in Chaseplane worked. If I remember rightly I had something weird going on with simultaneous versions of Chaseplane installed on my PC, at least one of which was completely bricked and wouldn't connect to P3D. It's still a little buggy for me to this day (every time I launch Orbx it wants to update it) but it's worked since I got rid of the offending duplicate.

I'm not sure if my symptoms were quite the same as yours, but it might be worth sniffing around your files/ registry in case there is another version hanging around like I found. It is possible that something in ORBX Central is causing it to break in some way.

3 hours ago, Ian S said:

Was there a trick to downloading? Every time I try, my ISP blocks it as an unsafe site?

Didn't have any problems on my end,

If you're still having trouble, I can send you the .zip file and the afcad I made with the updated exclusions (assuming a v5 install) if you'd like.

If installing for v5 you will need to create a fake v4 install so the installer runs.

Thinking pure stability, v4.5 is probably the best option as it's less prone to using up all your VRAM than v5 is, otherwise I would recommend v5 for giving better performance and slightly better visuals.

Oh wow, I am really happy to see this!

Sometimes I'm reminded just how lovely the flight sim community can be at times; this being one of those!

25 minutes ago, Afterburner said:

What about ORBX New Zealand South region?  It comes with detailed scenery and airports, although I can't remember how detailed the NZCH airport is compared to the one discussed here. I have occasionally flown Concorde-X from Sydney to Christchurch on FSX many years ago.

Hm, it does apparently give some custom airport markings and the such, although I can't seem to find that much specifici information as to the airports on there.

If it's just changing up the markings and not really changing up the buildings/ textures much I might just go with NZAA

6 hours ago, SimeonWilbury said:

I'm generally more than happy to use scenery without any support.

And indeed in my searches, there just so happens to be a Legacy FSX Scenery for NFFN, offered for free as it's no longer supported.

Threw that into the sim, redid the exclusions via ADE, and now I have a pretty decent Nadi scenery. Would be nice to see this from more former FSX/ P3D developers.

41 minutes ago, Ian S said:

Flightbeam's Wellington is also very good. Its a challenging airport too, with a short runway, strong winds and water at either end.

Yes, I was thinking about that one too potentially, although 6000ft is probably pushing it a bit for Concorde in terms of runway length.

37 minutes ago, Nurmblitz said:

The Christchurch developer gave his products for free not so long ago. Cannot remember the web address but I´m sure they are downloadable in some shady site.

I think they did up until the end of last year, so I think I missed the boat for that. I'm not against trying the latter though I do try to avoid that when I can.

21 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

An inexplicable decision to withdraw it from sale. Unless something has happened to the author and no support can be given.

I have it installed in v5 and it’s fine. It looks like the default airport is your only option. ☹️

From what I can tell the Developer retired, and no longer wanted to offer any support.

I can understand the not wanting to offer support anymore, but I'm generally more than happy to use scenery without any support.

I might just buy Flightbeam's NZAA scenery instead and use that in place of NZCH, not the same airport but would be nicer than flying into default.

Hi All

I've been looking at adding to my scenery collection as I explore the idea of doing some round-the-world tours in the FSL Concorde.

One of the airports it seemed to visit a good few times was Christchurch in New Zealand, upon having a sniff around there seems to have been quite a good looking scenery by Godzone for v4/v5 (I imagine a few tweaks would get it working in v5 at the very least), but the developer sadly seems to have decided to withdraw the scenery from sale and I no longer appear to have a legal way of purchasing it.

There seems to not be much on the freeware end, so I was just wondering if anyone might have some pointers?

I have Paulo Ricardo's SBKP scenery, which I'm running ok in V5, I had to make a patch for it to work properly in v5 but that shouldn't be necessary for v4.

From my experience, most FSX sceneries will within reason work on v4 perfectly fine, there's plenty of backwards compatibility between the two, and you won't be looking at the kinds of Autogen/ Elevation issues that V5 brought with it's updated Vector Data.

So, with the caveat that I don't own this particular airport (yet...), I reckon you should be fine running it in 4.5.

