FSX-MS AI Traffic Nightmare

[Bjoern 1,153]

I'm by no means inexperienced in terms of installing and managing AI traffic, but when has the entire endeavor become such a tedious nightmare?

All it used to take is finding the base models, download the paints, install the paints, download flightplans, adapt the aircraft.txt to point to the paints and compile the affair with TrafficTools/AIFP. Maybe run an Imagetool batch conversion afterward to cut the textures down even further to DXT1 format. I managed to expand upon my WOAI installation that way and created an entire 1980s AI environment with 400+ airlines.

The models were there and were acceptably detailed to provide a believable, dynamic environment. Textures were efficient DXT3 BMP files and there were little paint variations.

 

But attempting to bring my modern, WOAI based AI environment from the 2000s into the 2010s, I get the impression that things to have seem to gotten way out of hand.

 

1) AI models

Mostly FSX/P3D native by now, which isn't a bad thing at all. But the amount of unnecessary detail is insane. Polygon counts that begin to rival userspace aircraft from the FS2004 days, accounting for every unnecessary antenna configuration, animations almost entirely driven by custom code and steerable nosewheels, tiedowns on GA aircraft, custom light splashes (that aren't even standard on user aircraft) and even wingflex.

Who the hell needs all this? The philosophy of AI aircraft model design should be primarily driven by efficiency so that a lot of them can be rendered in very frequented places without dragging rendering performance down to a slide show. Every polygon and every animation beyond the minimum effectively works against this.

This is by no means a new trend, starting back in FS9 days, but in that case some features can (and will) at least be removed during the conversion into FSX native format.

 

2) Textures

To be direct, I consider anything beyond 1024 px and DXT3 format an utter waste of resources. Both in terms of disk space and and VAS. Therefor, I fail to understand how 2048 px textures or even those horriffic 4096 px textures have become the norm for FSX native models. They're four to sixteen times as large as 1024 px textures, do not look any better from the cockpit of the user aircraft and, combined with the greatly increased amount of animations on aircraft will drive VAS use through the roof (the FSX rendering engine creates a clone of the associated material if the part is animated).
If P3Dv4 had become the standard as well by now and if large SSDs were cheaper, this wouldn't be much of an issue. But they aren't.

Yes, authors issue FS9 versions of paints in more efficient sizes and formats, but these seem to be on the way out, with many up to date paints only available for FSX/P3D.

So you'll need to introduce an extra step into your workflow, namely batch resizing textures down to 1024 px, which will introduce you to a world of pain because there's no tool that's entirely up to the job. (X)Nconvert will stop working when you throw 10000+ input textures at it (or for whatever reason), MWGFX based tools (TextureManager) will randomly throw read/write errors due to unfathomable reasons and Imagetool isn't even able to resize textures and will steadfastly refuse to even read DDS files that were exported from Photoshop (try it!). You'll basically have to do it in chunks, managing backups along the way and keeping track of what was converted and what wasn't. Tedious, time consuming and no way as easy as it used to be (batch mass conversion into DDS DXT format with Imaghetool and you were done). And you'll need to repeat the process over and over and over again as you work your AI to-do list since you're generally never finished when trying to keep an AI environment diverse and up to date. Ugh!

Not to mention the trend for smooth alpha channels (instead of hard black/white borders) to display landing light splashes on the fuselage. This ruins any attempt to compress textures even further into DXT1 format (half the space requirement at the same resolution compared to DXT3/5) because the result from any conversion tool will be a black diffuse or nightmap texture (inherent limitations).

 

3) Logojets

Can't blame the painters, but I sincerely hope that some airlines out there burn in airline hell for their overuse of individualized paints or advertisements. Looking at you, Norwegian and Air India Express.

 

4) Lack of standardization

World Of AI was a great effort, providing standardized packages with a custom installer. But they've gone dark and any effort to standardize and streamline AI installation and management in their wake hasn't gone much beyond AI Flight Planner's installation tool, which can't be made smart enough to provide a quick and easy installation framework unless there is a degree of standardization across development groups regarding folder naming, paint titles and [fltsim.x] information handling. But knowing the highly individualized AI community, this is wishfulthinking at best. So the old method, manual is all there is and that will be.

