Moving into Prepar3D v3

[gman5250]

I've been running a side by side install of 2.5 and 3.0 for a few weeks now. As of today I have enough confidence in 3.0 to remove 2.5 permanently and free up that space on the SSD to accommodate 3.0 scenery and aircraft.

Until Instant Scenery is updated I'll use FSX for object placements, then port the .bgl files to P3D. It's a bit cumbersome, but this seems to be the MO for the foreseeable future as LM continues to update P3D.

To this point it has been my experience that most scenery and aircraft that I am interested in are working well in V3, although with some aircraft there are small technical glitches that will need to be addressed by the developers. This is not enough to dissuade me from using those aircraft in V3 but there are one or two that I fear may take quite some time to achieve compatibility. No worries, there are plenty of options available while the devs work out the tech issues.

The move into Windows 10 and P3Dv3 has dramatically improved the quality of my simulation time, although at times it has been frustrating. The move into V3 took quite a bit of effort to do correctly, but IMHO the time invested has been well worth the effort.

After flying 2.5 and 3.0 side by side, I can say that I am experiencing incredible weather/cloud rendering along with vastly improved HDR lighting options. I'm still not utilizing terrain shadowing, which I think still needs some refinement. I do use shadows for clouds, objects and vegetation, although for long IFR flights tree shadows are turned off to streamline resources.

Just thought I'd share my experience with those who may be on the fence.

Note: FSX and FSX ST will remain on the spinning drive for dev work and general convenience, but I'm not logging hours in those simulators.

Happy Flying

 

[Daube]

Thanks for the feedback. I'm also P3Dv3-only now, FSX is gone since a long time and P3Dv2.4 has been uninstalled a few months ago.
I'm still using Win 7 64 though... I'm not confident enough to switch to Windows 10 yet.

 

[bpfowler]

Following this with interest. Had planned to move to p3d entirely, but the Lodestars will keep me in fsx indefinitely.

P3d is a far more immersive environment for native Fsx mdl planes like the c47 and great f7f project.
Not planning win10 yet, maybe next machine...

 

[DaveWG]

Similar to Gman, I had V2.5 installed on a SSD, and put V3 on a HDD while assessing it. A week ago I removed 2.5 entirely & moved v3 on to the SSD and not used anything else since. FSX remains on a hard drive but is only fired up for testing / compatibility purposes.
There are bugs in V3, but nothing I can't live with or work around. Hopefully some of those will be fixed in 3.1. Pete Dowson is away on holiday again, so maybe the next update isn't too far off!

 

[modelr]

I have P3Dv3 and Win10 downloaded, but not yet installed. Win10 is on my & my wife's notebooks, and are turning out to be real PIAs!!! Especially for reading the news and for downloading large files. Had to use my main Sim machine to download P3Dv3, the notebook would not complete any downloads of the package. The WIN7 machine had NO problems. All my downloads go to a home network cloud HDD. So am worried about that. P3Dv2.5 has been working fine, except for the memory leak that restricts flying time. P3D is on SSD. Since the main sim rig is not used for general online use, except for the required registrations, etc. When I do get time to fly, I don't want to spend time tweaking. I'm going to wait just a little longer before changing over completely, but it is in the plan.