World Traffic 2 - How Not To Go Insane?

[Kuragiman 227]

So I picked up World Traffic 2, grabbed all the Bluebell planes, got a registration key and set up my first two airports with random solid flight routes.    Works like a charm except for one thing.  I fear I already know the answer to this but I want to confirm it with anyone else who has had WT2 for a while.     Ground Routing....   this has to be the most tedious thing I've ever encountered in flight simming.   Do you really have to jump through the hoops of a half dozen programs to get good ground routes setup for EACH and EVERY airport one at a time so you can actually see traffic on the ground moving around and not just in the sky?    Say there is an easy way to batch this crap?    Talk about a mega short coming for AI traffic generation if you have to spend hours setting up taxi routes at airports (if they don't already have them) and then edit them again and again because this node is too far off this way and that way and... @_@   Say it ain't so?    I looked at a few of the Groute Route solutions from Recording your own ground route... (let's just do this 50 times over so we can cover all the routes... No thanks...)   Python driven scripts that require a degree in engineering.. etc....

What is the best way to get ground routes setup?

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/29936-xgrc/

Ground Route Creator for World Traffic. Run this if an airport doesn't already have built-in ground routes. If the airport does not have an accurate ATC taxi network, you first will need to create/modify it with WED. Or you can browse here for a ground route for your favorite airports:

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/category/159-world-traffic-ground-routes/

[Kuragiman 227]

10 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/29936-xgrc/

Ground Route Creator for World Traffic. Run this if an airport doesn't already have built-in ground routes. If the airport does not have an accurate ATC taxi network, you first will need to create/modify it with WED. Or you can browse here for a ground route for your favorite airports:

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/category/159-world-traffic-ground-routes/

As I feared... lot of manual setup on the end-users side.   I guess it is what it is.  This is one of the areas I think X-Plane is weak in... Ai Traffic.  Way to much crap to do to get a single airport up and running decently.  FSX/P3D just reads the AFCAD, looks at the taxi network and directs traffic.  Nothing to it.     

 

I'll try out Xgrc.  Not use to running Python stuff and I think I am missing Python 3.0+.   If it can get some basic ground routes I'll be happy enough.   I did build a ground route map today for MZBZ in Belize but was unable to get the ground routes into WT2.   Lot's of nice traffic AROUND the Houston area though.

[trevg 21]

Wait until ver 3 is released shortly.

[x-plane 123 61]

World Traffic 3 (free update) should be out very soon and it will auto generate ground routes.

[Kuragiman 227]

9 minutes ago, x-plane 123 said:

World Traffic 3 (free update) should be out very soon and it will auto generate ground routes.

Thank the Lord all mighty.   All this manual setup is way to much for the average user.   I want to fly, not build an entire airport just so I can see some planes around me.

[Kuragiman 227]

Okay... Successfully run XRGC at KHOU just for testing.     Two questions now.   1)  I assume if you are going to use WT2 it is a good idea to go into the airport via WED and remove all the static traffic since it looks kind of silly to see planes spawning on top of the static aircraft..    and 2) WT2 isn't player aircraft aware?   A 757 from United Spawned on top of me at my gate.

 

Also, just a little side note.   Be nice if WT3 has the ability to limit how many copies of certain liveries can spawn in like Ultimate Traffic 2 let's you do.  As much as I love Southwest I'd rather not see 3 copies of the same special livery parked at my airport.  lol

[diddy64 1]

I feel your pain. Bought this a couple of years back and gave up once all my hair fell out and got bum soars from the amount of sitting. Roll on V3

D.

[kneighbour 32]

4 minutes ago, diddy64 said:

I feel your pain. Bought this a couple of years back and gave up once all my hair fell out and got bum soars from the amount of sitting. Roll on V3

D.

Same here - gave it a go for a few weeks, then totally gave up. Even without ground routes it has a few issues that totally break the immersion factor. I am waiting for V3 as well.