 

To put a few positive aspects into the rant:

5) Flight plans have become much better, thanks to AIFP. Hardly any errors during validation checks and compilation. So that's at least one front that's requiring less effort than before.

6) There's at some degree of standardization for some AI models now. No more division between the same aircraft supplied by three or four different authors. On the other hand, payware AI models are beginning to somewhat dilute this. Item #1 still applies though. Efficiency has taken a back seat.

 

Sorry for the lengthy post and sorry for basically being unfair to the AI developers who are doing this mostly for free. But I couldn't help myself since the anger built up over the last few weeks that were figuratively spent 24/7 working on AI with zero seconds flying. Due to the mass of real world traffic that needs to be in the simulator to provide a believable enviroment, efficiency in models, textures and procedures must be the prime objective and the current trends simply do not reflect this.

If AI installation, use and management was easier and more streamlined and the models more efficient, there would be less people turning AI down or off altogether and gravitating to all-in-one solutions provided by payware developers or groups with questionable understanding of copyrights or at least model and paint credits.

Keep in mind that AI and ATC is one of the very last advantages that MSFS and derivatives have over X-Plane, FlightGear or Aerofly. And this is an advantage that should be preserved under any circumstance and not buried between framerate, VAS and disk space issues!

 

[honanhal 1,420]

Hear hear. This is what I keep saying. It's the best of times and worst of times for AI. On the one hand, great models and paints, all available for free. As long as you have the expertise and the time. So, so much time...

How many people out there have the patience and the wherewithal to build a reasonably complete set of custom AI? A few hundred?

James

[Dave_YVR 968]

   It's a night and day difference between 1024 textures and even 2048, let alone 4096. Both of which can be quickly resized for what ever reason you prefer. Modeling techniques have changed as well, these various antenna options etc aren't actually part of the model but incorporated into the alpha layer of the texture itself. 

[Ian S 214]

It's hardly a nightmare. Some people such as myself really enjoy tinkering with the different models, new liveries and updated flight-plans regularly provided to us by the skilled and dedicated people'that develop them.

If you can't be bothered with that and just want some activity on the apron, install a simple payware system that does it for you, or just add some one of flightplans and models and dont bother with the updates. 

Each to their own...

[atco 161]

As someone who devotes hundreds of hours of my spare time into making AI repaints, AFCADs, flightplans and even the odd model or two and then gives them away for free to be enjoyed by anyone there are no words to describe how disheartening this post is. An absolute knife in the back.

You are complaining that models and repaints are now better and more detailed than ever before.........Seriously?

You are aware that most people are not running their sim of choice on a PC built 20 years ago right? There have been enormous advances in processing power, RAM, graphics cards and even the underlying sim platforms since the last decade?

As has been said if you want AI from the 90s with terrible, basic models and awful DXT1 textures there are plenty of payware packages that will give you exactly that with just a few mouse clicks and you can be spared from all the terrible time and effort that you clearly find so bothersome.

I honestly just don't know any more what will make people happy.

[markmasterson 63]

I for one appreciate everyone that gives to this hobby.  I normally don't reply to these posts.  There is nothing like going to your favorite airport and feeling like you are there.  Without the "Artists" both builders and repainters, I would never enjoy this hobby as much as I do.  I started with the first MS Simulator through SimLogic to P3D4.  Realism in these years has come so far.  All those that give and even those that sell I appreciate your art and enjoy it everytime I fly...Keep making this a great hobby!

[Bjoern 1,153]

38 minutes ago, atco said:

As someone who devotes hundreds of hours of my spare time into making AI repaints, AFCADs, flightplans and even the odd model or two and then gives them away for free to be enjoyed by anyone there are no words to describe how disheartening this post is. An absolute knife in the back.

You are complaining that models and repaints are now better and more detailed than ever before.........Seriously?

You are aware that most people are not running their sim of choice on a PC built 20 years ago right? There have been enormous advances in processing power, RAM, graphics cards and even the underlying sim platforms since the last decade?

As has been said if you want AI from the 90s with terrible, basic models and awful DXT1 textures there are plenty of payware packages that will give you exactly that with just a few mouse clicks and you can be spared from all the terrible time and effort that you clearly find so bothersome.

