My 3 big wishes for P3D v5

[Senchay]

Probably there will be a 4.5 first but i still wanted to "collect" some thoughts and maybe get one or 2 +1s to make sure to LM that this is what most would like. Or not, of course.

1. Let go of old things

Im aware that probably not the whole engine can be changed but at least drop compatibility to FSX and early P3D versions to fully focus on new possible technology. Many bigger devs already dropped it and i see little reason to stay on the current path when anyway most new addons wont be compatible anymore.

Besides that im near to sure that you will loose customers to XP11. Not because it would be really better but because the voices out there are so "loud". The places where things like "XP is the future" get more and more, even it may be far from the perfect sim.

2. Lower the fps loss from "locked fps".

Atm this is really bad.... Where one can easily achieve 40+ fps, often more, as soon as one locks to any value the performance drop is immense. From 40+ to low 20 region is something i never understood. I know that it changes internal calculations to focus on terrain but i think its time for a middle way. For many people this is not usable because of this reason.

3. Make P3D less affected by addons.

Its way too easy to let 3rd party addons break the whole Sim. I think is one of the biggest problems for me and a lot of others.

The many reinstalls are bad and lower the time flying A LOT. I think a lot of ppl have around 30% times with problems/tweaking and 70% real flying. There is no other sim where this is so immense.


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There are other things but that would be my first wishes. Im very visual focused but i would rather drop PBR in best visuals as finally have more peace in this hobby. These 3 things are nerve breaking for near to everyone who flys the bigger planes.

[Xenon]

I fully support your post. Prepar3D at present is a FSX with less content (less aircraft, no missions). Basically it has a new gui, graphic updates and little else. Mainly maintains the same structure of FSX (with merits and many defects).

In v5 I expect:

1. New default planes (new ones not recycled).
2. It would be nice to have the missions, perhaps those of FSX completely recreated, and completely new ones.
3. Work on the graphics engine, to make it cross-platform (Windows 10, Mac OS, Linux). Prepar3D independent of the platform would be the best, I am aware that it is a great job, but this is the right path to undertake for the future of this valuable project. I absolutely do not judge the graphics engine, which I am sure will be optimized in the future. I hope I'm not misunderstood by this question, but I'm sure that many will think like me.
4. Implement a system to allow the community to realize interface translations in various languages. This feature was already present in FSX, and P3D shares much of the structure, so I do not think it's a complex thing to do. This helps to further spread the project and give users a sense of additional freedom, while LM does not have to spend a penny, because users work on translations independently and then send the complete work to the official team that views their work before to officially include it. I think it's a good idea at no cost.
5. I really enjoyed the SDK for Prepar3D, it's a great way to allow modders to do independent work without imposing content limitations. It would be very nice an official editor to create Airports, and generic models. In this way designers can do a good job, without the need to be expert programmers.

Prepar3D is a great product, a good job has been done, but it is too dependent on third-party content (very expensive and heavy). It would be nice to have more complete Prepar3D, where payload contents are offered as a plus for passionate users, without having to spend so much to then have a beautiful, extremely heavy simulator that does not run smoothly even on a nuclear-powered PC.

Thanks to all of you, to the official team, and I hope my post will be read carefully. I love Prepar3D this I have not written yet ;)

[delly]

I thought I would share my thoughts here too.

Having just attempted to build the fastest Prepar3D sim possible I have been taken to the edge of what the engine can do. I think this reveals some of its limitations (and amazing strengths).

Here are some of the things I would like the dev team to take a look at and where I think the sim is falling behind against XP.

1. Texture and Scenery loading - the AutoGen / BGL texture loading algorithm is ancient and although an impressive increase in autogen density has been achieved the same old texture loading issues are here.
Even on the fastest PC you will often experience blurries or even worse autogen failing to keep up and popping in. If you go far enough (unlocked frames) eventually the autogen will not be able to keep up.

The OP raised this too. Pausing the sim, you will observe the engine loading/drawing the textures/autogen on the path behind the plane. The engine is not clever, and not optimised around the viewport direction or the ac position meaning if you are on a long flight and the scenery hasn't kept up when you come back you may have to wait 15 minutes for the scenery to 'unpack' (decompress) all the BGLs that the plane has flown over.

This may seem like a niche issue but it really at the core of the bottlenecking the current engine creates on the fastest hardware. I believe (but could be way off) the fact that BGLs hold compressed scenery (and textures) means a very large amount of compute power is needed just to unpack scenery. As scenery gets more detailed the compute power needed per frame goes through the roof.

On my I9-9900K can see all 16 thread cores at 100% when I am just flying at 300kts across Orbx TE GB. TE GB would be a very good scenery for LM to use to attempt to optimise as it perfectly shows the PC is underutilised but still stutters. I would love to understand where this regular stuttering comes from. TE GB is the kind of product that we will see more of in the future so Prepar V5 should be optimised for it.

