World Traffic 2 - How Not To Go Insane?

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

49 minutes ago, Desaix said:

But airborn traffic generated is realistic being taken from open flight database.

Riccardo,

I've read this before about WT3, but I don't understand something about that statement. The Open Flight Database:

http://openflights.org/data.html

is a massive compendium of airline routes (over 60,000 routes and over 500 airlines). All it assures is that one sees the geographically correct AI aircraft liveries either at a specific airport or when flying a specific route. It does not contain any live (real time) data to my knowledge, but I could be wrong about that. I'm pretty sure that the OFD is the source of many of the schedules that have been created for the various flight sims, so this is also suitable for XP.

Jay

[Kuragiman 227]

4 hours ago, pegruder said:

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.

I use that system on P3D you are referring too.   It does indeed make for beautiful traffic... In the Air.  It is terrible at it on the ground, just like WT2.    Many of the airports in the US have planes turn off their X-Ponder after exiting the runway so they vanish.      That seems to the the 5000 lbs. gorilla in the room; ground taxi.    We can get the gates populated.  We can get the skies populated.   All with the click of a button but the traffic coming in and going out to the runways is like pulling nails from a sloth; slow and painful.

[Desaix 235]

1 hour ago, jabloomf1230 said:

Riccardo,

I've read this before about WT3, but I don't understand something about that statement. The Open Flight Database:

http://openflights.org/data.html

is a massive compendium of airline routes (over 60,000 routes and over 500 airlines). All it assures is that one sees the geographically correct AI aircraft liveries either at a specific airport or when flying a specific route. It does not contain any live (real time) data to my knowledge, but I could be wrong about that. I'm pretty sure that the OFD is the source of many of the schedules that have been created for the various flight sims, so this is also suitable for XP.

Jay

I think it's correct, the result when you generate flight plans in WT3 is that you pretty get correct models and operators (not always of course because due to code share some errors might happen like an heavy AFR leaving EGCC for KATL or a CRJ AA in LEBL) at any airport covered. I'm not a fanatic of liveries when using an auto generator, I just expect a plausible traffic, something that X-Life cannot offer right now with a mix of liveries and models everywhere, at least they told me so.

If you're looking for realistic flights following real schedules then you can use my tool Afre or import in other ways a standard FSX schedule and export it in WT3 format. I will do that for summer 2017 but mainly for European destination unless I can find some reskinners able to work on american and asian liveries. But first I have to see WT3 enhacements on traffic management, it's pretty useless to have hundreds of exact liveries if we can't have correct separation in landing and take offs. And this is not trivial if you think to FSX after 10 years there's still a high chance to get a messy landing with overlapping aircrafts and tons of go arounds unless you use external software like SID&STAR plugin (not exactly easy to deal with).

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

Thanks. I already use AFRE which is a great help. As to the FSX/P3d side of things, the free addon AI Controller 2.0 really improves separation and runway selection by AI aircraft and makes them follow  the correct SIDs and STARs.

[classicjetsims 17]

I wrote World Traffic so a few comments:

• Aircraft with unique liveries only spawn a single copy.  There is a identifier in the aircraft definition field that says if the livery is unique or not and if so an unique aircraft only gets spawned once in the X-Plane world.
• The OpenFlight database used to autogen flights in WT3 does not contain schedule information so I randomly pick times and weight them to normal flight hours to generate plausible traffic flows.  Number of flights per day at an airport is estimated based on the number of routes in the database put can also be specified directly in the Airport Operations file which gets a user interface finally.  That UI also lets you specify which runways are operational depending on time of day and wind conditions, which runways can be used for takeoff and landing and which runways are available for certain aircraft types.  The database contains no info on general aviation traffic so that is added in separately.
• For other airports with no OpenFlight data, the old Airport Definition files can be used to specify traffic.  This works good for military airfields where you can set percentage of fighter aircraft, transports, trainers, etc.  This data is also used during autogen.
• When World Traffic was first created, there was no taxiway data available in the X-Plane databases.  I had hoped users would have generated more ground routes but that didn't really happen.  Anyway X-Plane 11 has more detailed taxiway info now and info on gates that lets you pick operators and aircraft types.  World Traffic 3 uses this data and the taxi network to generate ground routes.  There is a Parking Def API that also lets you define the push-back path if you don't like the default and it also lets you pick a specific aircraft for a gate if you want.  You can modify the types and operators from this interface as well and test the ground route.
• World Traffic 3 lets you use a mix of auto-generated flights and user-defined flights in the case where the user has created really specific flights that they want to use so it mixes the two depending on what data is available.  For the average user, it's much easier to use.  They go to a Flight Planning window, set their aircraft info, departure/arrival airports and click a generate button.  Flight plans are then loaded or generated if need be.  Missing ground routes are generated if they don't already exist and your're good to go.  This should be enough for the average user.  Lots of tuning can be done then with Airport Operations, Airport Definitions for military or small airfields, or modifying the parking defs but that's all optional.

WT3 has been a huge development along with re-done aircraft to fix animations and performance so I think users of it are going to be much happier.  I wish I could work on it full time as it's much more fun work than my real job but it's in test so thanks for your patience.

