VoxAtc and airport Afcad conflict

[seedosip 0]

Hi,

It’s been half a year now that I am using VoxATC (7.41) and I am very happy with it, definitely it gives another dimension to ATC in the Sim. I am using P3dV4 at this stage with 737 home cockpit.

I have encountered the following problem with a scenery, I assume it is related to AFCAD (ADE) somehow.

 

LEAS Asturias airport: default was checked with VoxATC and works absolutely fine. The addon scenery was checked with default ATC and works absolutely fine. All the AI traffic is custom built. Now the addon LEAS scenery has the following problem with VOXATC:

-          the AI traffic is parked correctly but as soon as it is cleared to taxi it starts to move very very slowly just into the terminal building and then stays there.

-          With proper aircraft you get the clearance and it’s the only scenery where the light to hold short do not appear, the red hold short line is at actual runway threshold.

-          When cleared takeoff (Circuit flight) when reporting downwind VOXATC stops replying anything. In the communication window you can see blue text that you have reported downwind or full stop landing, but no reply what so ever. This is the only scenery where I have noticed such a behavior.

 

Already checked for double AFCADS, checked AFCAD in ADE and all looks correct, default ATC works absolutely fine. Have re-installed the whole sim, installed only ORBX and the scenery and same problem.

 

Anybody had anything similar? Any help would be appreciated.

 

Many thanks in advance,

Sergej

 

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

I think that you are going to try to solve this on your own, as the airport developer RFSceneryBuilding provides limited support for their products. You would need to find someone with both that add-on airport and VOXATC 7.41 running under P3d4.

Anyway, let me ask you about what you looked at in ADE. First, run the ADE FaultFinder tool and see what it says. Second, see if you have duplicate taxi designators in the ADE Taxi Designator List (like two letter A designators). Third, check if you have multiple CVX  LEAS BGL files (these files contain road  vectors, and terrain polygons such as airport backgrounds and polygon excludes) for the LEAS airport. More on this below. Next, see if you have an ALT BGL file in ...\scenery\world\scenery for LEAS. Last, make sure that the folder for LEAS is the top priority in scenery.cfg.

As to CVX files, they will not be found as duplicates by Simple Airport Scanner or any other utility that searches for duplicate third-party airports. My Traffic sometimes includes them for specific airports, but I checked and it only has an updated ADE file, BR2_LEAS.BGL. ORBX Global FTX Vector also adds airport files for its altitude corrections. In the folder <drive>:\Program Files\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v4\ORBX\FTX_VECTOR\FTX_VECTOR_APT\scenery you should see a file ABP_LEAS.bgl.

I should add that using a very simple direct GPS IFR flight plan with LEAS as the departure airport might also shed some light on the issue.

[seedosip 0]

Thank you very much for a reply. To be honest it has been ages, since FS2004 I have not touched ¨Afcads¨, going through the ADE manual little by little, it is a bit frustrating though to spend more time fixing things than actual flying :)

I did run the simple airport scanner and found no problems. While checking the ADE of addon scenery (I believe it is called ADE_LEAS.bgl) I just did a zoomed in visual check, I will run the Fault Finder and check the Taxi designator list as you have suggested.

Indeed I had ALT BGL file in scenery/world/scenery but this was one of the first thing I checked and this did not resolve the problem. As for the ORBX I have also tried both with the airport correction and without it, does not seem to make any difference in this case.

One thing that I have not mentioned is that when initiating VOXATC in this scenery FATAL ERROR appears sometimes for a second but then disappears instantly. I have noticed another thing yesterday, incoming AI traffic was doing a downwind at 200ft AGL no idea if this could be related to the issue…

It is very interesting that default ATC with the same scenery works fine, AI traffic moves well following the taxiway lines.

I will do all the checks you have suggested and come back with the results, again thank you for your help.

Cheers,

Sergej 

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

5 hours ago, seedosip said:

It is very interesting that default ATC with the same scenery works fine, AI traffic moves well following the taxiway lines.

The sim's ATC and AI handling is very forgiving of flaws in taxiway geometry whereas VOXATC is not. I suspect that Microsoft had a programming advantage here over Tegwyn West since they designed the sim. Of course, the sim's ATC and AI are often rather simpleminded (probably closer to Artificial Stupidity than AI by today's standards).

Don't forget to try a test with a simple IFR flight plan. Sometimes the FATAL ERROR message is not related to either duplicate ADE files or faulty taxiway geometry. In fact, even inconsistencies in one's scenery library can cause this error. There is a whole long thread in this subforum describing a situation where an add-on airport was unintentionally added both to scenery.cfg and with the add-on.xml method. VOXATC didn't like that either.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

5 hours ago, seedosip said:

As for the ORBX I have also tried both with the airport correction and without it, does not seem to make any difference in this case.

 

I wanted to address this separately. Make sure that the FTX Vector airport BGL files for LEAS are actually renamed and disabled. The Vector Configurator utility tends to just rename one or the other in either the AEC or the APT subfolder.