2. The engines ability to maintain smooth FPS
Linked to point 1, the engine should be able to delay or sensibly throw out expensive rendering jobs to ensure consistent FPS (smoothness). This is quite standard in todays game, usually called Target FPS, options or scenery density could be dynamically adjusted to maintain a desired FPS.
Also raised by the OP the biggest bug bear for many users is the problems in the engine related to Locked FPS / V-Sync and smoothness. On my top end machine I see significant stuttering even when the framerate is 70FPS. It looks like 1 CORE is the bottleneck, it would be great to understand this in more detail but I guess that there are some key jobs that cannot be split across cores. Flying around in a circle (with a complex airport and high res scenery) is the best way to see these stutters so it seems that even though my VRAM is not full the engine is unloading and re-loading lots of textures. Why? This also explains the black texture issue on an airport when you switch views. Please could this part of the engine be fixed?
Again Orbx True Earth GB is a great example (please refer to the ORBX forums discussion, hopefully they have raised this with LM, I know the 6% Terrain load bug has been fixed in 4.5) and the limitations of the engine are getting exposed.

To summarise smoothness is absolutely key to everything, a house 10 miles away being rendered 400ms later is ok dropping 5FPS on final approach is not.

GFX areas I would like to see addressed:

• Ability to run unlocked without blowing up the autogen or texture loader (Dynamic Fiber time fraction)

• Ability to dynamically target a FPS while changing LOD/Density

• Ability to fade in newly rendered autogen/scenery rather than pop

• Proper volumetric clouds. Will not happen but maybe one day

• Real support for PBR materials, shaders need to be extended too, look at TomatoShade, the fresnel stuff makes a huge difference and adding this to the core product would not be difficult

• Engine and tarmac shimmer effects

• Sea effects seem worse than FSX, too dark below the plane, no ability to see white chop from 5000feet

• Better ability to draw clouds behind the camera that will change lighting on the AC. This is the famous bug where if you rotate the camera suddenly the plane goes from dark to light because the shadows a cloud were casting are now ignored (probably optimisation). This ruins immersion and makes for some horrible effects at dusk/dawn.

3. Support for uncompressed BGLs. Storage increasingly gets cheaper, I think a significant performance improvement could be made if I could uncompress my BGLs ahead of sim time (like XP does) thus giving my PC more CPU power to render and load autogen, AI planes etc. This could be optional per region.

4. Totally rebuild the UI.
The UI is pretty bad. It needs to be re-imagined. Here is just a small list of things that are infuriating:

• Allow me to maximise the settings window! The ListBox with planes in it is only a few high (when details are shown), I cannot maximise or make use of my HDPI display

• Shortcut for Graphics/Settings (why can't I do this)

• Much preferred the old plane images in FSX so I can quickly see the plane from a grid

• Save my frequent last planes, locations, weather, scenarios, flight plans. Annoying that I always have to type in the name of the airport every single time. Likewise finding the plane I want each time is ridiculous

• Moving to a new location should not cause the whole graphical engine to restart from scratch. It should be like slewing, ok pause it while it catches up but given how long it can take to load from scratch this is very frustrating

• All settings that do not need a full rebuild should be overlayed and should affect the image. E.g Shadow distance/lighting/bloom, let me fiddle with these and see in realtime what they do

• The clipping modes are bugged out. In the VC any objects outside the cockpit (like jetways) get culled when they come too close

• The Key Assignments page. Why oh why can I not search for a KEY! What does A do... no idea and no way to find it. Can I sort by Key, nope. Annoying. Use of proper windows or even a 3rd party WPF control set would fix all of this

• The map is astonishingly bad even for 1990s. How about 'Drag to move' (2000s) and pinch to zoom (2010s)

5. Stop support for ALL 32bit addons Just remove all the 32 bit code, kill all support for old addons!

6. Working VR This really will be great when it finally comes.

7. Better perf tuning and debugging tools/info - perhaps this is here already but I would love to be able to run P3D in debug to see where stutters are coming from and understand what settings I need to reduce. At the moment it takes too long to tweak and understand whats going on.

Just off the top of my head!

Having said all that, V4.4 on an RTX2080TI / I9900K is an incredible experience. Thank you and I look forward to V5!

[maajr57]

WOW! Impressive posts! much of the computer jargon way over my head but I want to add my two cents on two statements.

I think a lot of ppl have around 30% times with problems/tweaking and 70% real flying. There is no other sim where this is so immense.

[maajr57]

My previous post got cropped. Lost most of it. Oh well.

[vincent.guerandel]

My biggest wish for P3D v5:

- More FPS!
I am currently an avid vatsim pilot flying in VR and consider my PC to be in the mid high range end (i7 4790 / GTX1070).

If we consider a simple calculation:
- HTC Vive, Prepar3d v4.4 (low-Medium settings), Active sky + Cloud Arts (low settings) / orbx global, vector, europe, Lowi (medium settings) / A2A cessna 182 Skylane: AVG 45FPS
- HTC Vive, Prepar3d v4.4 (low settings), Active sky + Cloud Arts (low settings) / orbx global, vector, europe, Lowi (medium settings) / PMDG 737-800 NGX : T/O (29-30 FPS) Flight (29-30 FPS) Approach (15FPS) Landing (15FPS)
- Above settings (No VR involved) A2A: 70FPS / PMDG: 50FPS

This becomes even more problematic in VR when using major airport hub sceneries such as FlyTampa EHAM or UK2000 EGLL. I am not even mentioning FSlabs performance here which is abysmal.

