SimeonWilbury

Do you have any Cargo-specific recommendations for South America? Quito is definitely on my list but wondering if there are any other airports that'll take 747s you'd recommend.

Back when I used AI Traffic in FSX I used a utility called AI Flight Planner to edit all the flight plans that came with my Traffic Addon to replace VHHH with VHHX, it was able to do them all at once which helped. It's been a good few years since I did it so I can't quite remember the process, but it should be possible assuming said utility is compatible with v5.

Such always seems to be the case with newer software I guess. Windows is no exception to the rule for me, I didn't move to Windows 10 until extended support ended for Windows 7 - were it not perhaps for that and DX12 I would still be using Windows 7. I'll be holding on to P3D for not entirely dissimilar reasons until other factors force me onto the new. Software as a service as a whole irks me, but of course that's a whole different conversation which could probably do with it's own thread.

ORBX LDDU is a very scenic approach that I enjoy flying into. Haven't tried it in v5 yet but I believe it is compatible +1 for Kai Tak, I'd go so far as to recommend it as a standard airport for that region, another +1 for PANC, which is also a fine airport if you like to do trans-pacific Cargo-ops (which I often do) If you're into city sceneries there are some very good ones for NA, I use Aerosoft's US Cities X Chicago (there's also a DD scenery which is newer) which pairs well with FSDT KORD and FlyTampa KMDW, and DD's New York City X though airport offerings for NY are a bit lacking these days. Washington X gives a lovely representation of DC as well as a servicable representation of KDCA, I'd 100% recommend taking a MD80 in to fly the River Visual Approach to Rwy19, one of my favourites in the Sim. ORBX KSAN is a great airport with a challenging approach and a good representation of the surrounding area, another good one to take the MD80 into.

Seems to be little danger of that thankfully, TFDI have said they are aiming for a simultaneous release but if they hit a roadblock with the MSFS version they won't delay the P3D version if it's finished. The features they've demonstrated so far look very well-simulated so I'm optimisitic in regards to depth as well.

Totally agree. I was writing a post myself arguing against any kind of boycott, but you put it far better than I could. At the end of the day I think we should do our best to enjoy P3D as it is, regardless of future support. And the joy of this choice of sim is that there is still plenty of backwards compatibility for many products, so even if some content is a bit dated it remains 'good enough' to a large degree.

I'll be sticking to P3D for the time being for similar reasons. I don't expect I'll move to MSFS until the update-regime is more stable. And who knows how long that'll be. I'll happily continue buying what P3D content there is during that time. With the MD11 and Concorde still on the horizon I haven't much incentive to move over. One hopes that Airport Scenery development for P3D at least will pick up again during that time, even if it's just improvements of existing titles.

It's frustrating when a mature offering like P3D (still a lot in common with FSX so more than 15 years of dev experience) drops off a cliff in third-party support when the successor (MSFS) still lacks the very high fidelity aircraft sims we're used to in the old product. I agree that it's not the fault of consumers - people go for what they want, and for the majority of consumers the other offerings from MSFS make up for the lack of very high quality study-sim aircraft at present. But there is a real gap in the market at the moment. Many devs have stopped developing for P3D, but MSFS still hasn't got its SDK/ third party support in order yet so development is a lot slower. Not all of it is Microsoft/ Asobo's fault, a sim as new as MSFS will take a few years before devs are as comfortable with developing for it as they were with FSX/ P3D, but also the fact that third party support doesn't seem to be a top-tier priority means that this process is particularly slow. So basically, P3D, still the preferred sim for a decent number of us who prioritise the aircraft over the sim itself, is increasingly no longer served by many devs but without MSFS being a viable replacement yet, and it is not clear for how long this will be the case. I think it can be agreed that in the current stafe of affairs there won't be many more all-new aircraft projects begun for P3D, but supporting existing products to at least function properly in newer versions of P3D goes a long way towards keeping people satisfied. Certainly I don't see much reason for this not to happen in the scenery department considering the amount of P3D scenery ported to MSFS since its release. In essence, MSFS is frustrating for existing p3d users because it's split the market and for the moment is forcing a choice between being able to fly a good range of study-level aircraft or being able to rely on consistent third-party support. From a consumer perspective I would much rather there was more of 'phase-down' approach to P3D to make the transition easier.

