Will FSX/ESP aircraft work in P3D...

NFA01 · Post by **NFA01** » Thu Feb 10, 2011 6:15 pm

Will current aircraft (military and civil) developed for FSX or ESP work in P3D? How is the performance characteristics and modeling between the 2 programs?

Thanks,

Chip

N4GIX · Post by **N4GIX** » Thu Feb 10, 2011 6:21 pm

Yes, for the most part they will work just fine.

NFA01 · Post by **NFA01** » Thu Feb 10, 2011 6:41 pm

OK...can you define "most past"? Are there certain models that will not or just ones from certain developers?

Post by **Beau Hollis** » Fri Feb 11, 2011 9:25 am

The biggest issue we have come across internally is with FS9 models being sold as FSX models. Technically they run in FSX, but the model format is older and was built using older tools. Even in FSX, these models had some known issues such transparency and shadow glitches. In Prepar3D 1.0, we upgraded some of the core shader from Shader Model 2.0 to 3.0 to support new features like transparent water and IR sensors. The legacy FS9 model rendering pass uses older shaders and/or legacy fixed function fall-back routines. 3.0 shaders don't play nicely with 1.0/2.0 shaders on some hardware, so there have been some issues rendering these older models. Many of these issues will be resolved in the next point release thanks to more shader upgrades, but we still can't guarantee that FS9 content will render properly.

Beau

N4GIX · Post by **N4GIX** » Fri Feb 11, 2011 11:18 am

Beau pretty much summed up what I meant by "for the most part." You can load a .mdl file in any hex editor (or even notepad.exe for that matter) and check the header information.

If it doesn't have MDLXMDLH it simply isn't a true FSX/ESP/P3D model!