Military AI Works

It's been a good while since we've had any updates for P3D. Several bugs remain, and LM have gone quiet about fixing them. However, it appears their simulation department have been busy elsewhere, and you might have missed this from November last year:

https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/ne ... ining.html

It states that LM are about to employ Unreal Engine 5 for their future professional simulation products. UE is totally different from the way P3D is constructed, and any new version of P3D using it would break all backward compatibility. However, Lockheed say that "we have no plans to make major architectural changes that would undermine existing third party add-on compatibility with the [P3D] platform" (see here for context).

Unreal Engine is freeware at our level (see here ) and would make a fabulous basis for a flight simulator - arguably much more accessible then the MSFS ecosystem - though much of the flight coding would need to be new. However, LM is a huge and very rich company, and they will throw many millions at their professional military simulation product. Is it too much to hope that there will be an enthusiast Academic spin-off, as there is in P3D? It's a mouthwatering thought!

It is definitely an interesting proposition. What exactly it would mean for scenery developers I wouldn't know. The only experience I have had of the Unreal Engine is purely for benchmarks. Visually very appealing 3D views. This leads me back to what exactly it would mean for scenery. Will the engine utilise the models already built or would they need to be converted.

Definitely one to keep an eye on.

Unreal Engine can import .obj and .fbx files, which most current 3D programs can export and which MCX can generate from any format that it imports. UE obviously will not take FS-style bgls, so some form of conversion would always be required. Up to UE4 (a 32-bit scenery generator), UE has really been used for scenery generation for fairly close-up viewing and has been less useful for wide-field scenarios such as flight simulation. However, CAE has partnered with Epic to use UE5.x (now 64-bit) for its commercial flight simulators, which I suspect is what prompted LM to consider it for its own simulation products. In essence, the objections to its use in wide-field simulation have been removed.

The advantage of UE is that it does the whole job; it's not just a posh 3D drawing program. It provides the motion physics, the raytraced lighting, and pretty much everything needed to create a flight simulation wholly within UE. This article describes Epic's Antoinette project to enable flight simulation creation in UE.

The bottom line is that, given the will and the skill, anyone could create a new flight simulator using UE5. The question is whether they will do it in a form accessible to us.

You obviously know a lot more on the topic than myself so it was interesting to hear that.

As many here will know, we now have P3Dv5.4. No major new features, but some bug fixes. There was a Closed Beta of P3Dv6 visible on the Prepar3D website a month or two back (you can't see it now), so we know that P3Dv6 is in existence and being tested. Is it the UE5-based sim LM talked about? I doubt it, though I relatively recently discovered that P3D already uses UE4 for the True Skies feature, so LM already have some experience with this engine.

On this coming Saturday (June 24th 2023) LM will holding a Q&A session at FlightSimExpo in Houston, TX (see here). Hopefully there may be a little more clarity of the way ahead.

Prepar3Dv6 due in July

https://www.prepar3d.com/news/announcem ... 06/121241/

Admittedly there is quite a bit that has been left unsaid in this announcement... Such as:

1. Is this a continuation of the ESP engine or is this the new Unreal Engine???

2. Backwards addon compatibility?!?!?!

Of interest I see in the video it mentions "realistic weapons systems" while it is well known that pro-plus incorporated weapons via the default engine... I think this is the first time I have seen them advertise the "weapons systems" in such a manner... So wondering if weapons will now become part of the academic version and pro versions; or they are just showing off what is to still be a pro-plus feature only....???

I think they are not-so-subtly hinting that they are leaving the enthusiast market behind, and more publicly pitching for the professional military market (which they already have a large proportion of). It's significant, I think, that they chose to focus on weather and lighting effects, both of which are factors in scenarios that involve targeting, and city complexity (not fidelity), which wasn't really an issue for most enthusiast users.

The professional addon industry has largely abandoned P3D, so I think its future is going to be much more focussed as a training device. Will the Academic product continue? I would imagine so; it's an almost no-cost source of additional revenue.

The UE connection was established with True Skies, which uses UE4. I suspect that UE5 has been used for the new lighting and weather algorithms, but that the core sim is very much as before, and that anything that works in v5 will continue to work in v6. However, I'm not sure that v6 will bring anything significant for us.