I also forgot to ask if you are using fsaerodata.

[seedosip 0]

4 hours ago, jabloomf1230 said:

I wanted to address this separately. Make sure that the FTX Vector airport BGL files for LEAS are actually renamed and disabled. The Vector Configurator utility tends to just rename one or the other in either the AEC or the APT subfolder.

I also forgot to ask if you are using fsaerodata.

Hello Jay,

Thanks again for your help. No I do not use fsaerodata, just Navigraph. Leveld767 for VoxATC to be exact.

I have just checked for ADE Fault Finder  and got a bunch of Open Link Faults... I am quite new on ADE will try to go through the manual to see how to fix it, another thing I have noticed is ILS Hold Short is absolutely in a wrong place (which could explain why I dont get VOXATC to ¨get¨ me to the runways by marking the pathway... 

May be this could be enough to get to the developer to ask for a fix.. I have a freeware Asturias scenery which works just fine as does the default so I would assume it is something wrong with the ¨Afcad¨.

Will keep investigating..

 

Kind regards,

Sergej

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

40 minutes ago, seedosip said:

Hello Jay,

Thanks again for your help. No I do not use fsaerodata, just Navigraph. Leveld767 for VoxATC to be exact.

I have just checked for ADE Fault Finder  and got a bunch of Open Link Faults... I am quite new on ADE will try to go through the manual to see how to fix it, another thing I have noticed is ILS Hold Short is absolutely in a wrong place (which could explain why I dont get VOXATC to ¨get¨ me to the runways by marking the pathway... 

May be this could be enough to get to the developer to ask for a fix.. I have a freeware Asturias scenery which works just fine as does the default so I would assume it is something wrong with the ¨Afcad¨.

Will keep investigating..

 

Kind regards,

Sergej

That's a good start. An open link may or may not cause VOXATC to fail. It depends on how critical the open link is to the taxiway network. 

ILS hold shorts that are too far from the runway are ignored by the sim, but I have no idea what VOXATC does with that misinformation. It's not that difficult to fix the open links and the ILS hold and then recompile just the ADE file. Then copy the new ADE file to the 3rd party LEAS folder and rename the 3rd party LEAS  BGL file. to BGL.OFF. Then rerun the VOXATC Indexer utility.

I would also suggest that you download and install the freeware Little NavMap, which is great for creating flight plans but also has a side benefit of displaying a lot of information about a specific airport:

https://albar965.github.io/littlenavmap.html

[seedosip 0]

Hello,

Finally I have made some progress son the issue. I did fix the opened linked in ADE, though visually the nods looked connected, I did delete the problematic ones pointed out by ADE and re-draw the path lines. After compiling and replacing the BGL, AI finally started to move from terminal building to taxiways and not into the building.

Unfortunately when reaching hold short the traffic just went to straight to the runway (without tower contact) and just stayed there till disappearing. The same happened with incoming traffic, after landing just stayed on the runway… After a through comparison of different AFCADs I have notices that all the paths in LEAS scenery had a defined width of 0, so I did a test by defining the width in ADE for a few taxiways, fortunately LEAS is small :) And it did work! Traffic started to contact tower close to hold short line, started to take off without problems.

As you have mentioned, default ATC did not care about opened link or path width so it was working, while VoxATC looks at every details of AFCAD. I did spent a fair amount of time looking for this problem but on a bright side, I am getting a good experience with ADE.

 

Kind regards,

Sergej

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

Using a path width of zero is an ADE programming "trick", but it must be a problem for VOXATC.

6 hours ago, seedosip said:

I am getting a good experience with ADE.

Ha! Same here. I think that I have used ADE to revise about 70 of the 100 largest North American P3d4 stock airports. It's amazing to me how many have out of date runway and taxiway geometries. I have payware versions of about half of the remaining 30 and fortunately most of those are up to date except for airline gate assignments.

[seedosip 0]

Exactly Jay! Eventually we will get all the 3rd party scenery to get working perfectly with VoxATC. I cant really fly without it in the sim anymore :) Most of the sceneries I have, do work quite well. I did mention in a parallel topic that I have AI problems to depart and arrive to Madeira. Just run ADE Fault Finder and got a bunch of opened links for path and taxiways, though visually they seem connected, I assume when VoxATC reads it, it does find a fault and does not get traffic to get in/out. Just by chance you would not have Madeira installed? After previous experience I could suspect that those opened link could be the cause for the traffic under VoxATC not to move in/out. Just wanted to double check that any other users experience the same in Madeira+VoxATC.

Cheers,

Sergej

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

Nope, sorry, I don't have it installed. I commented in another thread on AVSim on how some 3rd party developers were happy to add tons of eye candy to their airports. But what it comes to making sure that the ADE isn't an out of date mess, well, those same developers just shrug their shoulders. I understand why, though. Most flightsim users like to ogle at the scenery and if the piloting component is a bit weak, that's not as an important factor.