The renderasync tweak has made a world of difference on my machine too,

Crucially I now have a decent framerate on night approaches into Heathrow, which was the one major performance issue that was bugging me. Many more Concorde flights are now on the table it seems.

As an aside, I notice the gauges still have quite a low FPS, but the actual sim now runs far smoother and the Autopilot is much more competent than it was when my frames were chugging.

Many thanks Maxime!

5 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

I found the same with my old 1080Ti. I prefer daytime flying anyway which helped on my old machine. With my new one nighttime is fine performance wise but I still don’t like it.

Ah, so indeed that's on my GPU end then.

My standards are probably a bit lower on the performance front on the whole, it only really gets to me when it starts to affect flight performance.

I'll keep an eye on the CG on future flights, I've not noticed much on that end so far, but I've yet to learn the F/E panel and so haven't been paying it much attention.

I just did another night arrival into EGLL

My FPS noticably went down before I was even near London, the flightdeck night-lighting I reckon is a big culprit in eating performance, though that could be my own hardware skewing things.

I run fine until I turn the lights on. Flying into more sparse scenery like OBBI I can seem to get away with it FPS-wise but EGLL really is a bit of a challenge.

For the record, I did a daytime arrival the other day and my frames at EGLL were much smoother.

Yeah - the performance isn't great in P3D. Bit disappointing development seems to have quietened down while MSFS gets the preferential treatment.

To offset the doom and gloom though - going to pipe up and say I'm still enjoying myself - I did give in and turn my settings down a fair amount, and I only run at 1080p ( without any traffic), but I'm getting enough frames for me; just made a flight down to BGI and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The only things I really dislike is flying into Heathrow at night, that is a bit of a slide-show, and the autopilot being pretty inconsistent in capturing the localiser on approaches.

So I'm not one of the people regretting their purchase at all.

The Cpu stuff is all a bit beyond me, all I know is I'm running a Ryzen 5 5600x, and my limitations are very much more on the GPU-end than the CPU end.

All things considered I do very much enjoy the aircraft, I waited for it for so long that I'm in the position of being glad I got something that works well enough after waiting years for the Just Flight 747 Classic and A300 to drop only to have them unceremoniously cancelled.

It has also just been fun in general to learn a bit more about the aircraft again having not flown it in-sim since 2018, but yes I do wish FSL would be a bit more transparent and forthcoming in terms of existing features and bugs.

Performance-wise while indeed you do need a good system to run it well I can just about make do with my current system which is mid-range and on the outdated side (though I do only run at 1080p which probably puts less strain on the GPU). I've long given up on ever having decent FPS in flight sims, and only at Heathrow is it really unacceptably low, so I'll cope until I can get some upgrades sorted.

My regret, as is shared by some, I guess comes down to MSFS being the sim that gets all the support and P3D being a bit left behind. Not much that can be done about it these days so I guess I'll enjoy my historical weather etc. while I can before eventually moving over.

Thoughts from my end; many of these are similar to Ray:

Three best:

• The VCS is a very immersive experience, I prefer it over FS2Crew which I use for the other aircraft in my fleet.
• A challenge to fly but in a good way, I never get tired of the flight profile.
• The flight planning tools are intuitive and easy to use, plus the paper charts are gorgeous (and useful).

Three worst:

• Appalling Performance, especially with cockpit night lighting on. I routinely suffer from Poor FPS (especially at Heathrow).
• Eats VRAM for breakfast, I've done my best to limit usage but flying into newer sceneries like T2G CDG is dicey at best, 8GB card is definitely the 'minimum' and not optimum.
• Still a few bugs and some features still need fleshing out, new features for the P3D version seem to be on hold while FSL develops the MSFS version.

Just the other day I picked up ImagineSim's TBPB and WSSS sceneries to open up a few new Concorde routes.

the lack of new Scenery development I expect is going to be an increasing problem as time goes by and airports evolve & the such, but P3D v5 remains a solid Sim and I expect it'll be at least another year or two before I even think about moving to something else.