Should I purchase p3d?

[guzler]

Hi guys,

It's been a very long while since I posted on the forum, mainly because my aging PC made/makes FSX stutter with blurry ground textures unless I'm microlighting so I rarely fly. I'm looking to build a new rig in the next few months and want to either reinstall FSX or p3D. I have a few questions though that I'm hoping you can answer on P3D

1. I have REX 2.0 installed on my current FSX set up and love the textures. I'm not fussed about being able to change them around. Can I simply copy and paste the textures in to p3D to get the same water and sky colours or have things changed too much? Here's a few images from my current set up and would hate to loose this look and feel.







This set up also has the SHADE tool that IMO improves the look considerably. Is there anything similar for p3D?

2. Given what I've previously invested in FSX, is it worth moving on or will the PC I'm getting give me smooth flying in FSX? (i5 9600K, GTX1070, 16gb 3000Mhz RAM). Key purchases that I previously made were Ultimate Traffic, Orbx UK and a few others, UK2000 british airports, Fly Tampa airports and several aircraft. I'm not sure if I can upgrade from these purchases or whether I would need to buy again.

3. A lot of people are also talking about XP11. Traffic and ATC is an important feature for me, do people use an aftermarket solution or isn't there ATC capability for XP11 yet? From the screen shots I've seen, it doesn't look any better than my current visuals in FSX.

Thanks
Neil

[Daube]

I believe the sky textures (sky and clouds) are compatible between FSX and P3D, so you should be able to move your FSX sky textures to your P3D without problems.
I don't use REX anymore (I had REX 4 TextureDirect), but I use the freeware HDEv2 pack made for FS9, and adapted for FSX... and it works perfectly in P3D. So you should be good to go on that side.

Concerning the general colors and rendering, there are Shade-like tools available for P3D. For P3Dv4, I use a freeware named TomatoShade. It works quite well but you have to be careful with some options (the options related to reflections are problematic right now, so you'd better keep these disabled for the moment). It indeed brings a drastic improvements to the sim colors and the intensity of the sunlight and the shadows.

Concerning XP11, it has an ATC but it's quite basic (way worse than FSX, if I understood correctly?). If AI traffic is important for you, then XPlane might not yet be the correct sim for you. *Yet*.

[paiken]

There is no real quick answer. I think your best bet would be to download the XP11 demo version and get a developers license ($10 a month) for P3Dv4 and see which will work best on your new system. Either is a vast improvement over FSX...whichever version you have. The biggest advantage of P3D over XP is that many of the products that you have already purchased for FSX are easily transferred, including REX and ORBX.

[dhazelgrove]

I use REX4 with soft clouds equally well in all of FSXA and P3D/P4D. No issues at all.

The P4D frame rates are whole orders of magnitude better than FSXA.
In FSXA, I get around 30FPS. It P4D I can get around 120FPS. Same hardware.

Dave

[guzler]

Thanks for the quick replies guys

My mate has installed X-Plane 10 on a home made simulator but he's quite new to this stuff so probably doesn't have the background knowledge about what can be done as I have learned along the way. It just looked a little 'flat' compared to how I've got mine set up but there again, stock FSX does too, so it's hard to get a feel of what is possible.

That's good to know about FPS improvements in P3D, I'm leaning towards going down this route, especially if I can copy the textures over. I may also look to install Xp11 at some point, but sounds like it isn't quite for me yet.

Do the software upgrades cause many issues? The only risk with the support we are getting from the developer is breaking things that you install. We never had that problem with FSX

As well us UTX, I have lots of home made traffic files and classic aircraft installed (one for immersion over reality!!) so I'll be experimenting with them too but not if they will migrate as some are FS9 models I think.

[jeansy]

As well us UTX, I have lots of home made traffic files and classic aircraft installed (one for immersion over reality!!) so I'll be experimenting with them too but not if they will migrate as some are FS9 models I think.

FS2004 models will not work as AI, you will need FSX native models even converting fs2004 to p3d in mcx will cause modelling errors

[guzler]

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that