Sceneries and P3D v4

[streichholz]

Hi FSDT,

I have a small question regarding your sceneries in P3D v4. While v4 is out for a while now, I was wondering if FSDT recompiled their sceneries to work native in P3D v4?

I know this might be a strange question, but I want a stable sim in the future and according to LM, non-native sceneries might cause a general instability of the sim.

Phil

[virtuali]

I know this might be a strange question, but I want a stable sim in the future and according to LM, non-native sceneries might cause a general instability of the sim.

LM never said anything like that. The sim either supports a feature from older SDKs, or it doesn't. If a scenery doesn't use or need a feature from the V4 SDK, recompiling it with it is entirely useless, and won't achieve any more speed, which is proven by the results of the following test, made to measure the impact of Dynamic Lights on 3 different FSDT sceneries, each one using a different SDK:

http://www.fsdreamteam.com/forum/index.php/topic,16007.msg114745.html#msg114745

What LM is suggesting, instead, are the installation *guidelines*, which says a product shouldn't install into the root of the sim, shouldn't change the default DLL/EXE.XML files, should't change the scenery.cfg and should instead use the new add-on.xml method.

ALL our products comply with these guidelines but, they won't get any faster or run better "just" because they comply with the guidelines: they will only easier to install, you'll be able to reinstall the sim without reinstalling the addons, and it will be less likely an installer would prevent another product from running, because it corrupted the core files of the sim, which we don't access anymore.

[streichholz]

I don't have any problem with the performance regarding FPS, but a little concerne about the stability of the sim itself.

Most likely because of the Post from RSR (PMDG)
https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/512651-14jun17-how-not-to-mess-up-a-perfectly-good-prepar3d-v4-installation/

Yesterday I tested a Scenery compiled with the SDK from FSX but caused an instant crash after loading the scenery.

I don't put your skills into question, in fact, I trust you more than other developer, but what PMDG states also makes perfect sense to me.

[virtuali]

Most likely because of the Post from RSR (PMDG)
https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/512651-14jun17-how-not-to-mess-up-a-perfectly-good-prepar3d-v4-installation/

I suspected your concern was related to that post, and not something that LM said...

Yesterday I tested a Scenery compiled with the SDK from FSX but caused an instant crash after loading the scenery.

It's not possible to say if the crash happened *because* the scenery was compiled with the FSX SDK or that it might have been prevented if it was compiled with the V4 SDK. It might have been just be a single file, or a single texture, or a missing texture, so that's just an anecdotal case. Not possible to say without checking that scenery.

I don't put your skills into question, in fact, I trust you more than other developer, but what PMDG states also makes perfect sense to me.

It's just wrong to generalize. Each scenery is a separate case, and I don't even think many sceneries out there are compiled with the FSX SDK, most of them use the FS8 SDK for the ground polygons, and the FSX SDK for the rest.

But that's not enough to label a scenery as "bad". It depends which instruction codes were used in each SDK. Some of them are still perfectly supported, some aren't, some cause a performance loss, and most of the unsupported or not well supported scenery codes are the ones from the FS8 SDK. In fact, we were amongst the few scenery developers that got rid of FS8 code for all our products released after 2010.

Not even the default scenery that comes with P3D V4 is all compiled with the V4 SDK. In fact, most of it it's not so no, if the usage of previous SDKs to compile sceneries was enough reason to make the sim unstable, LM itself would have recompiled the entire default scenery with the latest tools, which is not the case.

[streichholz]

Ok thank you for clarification about this topic.

[elmucki]

to be honest, i hope ORBX will do KPDX.