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Prepar3d, is it good?


Walter Almaraz

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Hi all,

Well I investigated everything related about this simulator, I know that is much better than FSX and another features. But I'm not sure if I buy or not.

Should I buy Prepar3d?

Regards,

Walter Almaraz

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By all means buy it, after all 50 USD is nothing! But be warned, it will take you time porting over all your fsx addons. Which to be frank is boring and a total pain in the ass, but if you do the research all the info needed to get nearly all fsx addons into P3D and working is out there on various fora. I'm doing it at the moment, and from early tests I wont be going back to fsx.

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By all means buy it, after all 50 USD is nothing! But be warned, it will take you time porting over all your fsx addons. Which to be frank is boring and a total pain in the ass, but if you do the research all the info needed to get nearly all fsx addons into P3D and working is out there on various fora. I'm doing it at the moment, and from early tests I wont be going back to fsx.

And what's the point? All said that it has the just about the same perfomance as FSX.

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The point being P3D is a current product, with developers still working on it.

Currently, there are not so many reasons to change from FSX to P3D, because lockheed didn't do SO much. If you have 2500k-2700k and GTX400-500 you still going to have same troubles with FPS in urban areas and big airports. Updated GUI and small fixes is not enogh....Well at least not for me.

P3D is made for commercial use, like training people for money in your cockpit and so on, because FSX can't be used for this.

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You can back up all these statements with concrete evidence? Also your interpretation of the EULA is suspect. Personally, I have no issues with FPS on my system, neither with FSX or P3D.

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From the interview with John Venema at Orbx on ASN:

What’s the big “visual” difference between FSX and Prepar3D

There is none. They are the same fundamental engine so everything looks identical. The only difference is the P3D has no stuttering and jerkiness and handles textures much more efficiently so there are hardly any blurries (of course your mileage varies according to your PC).

There is one slight difference in the shaders which gives P3D a much warmer “pink” tone to it which I quite like. They just need to reduce the pink tone on the snow and it will be perfect. The cool thing about P3D is that there is actually an active development team working on the code which we can liaise with and raise issues like that.

We prefer to work with living breathing developers rather than frozen dead 2006 FSX code which will never be improved.

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You can back up all these statements with concrete evidence? Also your interpretation of the EULA is suspect. Personally, I have no issues with FPS on my system, neither with FSX or P3D.

Here are the results from someone who compared the performance of FSX to P3D:

http://simmerhead.wordpress.com/2012/02/23/the-benchmark-flight-simulator-x-acceleration-vs-prepar3d-v1-2/

Some people say P3D runs smoother than FSX, but that's pretty much it.

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Yeah, that would be good.

From what I read in the forums, it seems that those people who have performance problems with FSX are more likeley to find P3D an improvement. But we all know about the placebo effect, so numbers are needed.

On the other hand, the people who have a well-balanced FSX setup seem not to see a great improvement in P3D.

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You can back up all these statements with concrete evidence? Also your interpretation of the EULA is suspect. Personally, I have no issues with FPS on my system, neither with FSX or P3D.

Yes. You can go to youtube and watch P3D videos. Also you can google screenshots and so on.

I would consider to move to P3D if lockheeds would make their sim simmilar to MS FLIGHT in terms of perfomance.

It's ridiculous to have lags in 2006 game on 2012 overclocked PC even with addons. And all this without good shadowing, global lightning, normal weather engine with realistic clouds.

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My problem with P3D, apart from the EULA issues and the lack of support from some addon developers is simply that I'm not sure what Lockheed's priorities are regarding future improvements of the sim platform. I mean, it's a sim intended for professional use and I have a feeling that adding more eye candy to the 3D engine or any kind of "fun stuff" is simply not a top priority for them.

It seems to me that they are more concerned about stability improvements and additions to the SDK, as well as pro-features like running the sim in a distributed environment.

Just compare MS Flight and P3D. I think both sims are based on FSX and they were developed in roughly the same time frame. On first sight, MS seems to have done a lot more work than Lockheed, at least in terms of what I consider important (I really don't care about the bathymetry stuff in P3D). So let's see what P3D 2.0 brings for us simmers. In its current state, P3D is too less of an improvement for me in order to take the plunge.

