CaptainAddOn

Update to navaids outside a major release is a very pleasant surprise. That has not historically happened. I wonder if we’ll be getting more frequent navdata updates.

Damian Clark - I am sure you are miles ahead of me on understanding the implications here, but early indications are P3D may be moving toward a more regular cadence of small incremental updates, and based on their versioning will still eventually get to 6.1, 6.2 etc. If active sky is just failing because it checks the version and doesn’t recognize it, have you given any consideration to just checking the first two parts of the software build (I.e. 6.0.x.x passes regardless of what the x’s are, but 6.1.x.x fails until you have had a chance to check things aren’t broken)? May save you a ton of grief (although I can’t speak to whether there is risk here). p.s. thank you for supporting v6 - clear skies on my end 😊

I think that you will find v6 a performance upgrade from v4, although possibly a small downgrade/parity with v5. If history repeats, v6 will probably get more performant as more point releases come out.

I once heard an LM employee give a talk where he stated that the models in the box with P3D are not even made by LM. Apparently they outsource them to avoid any potential for sensitive data to make its way into the public product and they have much better models for their military customers we will never get our hands on.

Orbx global, Active Sky, and primarily PMDG Boeing add-ons, with some occasional diversions into GA freeware or even the default aircraft. PMDG 737ngxu is my daily driver.

Page is up for me.

You are not criticizing P3D here though. You are criticizing PMDG for not supporting their products. Apples to apples (default to default), P3D v6 is a clear step up over P3D v5. I for one have pretty much all add-ons I fly regularly working perfectly.

Some really nice examples over on the Prepar3D forums: https://www.prepar3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6325&t=148248

Much better skies/clouds, improved terrain mesh, accumulating snow/rain, better performance, tunable color/lighting, more frequent updates I have this pet theory that anyone who is dragging their feet and saying "it's v5.5" has not actually bought v6 and tried it for themselves...

My take is that those 500 developers are very, very likely to be almost entirely made up of content developers at Asobo. What we really know about MSFS 2024 is: - The engine is pretty much the same. Good enough for backwards compatibility at least. Hard to quantify what they really mean when they say the significantly enhanced engine. - They are leaning into career mode, which implies a lot of content will be provided in the box (specific sceneries set-up conducive to career tasks + aircraft in the box that are needed to complete these missions, minimally) - They are dramatically increasing the amount of content that will be streamed and going even further cloud first. I take this to mean there will be a massive amount of content developed to the point where they don't just need to stream terrain/scenery, but even are getting to the point where they need to stream textures, aircraft, etc. to make it accessible on console and most PCs. Overall, a nice thing for the community, but for third party developers, I would be very, very scared that Microsoft will pull the rug out on my current active development efforts. I think the slow progress is because everyone is reluctant to staff up due to this risk. There already are many instances where aircraft shown in the 2024 trailer look to effectively be clones of existing popular payware aircraft on the marketplace. If Microsoft puts out the perfect sim with a standing army of 500, then what role do add-ons play in that?

I’m sure this is a bigger than normal update. We know they were missing some textures and also the entire C-130 model, plus who knows what else. A whole lot faster than downloading and installing the whole thing over again at least. Update worked smooth for me - appears to not have broken anything.

Moderators - recommend closing this one. People can readily find the content in question and the trolls are out in full force.

I think the bolded part actually says exactly that!

You in some kind of beta/early release program? I didn’t get an update and my C-130 still doesn’t work. Hoping this is indicative that all these fixes are imminent.I think v6 is great, but would be nice to get more frequent updates/enhancements.

LM offers a 14 day money back guarantee, so you can just buy it, try it, and decide whether to keep it within 14 days or to request a refund.

I think this is a really bizarre choice on the part of Parallel 42. Whereas LM will never produce a competitor’s aircraft out of the box without support from 3PD, this choice seems like it simply invite the P3D team to simply spend a few cycles on the next release improving the default camera systems. I can’t imagine that this would be that difficult, and it would kill whatever residual revenue chaseplane has left.

He states: “P3Dv6 remains a vital element in our long-term platform strategy, and we look forward to exploring its potential in due course.” I’d say this is really just all down to timing. Many other add one are putting without issue so perhaps this just comes down to the need to properly test on the new version when resources are available. In my view, this is reason to be optimistic about FSLabs support of v6. May need to hack stuff together near term, but eventually they will bring proper support.

So with multiple people now reporting multiple PMDG aircraft work and look just fine in v6 within 24 hours of release, can we all just acknowledge that the PMDG story here is BS? Obviously trying to push customers over to repurchase on the other platform. I’d recommend preparing some nice screenshots of their aircraft working in v6 and posting over in their forums to show them just how easy it will be to support their customers.

Time to update your resume!

Good news is that most of the aircraft seem to be porting over just fine.

Anyone try it out yet?

No doubt there are improvements there, but I fail to see how these impacts the aircraft instead of just the terrain/scenery. Visibility of precipitation on the runway or the PBR materials on autogen buildings seem to be to have nothing to do with aircraft add-ons. Perplexingly, the developer who seems to not be complaining about how much they are impacted is Orbx.

In my view, based on the release notes, the third party developers who are not supporting v6 are absolutely full of it. Nothing in those release notes looks like a big deal for third party developers to me. Perhaps just some tuning of the lighting or something to match the more advanced lighting enhancements. I suspect they want to force us to rebuy on "the other sim".

My point is that good business dictates to hire someone for $30 an hour to make $31 dollars an hour in a niche market, even though he already is paying 10 people $30 an hour to make $800 an hour in the main market. The notion of “we have to focus our resources on MSFS” does not come right out and say “P3D is not profitable”.

At least my interpretation of what he was saying is that devs should independently make a determination of whether to support P3D, without considering MSFS. So basically instead of fixing resources and optimizing those fixed resources, they should add resources as necessary to capture all of their potential/profitable customers, which may still include a profitable P3D niche community. That makes good business sense to me.