OK, we all have been over tweaks for weather, etc. Now I NEED to focus in on AI, it basically reduces my FPS by 50%!What are the tweeks?I have Ultimate Traffic and Mark Brunner's GA traffic add-on.I have Flight Ones Flight Environment using the low resolution clouds. As soon as I add some traffic, major drop in FPS.Please help!Barry

I would suggest that you include your system specs.On my system, I get 15-25 fps w/ default traffic at 100%, but when I add any other significant traffic, it drops to 5-10. So I don't bother with traffic.Thomas

Have you tried to narrow it down more Barry? By that, I mean have you tried it with just UT (no GA), then just GA without UT?I had a similar problem and found it was caused by just a couple of planes that I had included in the GA-traffic setup. I recompiled GA-traffic without those planes and everything has been great since then. R-

It will all depend on your planes you are using for AI, makes sure they are all made for AI, and don't rely on the GA program to make an AI plane for you, that just reduces the textures, not the MDL. You can replace the UT planes with aardvark ones if you want to take it further.The more polys (what makes up 3D objects and models) the sim has to render, the more your performance suffers.Regards, MichaelKDFWhttp://www.calvirair.com/mcpics/mcdcvabanner.jpgCalVirAir International

My system specs:CPU: Pentium 4 2.5 GHZMemory 768 Meg PC 2100Video: 128MB Matrox Parhelia Tri Display.Hard Drive: 80 GB WD 7200 rpm.CH USB YokeCH USB PedalsI'll try the process of elimination and see what the results are.Thanks!Barry

A while back I turned off all my AI traffic completely. The framerate hit, especially near busy airports in dense weather was just too much. Not to mention all the go-arounds get irritating as well. Since turning off traffic I noticed a drastic decrease in stuttering, especially during cruise.

Hi Michael,Is there any recommended method to replacing the UT AI traffic with Aardvark ones?Thanks, Bruce.

Hope you don't mind if I come in - I had exactly the same prob with f/r hits and am going down the road of changing the UT aircraft in part with Aardark ones. There is an excellent tutorial available on how to do this - check out The Learning Centre - http://www.wilsonsairspace.com/tlc.htmlBud

Thanks Bud, I appreciate the help.Bruce.

If you add a lot of AI traffic manually, you should double check your work! I have found tons of errors, misnamed texture= sections in the aircraft.cfg files, pointing to the wrong models, etc. Go through the aircraft list in the game and see if the repaint loads correctly. if you get a black screen instead of a plane that means it can't find the correct model, if it doesn't show the repaint that means you don't have it pointed to the right texture or the texture isn't for that model, etc. Once you clean up that the frames should increase, though lots of traffic in a detailed airport still eats frames. Unfortunately until a new version of FS is released, don't expect much improvement. My system is top of the line and 100% traffic with all sliders maxed still slows the game down, although it is still smooth enough to enjoy flying and only once in a while coming into a big airport like KLAX do I get slight pauses for everything to load

Alex,I've added a ton of AI manually and was always reviewing them with the aircraft preview in FS until someone told me about this free demo: http://www.flightsimdownloads.com/pub/Abac...RepaintDemo.exeIt lets you see all of the aircraft and if anything is wrong with the textures. It's perfect for AI previews after adding textures. Since you're only looking at textures, the program is free! It may take awhile to load if you have lots of AI textures.AITM is a really cool program for cross referencing aircraft titles with assignments. It's at the bottom of this link: http://www.molitor-home.de/fs/Downloads.htmlInside AITM is a utility that will list all of the aircraft that don't have AI assignments. It gives the config details that help determine what is wrong. Plus there are lots of other cool features, like seeing AI schedules by airport or aircraft.Without these two programs, my set-up would be a mess, especially with all the mistakes made during manual editing.Bruce

Thanks for the link to the repaint viewer, never saw that before. Good one! I just found out about AITM and that found most of my issues with typing in wrong models, textures, etc. The repaints were next on the list and this solves it. Thanks again!

The conclusion I came to after doing a bunch of research is that the best quality and fastest way to get good commercial traffic is to use UT for the "backbone" for flight plans and aircraft, and then tweak what's there with AIArdvark models and AFCAD tweaks until all of the UT planes are replaced with better models...Does this sound right? Does anyone out there have a tutorial to do exactly what I describe above?

When flying into a GA field, for me 80% of the time, I turn off Commercial traffic... this dramatically reduces traffic. As I use GA-Traffic, set to 100% with lots of GA-AI sometimes have over 35-50 GA aircraft parked at KFULWith LAX, KONT, and KSNA, and three Military Bases around me, there is a lot of traffic in the air.... Am in the flight path for several airfields, so all day long, most any time can see or hear something.

If you don't care about reflections on AI aircraft, you can convert all you textures to DXT1 with mip maps. This will make all your AI textures about 680k by removing the alpha channel. And mip maps don't seem to be blurry with DXT1 like they are with DXT3 so might as well use them.There is a pinned post at PAI website under "FS2004 Discussion" with detailed instructions on how to do this. Make sure and backup your original textures first before attempting this because once you convert to DXT1, you can't convert back to what they were before and there are a couple other things to watch out for (like don't do this to your light map textures).I personally have had great results doing this. Others have also reported good results, but some people have said they notice no difference. So YMMV.Another thing I did was change all my AI light map textures to 512x512 or even 256x256 with mip maps. There is no reason to have 1024x1024 light map textures.Matt Fox