Yes, I imagine a good ATC service like what RC provides is very useful when using older airport layouts. I've gotten so used to flying with no traffic or ATC over the years that I've become very reliant on charts, and I also use them a lot for navigating on the ground so a certain degree of accuracy to the current state is appreciated. It also depends on the level of flight planning you do I guess as well, as all my flights are planned via PFPX using the latest available Navigraph data. Thankfully in the latter regard Navigraph still does navdata for Kai Tak, meaning I get to keep at least one bygone relic on my network.

I think for those of us who use charts from providers like Navigraph that are kept relatively up-to-date with the current state of an airport like to keep a relative similarity between the two to minimise confusion. It's also useful when flying online on services like vatsim as changes to taxiway layouts can potentially cause some inconvenience. I don't think most of us (except perhaps the true die-hards of us) notice most of the minor changes that always go on to airports, but the more significant ones are normally easy to pick-up as they tend to preceeded by a not insubstantial amount of construction work in the real world (which is often reflected in the charts from navigraph etc. for a time). As someone who mostly flies offline without traffic mostly layout changes don't bother me that much - I mainly fly cargo and cargo terminals don't change much and for some airports like OMDB I still actively used old (now-demolished) cargo stands. Though it can be a very different story when I fly pax. In these cases it's a big help when devs provide charts of how the airport was at the time the scenery was made. Only area where updates become an absolute must in my view is if there is significant change to the runway layout (KORD would be a good example) as without the right FMC procedures/ ILS frequencies it can be a huge faff to fly instrument approaches.

I imagine people will also want the third runway for VHHH when that eventually opens - though given I still exclusively use Kai Tak that is practically a non-issue for me

+1 for me on this one, I get very confused whenever I have to park in SFO A slightly left-field one would be WF Studios' ZHCC (Zhengzhou) - there's since been a new taxiway installed since the scenery was developed added parallell to 12R/30L, to see that added would be a welcome improvement to navigating that airport when I next pop in on one of my 747 cargo runs.

Not a pilot here, but the 747 does have body-gear steering on two of the main gear bogies to help with tight turns on the ground, so they aren't all fixed position per-se. On the -400 I believe it is active below 16kn GS (at least that's what I remember from the manual). So that helps it a bit better at low speeds. You'll notice in the PMDG 744 that if you go beyond 16kn GS the aircraft turns more slowly and it becomes very difficult to make any tight turns. I haven't tried the 777 but have tried both versions of the 737, all I can really say about the 737 is it's my least favourite aircraft in regards to ground-handling but that was the case even with the older, less realistic steering.

They match the frequencies on Navigraph as well, flew in with the BAe 146 the other day and no problems.

Depends what your standards are I guess, wong runway numbers don't upset me much (and with the update posted that is no longer an issue). Optimisation isn't great but the flying I've done so far in v5 has been fine on the fps front. Main complaints are outdated texturing and lack of DL, which isn't a dealbreaker for me. I should however note that I bought the scenery a good few years ago when it was considered more up to date (i.e. before the runway number change); I haven't tried the others so I won't go beyond elaborating on my own experiences.

The FSDT version is outdated and unoptimised, but I still find it works well enough for my purposes, at the very least the installer natively supports v5 and I haven't had to modify it at all. Not great but minimal faff required.

I've flown in a couple of times and no issues with VRAM. Albeit I'm perhaps a little more conservative with settings than some, but I'm finding this scenery to be giving both great Visuals and FPS.

Update: I'm getting a strong feeling this is linked to Sky Force. I flew EKCH-UUEE in the MaddogX this morning and the sim no error CTD'd when I was on the ground at Moscow getting ready to start up for the return leg. Only thing different from yesterday (other than the different route/ aircraft) was that I was running Sky Force. It's possible the Rob's suggestion was correct and Sky Force is conflicting with ASP3D somehow. I'll try and run some more flights without Sky Force running and see if I run into any more CTDs. Only other thing that might possible be linked is PFPX being the unstable mess that it is somehow causing a memory leak in P3D or something, I closed PFPX a few hours into yesterday's flight. Edit: just did a bit of googling and found this in the P3D Forums, seems familar to what I've been experiencing, if in a much older version of P3D https://www.prepar3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=128396

Success this time around! May well have potentially been Sky Force causing the trouble after all. Won't know till I get some more long-hauls under my belt, but it's currently working!

