I'd have supported and encouraged a large scale move to MSFS development if that platform was more mature but whilst its installed on my machine, I've gone back to P3D.
As I've said in many other threads here and in other places too, you as an user have the luxury of basing your choices on the present, and you can change your strategy at any time. Tomorrow ( or the next year, it doesn't matter ), PMDG comes out for MSFS, and you can instantly decide to reverse your choice.
We as developers don't have such luxury, we must anticipate what users will do in the next 2-3 years, because that what it takes to make a big airport entirely from scratch with the level of quality users expect in the 2020s. That what it took to make KORD V2, and we don't have any indications it will take any less in the future.
With the additional caveat that, a scenery made *only* for MSFS it's probably faster and easier to do than a cross-platform scenery, because MSFS has solved several issues that added quite a bit to the workload in FSX or P3D, mostly related to background textures and sloped runways/terrain. If we use these features as they should, we can CUT development time, but it would made the scenery very hard to port back to P3D.
Another big one is real-time Ambient Occlusion offered by the sim, which is lacking in P3D. If you are not a scenery developer, you cannot possibly know how deep is the effect of this feature on scenery development and the quality of the final result. It completely changes the way we *design* a scenery because, instead of fighting when low resolution textures that must contain pre-baked AO ( and our dev time creating it ), we change entirely the way a scenery is made, because we can now use high quality architectural materials on repeating textures which will get all their correct physical material AND proper shading, and this completely turns around the way you model an airport. It saves time and you also get better results. A scenery made this way for P3D would look very bland and cartoonish, so we can't model that way for P3D.
Taking 2 years to do a big airport wasn't sustainable anymore, and this was true even before MSFS was announced. The user base has NOT increased since FSX heydays, quite the opposite, lots of users didn't switch to P3D and many just changed hobby but, thanks to MSFS, many went back, and we have a lot of new users too.
So, assuming you had a business on your own and have this situation:
- One platform that due to its graphic limitations forces you to longer development times, which are not easily recovered, since is not gaining new users, which are lot less than they used to be a few years ago.
- Another platform that has a superior graphic engine, that allows you to get better results in less time, which are far more users already, which can only grow further, when they'll release a new console version, and will surely win all the remaining users shortly, when those famous "high end airliners" will eventually come, and they will. A platform that nowadays is already sustainable with sales of smaller airports, that tooks 1/10th of the time to do compared to a big Hub.
What platform would you chose ?
This is strictly from an airport scenery development point of view. While the SDK is not nearly finished, it's at least *reasonably* complete to allow production of airport sceneries that can sustain our business more than they did with FSX or P3D, right now.
Unfortunately the SDK today doesn't allow to create more complex products like hi-end aircraft or complex utilities, we understand that very well, since we are in a fairly unique position of being both scenery developers AND utilities developers ( and we have been airplane developers too ), for that P3D is today clearly the better choice because, the reason why you still don't see GSX for MSFS and PMDG has announced a delay, it's entirely due to the lack of a feature-complete SDK, but we know what is being done right now, we have additional non public channels we can follow development and suggest changes to the SDK, and users cannot possibly get the whole picture, you just have to trust the sim WILL eventually mature.
On the other hand, while you might assume that "just" because we have released several MSFS product in a very short amount of time that we "abandoned" P3D, but that's not the case, we just released a native P3D 64 bit version of the Couatl engine and while users were assuming we "jumped on the MSFS bandwagon", we were also working to do some changes to GSX, and the result you are seeing right now, is the latest release from FS Labs, which feature an incredibly tight integration with GSX, and that came because we worked together with them to add what they needed.
We are also trying our best to convince LM to add a few extra features which would make our life much easier in P3D V5. Apart for the required stability issues, which we hope will be improved in future upgrades, we ( and other developers too ), are trying to obtain at least the following:
- An easier and safer alternative way to draw graphic in realtime over scenery/vehicles which won't require to use complex and potentially dangerous DirectX code, where even the slightest mistake can crash the sim. P3D V5 has enough stability problems on its own that we decided to just DISABLE DirectX from the V5 version of our software, because the last time we wanted is to have users assuming the sim DXGI-crashed on them because of our modules. And DX12 is so much more complex that DX11 ever was, so we really need an alternative in the SDK that is safer and easier to use.
- Support for realtime AO in the sim. This would be a game changer, and we can only hope LM understands that, because if it comes, it would make it much easier for us to develop a scenery in parallel that can be used on both and not look entirely different.