As a result, I am switching to an i9 in the next couple of months to be able to have an enjoyable experience flying in VR.

But is it a justifiable solution? No, I don't think P3D users should have to spend an enormous amount of cash just to be able to have an average experience flying in VR on Prepar3d. The engine is clearly outdated and P3D needs to invest as not only will it bring more performance but also better graphics. The system settings entry requirements for new players will also be lower.

I don't personally want to move to xplane as even though I have never tried it, I dont think it would bring that (close to reality experience) that I am looking for when flying. This is what currently makes P3D better in my opinion but it is clearly behind in terms of performance and graphics.

[delly]

The same chat is going on over on at avsim
https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/5514 ... -in-p3dv5/

[delly]

I am currently an avid vatsim pilot flying in VR and consider my PC to be in the mid high range end (i7 4790 / GTX1070).

I upgraded from GTX 980TI / I7-4790K to RTX 2080TI / I9-9900K and the difference was massive, the CPU is still the major bottleneck so you will see a big jump in FPS with an I9.

[Xenon]

I upgraded from GTX 980TI / I7-4790K to RTX 2080TI / I9-9900K and the difference was massive, the CPU is still the major bottleneck so you will see a big jump in FPS with an I9.

Total cost of your PC? 3000 dollars? maybe even more right? with what they cost the addon, Prepar3D, powerful hardware to handle such beautiful graphics (poorly optimized), I take the patent for flying ultralight and I do the pilot 3 months a year (summer).

With powerful hardware like yours, it makes no sense to say that Prepar3D runs well! it is obvious that it runs well! if he did not turn it was strange.

I hope that Prepar3D will soon become a complete product, with enough content to fly without the need to buy very expensive addons, which make the simulator heavy and inconvenient to install for each new release.

I do not think I asked for the moon! currently Prepar3D is an engine with old features, little optimized, which can only be used by buying expensive addons. If the whole community likes to spend a lot of money to get something 20 years ago, I'm happy for you!

[Lipuprepar3d]

1- Much better fps performance for VR (90fps)
2- Much better fps for monitors
3- DX12 for better performance.
4- After these changes you could go on improving the simulator.

[Lipuprepar3d]

Even with that computer, quite similar to mine, in VR you can't achieve the 90fps needed for a good experience. Not even in a monitor you get those fps. Not in cities... They need to improve the code a lot.

I upgraded from GTX 980TI / I7-4790K to RTX 2080TI / I9-9900K and the difference was massive, the CPU is still the major bottleneck so you will see a big jump in FPS with an I9.

Total cost of your PC? 3000 dollars? maybe even more right? with what they cost the addon, Prepar3D, powerful hardware to handle such beautiful graphics (poorly optimized), I take the patent for flying ultralight and I do the pilot 3 months a year (summer).

With powerful hardware like yours, it makes no sense to say that Prepar3D runs well! it is obvious that it runs well! if he did not turn it was strange.

I hope that Prepar3D will soon become a complete product, with enough content to fly without the need to buy very expensive addons, which make the simulator heavy and inconvenient to install for each new release.

I do not think I asked for the moon! currently Prepar3D is an engine with old features, little optimized, which can only be used by buying expensive addons. If the whole community likes to spend a lot of money to get something 20 years ago, I'm happy for you!

[maajr57]

In the Options-Key Assignments Window, can we get a the current Control Configurations .XML file shown in the window? or the last file imported?

[jetpilot1980]

Probably there will be a 4.5 first but i still wanted to "collect" some thoughts and maybe get one or 2 +1s to make sure to LM that this is what most would like. Or not, of course.

1. Let go of old things

Im aware that probably not the whole engine can be changed but at least drop compatibility to FSX and early P3D versions to fully focus on new possible technology. Many bigger devs already dropped it and i see little reason to stay on the current path when anyway most new addons wont be compatible anymore.

On behalf of those of us with payware addons this is not a desirable request; since a lot of the developers treated their payware as an entirely new development when converting from P3Dv3 to P3Dv4; which caused a lot of us to have to pay all over again... Which can get really expensive...

[monir geadah]

On behalf of those of us with payware addons this is not a desirable request; since a lot of the developers treated their payware as an entirely new development when converting from P3Dv3 to P3Dv4; which caused a lot of us to have to pay all over again... Which can get really expensive...

The same from me also.

Best wishes

Monir

[DylanM]

Great posts by those above.

I would tend to agree with the OP and would support a full break in backward compatibility for the sake of a new engine with significantly improved performance, graphics, and realism settings. Even if it meant that existing addons wouldn't be compatible with V5 (until the developers catch up), it wouldn't preclude us from still running 4.X in parallel.