 

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

Cool, thanks for the info and I'm looking forward to the upgrade to V3.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

On 3/1/2017 at 1:34 PM, Kuragiman said:

It does indeed make for beautiful traffic... In the Air.  It is terrible at it on the ground

Yep. I was enthused about this "live traffic" freeware too until I started experiencing the same limitations. Honestly, it is also really impractical to ask the users to go around and edit all the airports so that the airline codes match the gates correctly. The OpenFlight Database approach that WT3 is using is a far less intrusive option for the average sim user. Further, the  live traffic app does not coexist with any other AI traffic so one not only doesn't see parked aircraft but also the vast majority of VFR aircraft either. But what can one expect for free?

[sparkie66 81]

On Wednesday, March 01, 2017 at 2:18 PM, Kuragiman said:

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.

P3d = windows and XP = linux 😎

[Desaix 235]

32 minutes ago, sparkie66 said:

P3d = windows and XP = linux 😎

Mah...I have XP in windows and happy I am. Why should I need to install Linux which scores the incredible percentage of 4% of XP users.

[Kuragiman 227]

7 hours ago, classicjetsims said:

I wrote World Traffic so a few comments:

• Aircraft with unique liveries only spawn a single copy.  There is a identifier in the aircraft definition field that says if the livery is unique or not and if so an unique aircraft only gets spawned once in the X-Plane world.
• The OpenFlight database used to autogen flights in WT3 does not contain schedule information so I randomly pick times and weight them to normal flight hours to generate plausible traffic flows.  Number of flights per day at an airport is estimated based on the number of routes in the database put can also be specified directly in the Airport Operations file which gets a user interface finally.  That UI also lets you specify which runways are operational depending on time of day and wind conditions, which runways can be used for takeoff and landing and which runways are available for certain aircraft types.  The database contains no info on general aviation traffic so that is added in separately.
• For other airports with no OpenFlight data, the old Airport Definition files can be used to specify traffic.  This works good for military airfields where you can set percentage of fighter aircraft, transports, trainers, etc.  This data is also used during autogen.
• When World Traffic was first created, there was no taxiway data available in the X-Plane databases.  I had hoped users would have generated more ground routes but that didn't really happen.  Anyway X-Plane 11 has more detailed taxiway info now and info on gates that lets you pick operators and aircraft types.  World Traffic 3 uses this data and the taxi network to generate ground routes.  There is a Parking Def API that also lets you define the push-back path if you don't like the default and it also lets you pick a specific aircraft for a gate if you want.  You can modify the types and operators from this interface as well and test the ground route.
• World Traffic 3 lets you use a mix of auto-generated flights and user-defined flights in the case where the user has created really specific flights that they want to use so it mixes the two depending on what data is available.  For the average user, it's much easier to use.  They go to a Flight Planning window, set their aircraft info, departure/arrival airports and click a generate button.  Flight plans are then loaded or generated if need be.  Missing ground routes are generated if they don't already exist and your're good to go.  This should be enough for the average user.  Lots of tuning can be done then with Airport Operations, Airport Definitions for military or small airfields, or modifying the parking defs but that's all optional.

WT3 has been a huge development along with re-done aircraft to fix animations and performance so I think users of it are going to be much happier.  I wish I could work on it full time as it's much more fun work than my real job but it's in test so thanks for your patience.

 

 

Great info.   That sounds much much better.   I don't need exact flight schedules.. I just need my airports filled and the skies a little busy at the click of the button.   I'm not demanding anything... lol.     I look forward to this upgrade.

[sparkie66 81]

7 hours ago, Desaix said:

Mah...I have XP in windows and happy I am. Why should I need to install Linux which scores the incredible percentage of 4% of XP users.

😎 i meant xp has a more linuxy feel about it. Imho

[sparkie66 81]

2 bad we dont have live traffic like in p3d. That is amazing!

[Desaix 235]

If it's what described by Kuragiman (plane disapperaing on ground and erratic behavious while airborne) I guess it's something we really don't miss. What we miss it's a working ground system thought for a working ATC, instead LR never pay great attention to ATC.

As said by Kuragiman it's incredible that scenery developers didn't understand the relevance of a good ground layout, still payware scenery are sometimes faulty and lacking definitions like gates type and airport flows. I remember coming from FSX 3 years ago I dared to complain about how sceneries by a great freeware developer with hundreds of airports done had no parking positions and ATC taxiways. More than a complain it was a suggestion because apart from that they were great. Well, I got multiple offences "do not download" "how ungrateful you're" "how do you dare to criticize his work"...

In the end I knew I was right and I still cannot understand why LR does not make a working ATC layout MANDATORY : no full apt.dat with ATC lines and parking positions and airport flows, no loading of scenery. I appreciate Justsim for example because their XP airports always present a good apt.dat with taxi net with correct gate and taxiways names. 

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

Unlike FSX  and P3d, XP  relies on its community  of users to create the more detailed versions of airports. I guess that LR  didn't want to place any unnecessary  barriers for users in creating airports, but the ground routing issue eventually came back to bite them.

[Kuragiman 227]

Oh!  Classicjetsims, one question about WT3 that lingers.    Will it be aware of the users aircraft before spawning in traffic?   Almost every time I've used WT2 a plane always spawns in at the gate I start at.   Is this a limitation of XP11?  Bad airport design work?   WT2 unable to know the position of the player's aircraft and flag that gate as non-spawnable?