FSX vs PD3 V4

I'm not sure Ben, as I didn't dig too deeply into it after I saw the price tags involved. My thought on the developer/professional plans that you pay monthly for, I doubt that they will work if you discontinue your monthly payments - perhaps some on-line handshaking that must take place to use them, otherwise who would continue to pay the monthly costs?

Even so, I think they've excluded all but the 'big boys' from contributing addons. Perhaps PMDG and Aerosoft types can afford the development costs, but for those of us who dabble in creating addons for our simulators - they've pretty much priced us out until others develop some freeware tools to work in lieu of the costly tools recommended by P3dv4.

If I recall correctly, the developer SDK is freely available from them anyway and you can develop on the Academic version I think too. The problem is that the SDK utilized a 3rd party tool that is also crazy expensive. That was what finally drove me away from development to P3dv4 standards. After some experimentation, I discovered that my scenery developed with the old FSX tools for the FSX system work adequately on P3dv4 (for the most part), so I was satisfied with that since I test all my stuff on both systems anyway, and for both default and FTX Global scenery installs to ensure it's as compatible as possible - and if necessary, create separate download for the different systems or scenery addons.

I haven't checked lately to see how the development of freeware tools has progressed for P3d, and I haven't searched forums to see if others have discussed the questions you posed here. I would think that there should be something regarding these topics by now.