The latest news from the P3D front line
The 'Estonian' migrator tool (that creates a virtual FSX folder and fools reluctant installers that P3D is FSX) has been updated to v1.6. The main purpose of the update is because some people found a problem with some Aerosoft and other products reporting that a version was already installed (e.g. in FSX) and would not allow another installation (or uninstallation). It's to do with registry entries and this new version addresses and solves the problem.
http://www.flightsim.ee/
More and more people have been reporting Out of Memory errors and Fatal Errors (G3D errors) on several forums. These aren't new, they happen with FSX and the accepted reason appears to be the same for both sims. The fact that they are 32 bit programs and can only use a little over 3Gb of memory irrespective of how much you have on your PC. It appears that the focus is moving to P3D simply because more 'power-users' are moving to that sim. The common factors seem to be running memory hungry aircraft over detailed scenery with the display sliders well to the right. For instance, if you're flying a PMDG 747 over ORBX Seattle area you're unlikely to get as far as Vancouver before experiencing an error. I've certainly experienced a few crashes with my Captain Sim aircraft (with maxed sliders) but it's not specific to any particular aircraft or area. It's just the memory load involved and it's because modern hardware and add-on software has finally overtaken the capability of the simulator.
So what to do? Well, we've pushed it to the limit so we now need to back off a bit to achieve reliability. Firstly, Peter Dowson has discovered how to anticipate the most common G3D crash and the latest version of FSUIPC (free and paid) will prevent the crash and will autosave if you ask it so that if it does crash you don't lose the flight. He's been working with LM and has kindly given them the necessary code which they will incorporate into a later version of Prepar3d. Second is the Microsoft HotFix that optimises the memory usage (which I provided a link to earlier in this thread). Thirdly is the old FSX tweak, the HIGHMEMFIX=1 entry in the Graphics section of the config file. Those fixes will make sure that your memory usage is optimised but if you still get memory problems there's nothing for it but to start backing off the display sliders a little until the crashes stop.
I've started to notice the shader problem with FS9 aircraft in P3D that Ben was getting on the Viscount. I noticed it on the 1-11 the other day in cloudy conditions. I did find a post on the P3D forum that did state that they had changed the shader and aircraft shadowing in later versions and that this would affect older models - so it's definitely another instance of development taking precedence over backward compatibility and will be a consideration for many on this forum who will not want to move to a simulator which won't fully support their favourite models. On the other hand, I love flying the 1-11 in P3D, even if the white does sometimes look a bit dark from outside. I just won't bother taking screenshots in those conditions as it looks fine from the inside
Ian