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Comparing P3D to Flight is a big no no. It just cant be done. Its like comparing a Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter to the Eurofighter Typhoon :lol:

As for lack of developer support it's no real issue, if I can make their software work in P3D anyone can.

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No no no, don't compare MS Flight to anything at all ! Hmmm...okay, compare it to Super Mario if you absolutely must...

Anyway...Matt, I'm very much watching the P3D conversations here and elsewhere. Is this really the future of flight sim as we know it ? Is P3D V.2 with DX11 going to render your entire collection of FSX add-ons unusable ? Someone else is going to have to go over the parapet brandishing his credit card on this one.

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Flight and Super Mario, there's a thought.... Think I might dig out the NES and give Mario Bros a blast :lol:

As for is P3D the future, I dunno, my magic 8 ball's in the shop being fixed. Does it suit me for what I use, its looking that way but the jury is out still. Yes I have some performance gains so far, flight is definately smoother from what I have tested and working with 3 screens and uber wide resolutions is definately improved but I really need more time using it and the next version of REX lol. As a bonus you get the JustFlight Constellation and P38 thrown in. Neither ground breaking, but the P38 is a hoot to fly and both are well above the fidelity FSX and Flight offers out of the box. So far I have working in P3D: PMDG Jetstream, Aerosoft Catalina, Aerosoft Beaver, nearly all Carenado's offerings for FSX (Jetprop, A36 and C337 don't work yet), CS 707, 727 and 757 and all of RealAir's offerings bar theCitabria which I don't own. Scenery wise, I don't think there's any major compatibility issues other than no AES or AESLite but if like me you fly GA most of the time you wont miss it much. The biggest ball ache is porting everything over with out the need for FSX to be installed. I'm not too sure VistaMare package of dll's work, but that could be down to my home made dll.xml not working. And is possibly more a reflection of my XML programming skills? Don't ask me how it works with IVAO or VATSIM, as to be frank I couldn't care less about either as I tend to fly online with a few friends in a casual learning environment.

As for V2, I hope it breaks compatibility. Yes I will loose out on 200+ addons I have but, I will hopefully gain in loosing all the legacy crud that is FSX and get a simulator that can utilise the modern hardware I invest in to its utmost without the mention of "plausible world".

Is P3D worth the 50 USD (£31)? That depends really on your situation. What types of flying you do what types of aircraft you fly. At the end of the day thats about the same price as a PMDG addon and offers a whole lot more scope.

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Is being different really a bug? FSX and P3D ATC is abysmal anyway.

How do you rate ATC in FSX and P3D? Just in case that you might need the pertinent question to your answer :) !

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Seeing as both FSX and P3D share the same atc, I rate it as abysmal. It could be only slightly worse but a hell of a lot better. I was going to write a list of whats wrong with FSX atc, I thought it would be quicker to write whats right, so instead heres a list of whats right:

I couldn'f find one thing right with it, sorry :lol:

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Seeing as both FSX and P3D share the same atc, I rate it as abysmal. It could be only slightly worse but a hell of a lot better. I was going to write a list of whats wrong with FSX atc, I thought it would be quicker to write whats right, so instead heres a list of whats right:

I couldn'f find one thing right with it, sorry :lol:

No need to tell me, Matt. I was a member of the ATC in the German Navy (Marineflieger) for 8 years ...

I simply mentioned the ATC interface beause I take it as an indication how P3D treat their stuff. Probably I should say 'one' indication but I' m sure you already got what I mean.

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Hi Matt,

First off, thanks for taking the time to share your experiences on P3D with us here.

I have a small question: I see that the $50 version includes a small watermark in the upper right hand corner, - do you have this same version and if so, is it noticeable or is it something that gets forgotton after a bit...

Thanks!

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Hi Matt,

First off, thanks for taking the time to share your experiences on P3D with us here.

I have a small question: I see that the $50 version includes a small watermark in the upper right hand corner, - do you have this same version and if so, is it noticeable or is it something that gets forgotton after a bit...

Thanks!

Well - I' m not Matt but I know that it is only visible when you leave full screen mode. Take a look here. Note the watermark in the top right corner.

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