Godzone and Prepar3D, and other bits and pieces

[Ian Warren]

QUOTE (Scupper @ Dec 9 2013,11:15 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I put a couple of new shots of Auckland in the Screenshots section, entitled 'Jafa'. Still not quite as spiffy as Rob's though, - have to tweak REX a bit more...

Looking at your atmospherics in 'Jafa' i'm not to sure about that .. forget the spiffy .. i'd go Snazzy ! .. good to compare clear and swamped in weathers .

[zk2704]

Hi there Rob, Nice screenshots there, one question here

What sim do you think is better, FSX or P3D?
It seems that I am thinking about trying Prepar3d but it's a hard one, too hard for my brain cases to get an answer!
Well other members gave opinions about Prepar3d that involving some of your Godzone 'Real NZ' scenery that some places were flat
But as I saw its Wikipedia page about Prepar3d, it said it was a huge improvement over FSX as the graphics were better, the scenery was better but NZ still remaining like a desert, textures were better but when I go onto their website powered by Lockheed Martin they have several licenses and you have to buy them seperatedly.


Well it looks like a competition like

FSX vs P3D. Who wins?

Thanks

Zain.

[Ian Warren]

QUOTE (zk2704 @ Dec 10 2013,10:49 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Well it looks like a competition like

FSX vs P3D. Who wins?

Zain , its a case of buying the program and looking yourself, i look at all the programs and compare, good example if your looking for performance you can always return to FS2004 - we have many and a advocate here that is proved by the great screens shown , the addons are still great fact many only work in FS9 , You then have your FSX were it affects frames even into the hugely well designed airports even but still come out with a large frame issue (FPS hogger) End of the day its what you want to see ... and how you show a result or used as a training tool, maybe Xplane is the better , the thing is how it compares on your PC and if that is not working maybe step backward rather than go forward and just see what sort of result you get .

[toprob]

Basically, P3D doesn't make any changes to any scenery at all. You'll see the same landclass, textures, elevation mesh as FSX. So default P3D NZ doesn't add any scenery over default FSX.

Lockheed Martin have said that they will develop and upgrade the underlying capabilities of the sim, but it is really up to third parties to do the stuff which doesn't require getting into the code of the sim. So anything involving textures, whether weather, landclass, scenery, vehicles etc, or scenery in general, such as customised airports, they'll leave up to others.

There were a lot of issues which people had with FSX, which they were stuck with, as FSX was no longer being worked on. So it is stuck as it is, and can't be altered except for cosmetic changes, such as nice airports. Lockheed Martin have effectively brought the sim back to life, by giving it a future, and committing to further development.

Improvements so far are mainly to visual rendering -- it might be showing the same scenery, but it shows it a lot better -- and memory management etc. Performance is much improved.

In my opinion, P3D is a huge step forward, mainly because FSX is a dead end, and can only turn into a retro hobby. But P3D does have a few issues,which I'd hope would be fixed fairly quickly. If you are unsure, then you might be better off waiting until the first patch.

And of course P3D is DX11-only, so not everyone can run it at all.

Zain, you might be a bit confused by the licensing, no matter which license you buy you'll get exactly the same P3D, except for the one aimed at the military, and that costs thousands anyway. You won't have to buy more than one license.

[toprob]

There's a Prepar3D post on my development blog, and a call for a few more testers who are happy to install Real NZ scenery into P3D using a dual installer.
If you are interested, please contact me.
There are a few pre-test questions which I'd like you to answer. I've been including these in the email to testers, but I'll include them here to speed things up:

Have you tried to install any scenery into Prepar3D so far? Real NZ scenery? FTX NZ? Vector Land Class? Other?
Do you currently have FSX installed?
Do you use FTX in FSX?
Do you use VLC in FSX?
Have you ever used the 'Switcher' tool which switches the Nelson scenery in FSX between FTX and VLC mode?
Do you use FSX in DX10 mode?
Have you had any problems with Prepar3D?
Are you aware of the issues which people are having with vegetation autogen textures?
Would you be very annoyed if this issue cropped up when you installed Nelson?
Are you normally happy to allow installers to edit your Scenery.cfg file?
If not, would you be prepared to do so in this test?