Performance advantage with using external AI Traffic tools?

[JoeFackel 760]

Hi everyone,

i want to ask if there would be an performance advantage using external traffic tools like UT Live over the .bgl driven AI Traffic by P3D itself. The idea is that maybe i could relieve the stress from the P3D core engine and let UT inject the traffic running on a different core or even on an client machine.

Thx in advance for more infos!

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

Hello Joe,

generally speaking - no. An external AI app usually works with SimConnect - it creates the AI and then assigns a flight plan to it (otherwise you wouldn't get ATC to talk to them) - and is done. The AI logic inside the simulator is doing all the flying, the starting of engines, turning on/off lights, moving control surfaces, raise or drop the gear, etc.etc. it doesn't matter how the planes have been created. If anything, then using an external app is worse performance wise, because you add the SimConnect API overhead to service an additional client and especially creating/removing SimObjects with the SimConnect API puts a little strain on the sim. While hardly noticable to the users as a small "hesitation", if you create many objects, then there will be many "hesitations" = stutters. This is most noticable when you fly from your lonely route into a more densly populated area of a major hub airport. But that usually happens with the BGL based method too, so there really is nothing to be gained.

There are exceptions from the rule, where the external app is controlling every movement of the AI (AFAIK there is this SID/STAR controller and the two apps that inject live traffic. I think that VoxATC does it too, within limits). But there is no guarantee that to use your own code instead of taking advantage of the AI object movement logic in P3D is any better. In P3D we now even have the option to natively attach an external simulator engine to an object if we so desire - but someone has to develop a superior engine first...

Only thing that you can do is to remove the calculation of which plane should be flying where and when. Even move it to another computer if you run UT on a network. But that only has a positive effect on the weakest of computers, where every CPU instruction saved is a bonus. The bulk of the calculations - the actual flight of the AI - is still done by the sim.

Best regards