A quick chat with George of FlyTampa

A while back you may recall an article published by Dominique regarding some issues a few major developers are experiencing with the P3D platform and 3DS Max. These issues are causing major delays in scenery development. We did get to hear from Umberto of FSDT on some of these issues a while back. Today, I am sitting with George Grimshaw who is going to shed a bit more light on the subject.

D'Andre: Good morning Greorge. This P3D issue and the delays it's causing Montreal. Have you been able to make much progress?

George: The P3D issue is still frustrating.

As scenery developers, we are constantly trying to improve on our previous scenery & with Montreal one of our improvements has been a terminal texture size increase from 1024 to 2048. The reason for these larger textures is mainly to maintain a decent resolution while allowing unique texturing, shadowing & ambient occlusion baking rather than the usual tiled textures where the same image is repeated along the length of the terminal. Unfortunately the latest version of 3d Studio Max that was supported by Microsoft/ACES, was version 9 released in 2006. Max 9 is now very slow & cannot handle large textures. It is limited to a low amount of memory because of FSX's 32bit exporter plugins. Once this memory limit is hit, Max will crash & sometimes corrupt your files as a bonus annoyance.

Autodesk, the makers of 3d Studio Max, rightly decided to overhaul the poor viewport performance creating a new system they called 'Nitrous'. The difference was enormous, Yugo V McLaren F1 sorta difference.

Max 2012 can throw around an entire Airport scene at 30 fps compared to 0.5 Fps on Max 9. The crashing & corrupting of files is also addressed.

Plus Max 2012 comes with 100s of modeling & UVW mapping improvements that have the potential to shave 100s of hours off development times. 

When P3D came out, it came with an updated SDK which supported Max 2012. This was very exciting. However, it was disappointing to discover the P3D Max2012 plugins would crash when trying to export more complex models due to a memory leak.

Even Microsoft FLIGHT's SDK supported Max2012 reliably way back before FLIGHT was released. Not that it matters now.

D'Andre: Do you think Lochheed Martin should make more of a effort and look into these issues?

George: I understand that P3D/LM don't owe us anything. It's unfair to expect them to fix it. But they are our only hope for a faster, more reliable & feature packed 3d Modelling package.

Until they fix it & there's no evidence they ever will as they claim they have priorities in other areas, we are all stuck using a 3D Modelling package that is starting to show it's age & lacks modern features. 

I don't want to sound like I'm knocking P3D, I really would love for it to eventually replace both FSX & FS9.

PS. Max 2013 just came out....Oh Boy.

D'Andre: Well let's just hope it doesn't bring another can of worms with it. Thanks for the insight George and best of luck on the Montreal project. We are still very excited.

If there are any other developers experiencing similar issues, we would love to hear from you. ADX will continue to keep an eye on this topic.


Cheers!

D'Andre

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