Hi fellow flight simmers. Happy Holidays. I am constantly having problems with AI traffic clustering up during my flights and causing my system to slow to a crawl. This seems to happen so often that it is causing me to lose my zip for using the simulator. I love FS2004, but I can't take resetting my flight and praying that the next one doesn't have these dreaded clumps of AI planes. Is there anyway to solve this problem. If someone is reading this from microsoft; i want to know if a fix is on the way. This wasn't a problem in FS2002. Thanks in advance for all the help. Oh yeah I am using Ultimate traffic.Thanks.

Lower your AI Traffic %.Hope this helps,JimActiveSky Supporthttp://www.hifisim.com/images/as2004proudsupporter.jpg

Hi. Thanks. I tried this once. I lowered it from 100% to 50% and got ok results. I attempted to raise it back to 100% and the whole sim crashed while the traffic was reloading. I hope there is a fix in thew works at microsoft because this is a problem that I think everyone is having at one time or another. Thank you for your response.

AI models whether actually visible or hidden by visual range are still rendered in ram within I think a forty mile range of your current location. If you have a TCAS gauge installed and set it at that you will see what I am talking about. These all take a toll on ram usage and cpu performance.The flight plans set are set at a percent for each one which relates to your AI traffic setting. If you set it at let us say 80 and there is one at 85 it will not take effect. All of your flight plans within a group are compiled to a traficxxxx.bgl file. If you use traffic tools or better yet with a front end such as AITM you can after a learning curve decompile your trafficxxx.bgl file, modify the percent level of each plan in the compilation to at what point you wish it to take effect, and recompile it.The end result is you will gain control as to how the clustering forms and you can adjust your AI slider to pick the threshold for your desired overall tracffic density.As for as your system crashing when loading AI, FS probably (along with your add-on apps) probably loaded with not enough resources remaining to acommodate the requirements added by your AI density. To get the most available resources and ram for FS, shut down any unneeded services in the background, run a ram defragmenter such as RAM DEF XT available freeware at www.Tucows.com, and then start up your FS apps.Search this forum for FS Autostart threads (there is now a forum here on AVSIM) to control your background process activity.I'm running W98SE with the Vcache cheat allowing 768 MB ram, n NVidia card with 256MB ram and after cleaning things up with the afore mentioned defragger and using EndItAll to manually shut down unnedded processes, can go into FS with 550 to 650 MB available. I run traffic at 86% using UT2 mixed with a couple of cargo traffic bgls, 3D clouds at 80%, and a freeware RJ85 but with a complex panel (www.baepanelproject.com), a complex home airport, and while FPS is hit I do not CTD very much any more if at all.Hope this info helps especially with your system requirement determination.

Yeah. I appeciate your time and advice. Maybe these Microsoft will get everything right in their next release. Thanks for the all the advice everyone.