None of us saw USA Roads coming down the pike and one has to marvel at the negotiations and out-of-the-box thinking that must have gone on between Flight1 and the people who owned the database. That same creativity could see actual air traffic via several online tracking services ported into flight sim. Plane type, flight plan, actual performance - all the data is there! Wouldn't that be cool! Disclaimer - I have no idea if anyone is working on this. Just wishful thinking (before someone asks when the release date is!)David

Good thinking. My job actually allows me to tap FAA host computers and all the data you are talking about is there indeed ...There is however one single problem that I am not sure the path is the right one to persue. When you bring in the actual radar data there is really no 'room' for your own flight - if for example you want to squeeze in and land at the very busy ORD airport no ground aircraft will be waiting for you, no airspace will be reserved for you. Therefore I tend to think that it is better to take approach of Flight1's Ultimate Traffic - take the known flight plans with usual departure times and simulate based on that. This at least allows software to account for your own flight.Michael J.http://www.reality-xp.com/community/nr/rsc/rxp-higher.jpg

With all earned respect for USA Roads, a stunning addon that is certainly a "must have" for any VFR flying in the US, it certainly isn't such an out-of-the-box project as you think.Fly!, the defunct competitor to Flight Sim, had its focus on realistic real world VFR roads and scenery many years ago. TerraScene was a top notch tool for the Fly! community (and even still for some specialized FS scenery work) that allowed real world roads and rail to be brought in to the sim via the publicly available road and rail data at the USGS (available for the entire continental US thanks to your tax dollars).While the process for Fly! was designed as an end-user generation tool and had extreme size issues for large area coverage, USA Roads has taken that to the logical conclusion using FS's abilities: provide a comprehensive data set that is pre packaged for the entire United States. USA Roads is indeed an amazing addon that accomplishes that goal with aplomb.Just thought I'd give a little background.Take care,Elrond

Michael,You raise some good points. It would might be good though to monitor the tracking for a few days then generate GA traffic based on the real traffic load (actually I guess the VFR planes would be left out). The GA traffic generator that came out recently is a good first step but requires far more tinkering than I was willing to put into it. If someone used that to generate realistic GA traffic using a database of AI friendly aircraft that would be very helpful.David

Yeah, the problem with GA is that most of it is VFR and VFR flights are nowhere recorded (except those that file flight plans). Michael J.http://www.reality-xp.com/community/nr/rsc/rxp-higher.jpg

TerraScene is still king. Imagine combining that texture data with autogen?Wow.Tim

The next big thing ?..................Definately "Smellofly" the Microsoft version of Smellovision.Trufflington The Flying Doghttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/86844.jpg

I've also often thought it would be great to have the AI traffic driven by the real-time aircraft position data we've all seen from online flight-tracking services. In particular, I think it would be great when I travel on business for my wife to be able to find my simulated flight from a spot view and show my 2-year-old daughter the computer screen and say, "There's Daddy's airplane."In trying to imagine how that might be accomplished, I was initially encouraged by the knowledge that the data are available, but my admittedly very limited understanding of how FS9 creates AI traffic leads me to suspect that it would be very difficult or impossible to actually use the data without rewriting some of the FS9 code.I mean, would you have to recompile the entire AI traffic BGL each time a flight made a deviation from what the software thought the flight path should be? And how would you model taxiing from the gate to takeoff, since (as far as I'm aware) the flight tracking reports are only active once the flight is in the air, so how would you know when to depart the gate and taxi in time to take off just at the moment that the real-time data come online?As I said, my knowledge of how it works is pretty limited, so it may be that those problems are not really problems at all. Is there someone who does understand the AI engine well enough to say whether this is do-able?

Actually part of what you asked for ("there's Daddy's airplane") can be done today. Microsoft publishes an API as part if its SDK that lets you drive the user's aircraft from an external program. If it's just a single aircraft you're interested in it's not that hard, provided you have a way to get the source data. As for multiple aircraft, yes, that would take more work but might be possible through FS multiplayer APIs.