[Desaix 235]

Indeed WT is very powerful but very demanding. I'm doing a revision of my Agre tool to create and edit ground routes but a prerequisite (like WT3 itself) is a working WED layout apt.dat 

The problem as never stressed enough is that freeare designers but also payware ones never invested time doing a decent apt.dat AI traffic layout,with correct one way taxiways, gates assigned to operators, correct width, airport flows...only with XP11 LR seemed to realize that people like lively airports with fancy liveries to look at. 

In FSX you never see an airport released without a good AFCAD, in the XP world a bare apt.dat without ATC lines is the norm so we need time which XP wise means months if not years.

Both WT3 and Xlife will need a good developed apt.dat to work with, the hope is that the more people using these plugins the more ground routes wll be developed but a central repository is needed to share these routes, XLIfe has an automatic download of approuved layouts, WT not yet. 

I feel your pain though, I'm spending hours to build LEBL ground routes in a realistic way, not a task you can do on any airports not already covered, in the end it's a choice of designing or flying. WT roadmap is good with a full revision of ATC for version 4 but being a one man project can take forever. Still if WT3 can sort out the separation bug, as soon as you have some traffic weird effects appear like overlapping landings, takeoffs with runway already engaged, it has good potential with the automatic ground routes and flight plans generation.

[Glenn_C 135]

You would have saved yourself time and frustration if you had read up a bit more on this plugin beforehand. There are many topics and reviews that explain these very problems.

I myself am very happy with it. I have it all setup exactly as I want it with ground routes at all airports I fly to and with planes flying the correct liveries for the region I am flying in. WT3 will be a vast improvement I believe so hang in there as there is really not a plugin that can compare once it all is setup correctly. Yes I do know their is one form Jar design but that also has it's shortcomings.

 

[Kuragiman 227]

1 hour ago, Glenn_C said:

You would have saved yourself time

Really?   lol... No.  I wouldn't have.   At the end of the day, since airport designers in X-Plane are lazy, I'd still have to do most of the work that is already taken care when doing FSX/P3D airports.   And it's not as easy as slapping down a bunch of taxi routes and going with it.   There appears to be a lot of rules one must follow when making taxi routes or else they won't compile or function properly.

I guess I assumed this kind of micro management would have been taken care of by X-Plane or the 3rd Party dev,  X-Plane is as old as the ESP FSX enine is it not?   I am coming from the P3D platform where stuff like this is pretty much handled already by the AFCAD and 3rd party developers.    I am learning painfully that X-Plane expects all of it's 'pilots' to be programmers and designers too if they want a fully functional, AI littered realistic airport.

Ah well, the bright side is, I want to develop airports for X-Plane now.   So I guess I will be an expert before long having to do all this grunt work.      I have already begun to learn and started transferring my KAMA Rick Husband project from FSX to XP11.

[pegruder 65]

Someone should build something similar for xplane that I found for Prepar3d.  Its a neat app that pulls in real aircraft data based of their transponder and creates matching AI traffic.  It doesn't need ground routing because the aircraft follow their real world counterparts. The only drawback is occasionally the data isn't accurate, and some airports have the aircraft turn off the transponder during taxi, causing the AI to disappear.  All in all it was pretty cool to join the approach and landing pattern of the real world, even if there were some bugs with ground ops.

[ohsirus 241]

I bought it at launch and haven't used it once, too many hurdles in the beginning. I'm glad V3 is a free update as I'm sure I'm not alone in hardly ever using it since purchase.

[Desaix 235]

Wait, WT3 regarding realistic traffic will be really good, I'm testing it and generating plausible flight plans for any airport is quite accurate (apart from codeshare problem but it's beta version) is easy. What is less intuitive is to have these flights to move properly on ground since few airports have ground routes, very few well done ground routes, and not many an ATC Wed layout ready for generating routes. But airborn traffic generated is realistic being taken from open flight database. I still prefer my real schedules database imported from FSX schedules but it's a matter of personal taste because I don't see duplicated or wrong liveries and models, but sometimes medium airports are deserted, while with the automatic planning you can have tons of movements.

What WT lacks is widespread availability of ground routes, there are many but not organized, if someone has web skills please post here or in the WT subforum at the org so that we can arrange something automatically downloadable by any user.