A little update I just realised I completely forgot to mention in my last reply, I am currently running EA On. I am re-running the flight today after a bit of a break (and a few nice short-hauls). I have made the following changes: Updated AMD Drivers Updated Active Sky Cleared Shaders Running without Rex Sky Force I remember there being something about a buffer overflow with preferred UI Languages in the Processmontior log. I had an extra language added for compatibility with an addon I don't currently have installed, I've reduced it down to just one language in case that fixes anything. Will run Process monitor again for the last few hours of the flight to try and pick up anything if it crashes again. If this flight isn't successful I'll try again with EA Off to see if that causes anything. If still nothing I'll do another fresh Install with only the 747, Active Sky and the relevant Airport Sceneries. If there's still a problem then I guess I'll have to try and substitute another aircraft in to see if it's a PMDG issue.

Hi Rob, I don't think it should be a conflict between Active Sky and Sky Force, I only use Sky Force for the Cloud models and have the weather engine turned off. However I have seen an unresolved thread on the PMDG Forums that has suggested Sky Force as a potential culprit, so I'll look to run a future flight without it to see if that changes anything. The 747 should be up to date, it certainly is according to the PMDG Ops Centre and it updates whenever I reinstall it. As I mentioned above, Sky Force shouldn't be providing any weather data in theory as it should only be responsible for syncing cloud models, though again I'll do a test run without it. The Permissions issue is a possibility, there were some permissions issues visible in the process monitor log but not sure if they're the cause. From what P3D gave me in the DXDiag log it may also be something to do with my drivers, as the diagnostics constantly cites cpumetricsserver.exe which from what I can tell is AMD related, and the same process shows up in event viewer with a buffer overflow when I start Windows. I will try and use display driver uninstaller to see if I can clear up any potential driver irregularities. Many thanks for the help!

Done more digging. I think it is a memory leak. Will post on the LM forums and see if a solution is possible. From P3D generated DXdiag file: Windows Error Reporting: +++ WER0 +++: Fault bucket 2143477839530551784, type 5 Event Name: RADAR_PRE_LEAK_64 Response: Not available Cab Id: 0

I've done some digging: I had a checkout of my Active sky files and found a SimConnection log, it looks like there's some kind of Simconnect error going on: 12:20:54:0681-Sim general message:Sim Msg: Exception received: SIMCONNECT_EXCEPTION_OUT_OF_BOUNDS 21:25:52:0713-Sim general message:Sim Msg: Exception received: SIMCONNECT_EXCEPTION_OUT_OF_BOUNDS 21:26:37:0592-Sim general message:Sim Msg: Connection closed Not sure if this is the culprit or not, but suggests that maybe SimConnect was misbehaving? EDIT: I also found this entry in ActiveSky's Utils_Log: 21:26:38:0092-Exception thrown attempting to clean temporary file: C:\Users\Martin\Documents\Prepar3D v5 Add-ons\ActiveSkyP5\Weather\clouds\tmp\10486429_9.cld. Exception error: Access to the path '10486429_9.cld' is denied.

I think TFDI have said they're aspiring to a simultaneous release, but that if the MSFS version does get bogged down they won't deprive us of a working P3D version if that is ready to ship. So I'm relatively confident we'll at least get the P3D base version within the year.

Yes, I can understand why. I prefer to run my flights in real time generally as It gives me an excuse to spend most of the day studying/ doing other activities and then come back to the PC at the end of the day to finish the flight. I very much got into the habit of this in v4.5 because that sim was so stable for me. Memory leak is possible, but I assume this must be due to a change in P3D itself/ an addon rather than a change to my PC or OS install. I would imagine such leaks would at least result in an error of some sort though? From what I have in the ProcessMonitor Log the Sim just seems to suddenly decide to shut everything down. I may give this a look to see if AMD have an equivalent setting, though I'm not seeing any evidence linking this to my GPU/ Drivers. I've considered this, then again since this is quite a recent install I haven't actually got much in the way of scenery installed. I'll probably try and do a very basic P3D config with Only the PMDG, active sky and relevant airport sceneries to see if I can narrow down the issue to a specific addon. It'll be a long process as I'll have to run the sim for 8+ hours each time but is really the only effective way of solving this I guess. Many thanks for the help