AI Traffic Settings

[Guest bigw0lt]

I was wondering if anyone has examined the AI traffic settings. I notice a serious performance boost when I lower the AI %. Normally I had been running it at 100%, but since dropping it got a huge order of magnitude better in frame rates, which is to be expected.However, I find that the percentages that are offered are misleading. Take for instance me being at Houston Hobby. At full AI I would see 6-8 southwest aircraft parked. However, when I drop the % to 97, 98, 99 percent, I lose at least 3 of those parked aircrafts. It seems as though there is no middle ground. Even going down to 95% the same amount of traffic disappears.Is there a way to adjust how many flights FS9 eliminates when you modify the traffic percentages?I am using ultimate traffic.Thanks

[Guest SilverCircle]

>Is there a way to adjust how many flights FS9 eliminates when>you modify the traffic percentages?Well, this isn't random. It is all configured in the flight plan(s). Each flight has a threshold value (in percent). If the slider setting is higher or equal than this value, the flight will appear. If it is lower, it will not.So, to make this thing work, the AI flight plans must cooperate - e.g. if all flights are set to appear at 5%, then setting the slider above 5% will enable all these flights, thus giving you essentially 100% traffic. Or another example: If 1/3 of all flights are set to appear at 5%, 1/3 at 20% and 1/3 at 50%, then setting the slider to 10% will enable the first 33% of the entire traffic, setting it to 20% (or higher) will enable the next 33% and setting it to 50 or higher will give you all the flights in the flight plan.I'am almost sure, UT should have a feature to control this in its flight plans. I don't use it though, because I have my own traffic library built over a long time from freeware projects, so I cannot tell you exactly how.

[RFields5421 1]

Ultimate Traffic, My Traffic, Just Flight's Traffic and Project AI ensure that all their flight plans are 'randomized' so that the AI slider numbers are the approximate percentage of the AI traffic you get as active.The vast majority of flight plans you download have one or maybe two percentages in the traffic file.A few years ago 50% was very popular, but that has changed to 1% for most plans these days.I just checked several uploaded to the Avsim library in the past few days - all are set for 1% - so it's either all or nothing with those flight plans.

[ailchim 206]

The above posts have it exactly right.However, there are programs out there which will completely randomise the AI % for a given set of AI flightplans. Then 49% isn't the same as 48% or 47%. Without the ability to check on my nachine, I'm going to say that AI Mover is one that does that.www.molitor-home.de/FS/AITM/ However, if you only have 6 aircraft on show anyway, the %age isn't going to make a lot of difference - this would be different if you had 40 AI aircraft at a major airport.It should be remembered that the effect on frame rates isn't due solely to the number of aircraft but also to the framerate effect of the aircraft models you are using. So you can reduce the framerate hit by using "friendly" models such as Aardvark or EvolveAI.