American Airlines Virtual

Man, this is driving me crazy.

Last year I jumped from FSX to P3Dv4. I had a great plan for how to affordably build up my add-ons over about 2 years.

Then 3 months after making the move to P3Dv4, Microsoft made their Flight Simulator 2020 announcement. Beautiful eye candy, available in 12-18 months.

UGH! What to do now?

Luckily (unluckily??), I was promoted at work, became extremely busy with real world obligations, and this slowed down my flying and my desire to expand my P3Dv4 fleet. I was pretty much waiting it out to see the final
MSFS-2020 product before investing too much in P3Dv4.

Now, Lockheed has announced P3Dv5. History tells us the upgrade won't be free from Lockheed, or from half the add-on vendors. What I find really disappointing is the P3Dv4 airplane offerings feel limited. They never caught up to what was out there for FSX. There's no Concorde, no MD-11, ... And now all the add-on vendors will jump to P3Dv5. But will they all jump? Will some get tired of chasing the new sims, or just plain not be able to afford to keep porting their software to the latest sim?

Seems my options are:
1. Stick with P3Dv4
2. Jump to P3Dv5
3. Wait for MS2020
4. Go "all-in" on all 3 (if I do this and my wife finds out, I'm dead!)

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I have x-plane 11 and I have the same problem, the question is to buy more in Xplane or wait. In my own opinion, we should wait for the FS2020 for 5 or 6 months more. I can not speak about it, but you can see the image in the FS2020 web, I think the future of the simulation is there. Wait for FS2020 or we will lose our CEO...

My $0.02.

I stayed on P3Dv2.5 until v4 came out, then I upgraded and had both 2.5 and 4 on the same computer. As aircraft and other add-ons became available for v4, I moved a/c to v4. I'm very satisfied with v4, so I may not buy v5 … or wait until the important a/c in my stable are available. I haven't seen anything definitive as to how much rework on add-ons is required of the add-on devs in moving to v5. I have seen some chatter that the work may be minimal if any at all.

I will probably buy MSFS 2020 when it becomes available. Then I can play in the P3D world and 2020 to see which is going to prevail.

Well, to put my $0.02 in....

I ran FSX for years with great looking scenery (finally, took some tweaking) and working very wel 80% of the time. I moved to P3Dv4 in 2018 and I'm still suffering because I lost some of my a/c (i.e. PMDG 777 cost me $100 and will cost me $134 to purchase for P3Dv4). I don't feel the graphics are quit as vivid as I had it in FSX but maybe I still need to experiment with more tweaks.

My plan is to wait until Microsoft 2020 has been out for about a year before I even consider moving to it. I want others to flush out all the bugs before I jump in and I want to understand what a/c I can keep and what I will lose again. I've also seen a number of YouTube videos of X-Plane and I'm impressed with the graphics, features, and there is a lot of emphasis on X-Plane by the vendors now. If I would lose a lot of a/c with Microsoft 2020 then this will bring X-Plane back into consideration.

Haven't seen anything on P3Dv5 yet so I will have to go investigate.