I honestly just don't know any more what will make people happy.

It's not that it wasn't exactly easy for me writing this down. Believe it or not, I've got at least a few dozen hours in the "do" department of AI myself (flight plans and paints), albeit only for the (retro) days long gone. I know how much effort collecting flight plan data and digging through airplane photo sites is and how little return one gets for that.
But I really don't understand why AI needs to be just as detailed as the user aircraft. If "better models" mean two or three more polys here and there and a few more LODs for smoother transitions and textures that were crafted on high reolution paintkits but downsampled to more sensible resolutions and filesizes, I would be the happiest guy on the block.
One AI aircraft on it's own won't make a dent in rendering performance, but since traffic is a numbers game, every additional bunch of polygons, animation, texture and extra feature is multiplied by a dozen or more in the scene, making the impact of additional details all the greater. I guarantee you that I can bring a current generation PC with P3Dv4 to its knees by simply going HD on textures and using current model generations. And if AI traffic already takes a good portion of the available resources, where does that leave the user aircraft, scenery, weather and sound? Those also tend to possess ever increasing levels of details, therfor you basically have five elements that are all competing for rendering time. And hardware resources are limited, no matter the number of cores, memory bandwith or video RAM. Not to mention the rendering engine of the simulator itself, which is by no means the most perfect and efficient.

I can't speak for others, but in order to make me happy - and this does not just apply to AI, but especially to userspace models as well - efficiency should never be lost from focus. And in the eyes of this word not allowed, that focus has been lost.

Back to trying to figure out a way to mass resize textures.

 

1 hour ago, Dave_YVR said:

   It's a night and day difference between 1024 textures and even 2048, let alone 4096. Both of which can be quickly resized for what ever reason you prefer. Modeling techniques have changed as well, these various antenna options etc aren't actually part of the model but incorporated into the alpha layer of the texture itself. 

If you've got a good and very robust mass texture conversion tool, I'd gladly hear about it. So far, everything I've tried fell short of the curve.

 

48 minutes ago, Ian S said:

It's hardly a nightmare. Some people such as myself really enjoy tinkering with the different models, new liveries and updated flight-plans regularly provided to us by the skilled and dedicated people'that develop them.

If you can't be bothered with that and just want some activity on the apron, install a simple payware system that does it for you, or just add some one of flightplans and models and dont bother with the updates. 

Each to their own...

There's a difference between basically starting from scratch and staying in the loop.

[Ian S 214]

1 hour ago, atco said:

As someone who devotes hundreds of hours of my spare time into making AI repaints, AFCADs, flightplans and even the odd model or two and then gives them away for free to be enjoyed by anyone there are no words to describe how disheartening this post is. An absolute knife in the back.

You are complaining that models and repaints are now better and more detailed than ever before.........Seriously?

You are aware that most people are not running their sim of choice on a PC built 20 years ago right? There have been enormous advances in processing power, RAM, graphics cards and even the underlying sim platforms since the last decade?

As has been said if you want AI from the 90s with terrible, basic models and awful DXT1 textures there are plenty of payware packages that will give you exactly that with just a few mouse clicks and you can be spared from all the terrible time and effort that you clearly find so bothersome.

I honestly just don't know any more what will make people happy.

Please don't be put off mate, I love your work and am sure there are hundreds that feel the same.

[mjlw 2]

• I for one appreciate the wonderful work that Garry Lewis, Juergen Baumbusch, Philippe Tabatchnik, Johan Clausen and Kyle Meeks give to us freely. It enhances our hobby, gives us a fantastic sense of emersion and makes such a difference to our flight sim world. 

Regards Matt Williams

[Ian S 214]

5 minutes ago, mjlw said:

• I for one appreciate the wonderful work that Garry Lewis, Juergen Baumbusch, Philippe Tabatchnik, Johan Clausen and Kyle Meeks give to us freely. It enhances our hobby, gives us a fantastic sense of emersion and makes such a difference to our flight sim world. 

Regards Matt Williams

Plus many more including Atco (above), Erez who produces the FAIB models and the team that has converted models for use in P3Dv4

[Bjoern 1,153]

To put a bit more positivity on things and prove that I'm not just complaining about the situation, I think I've managed to come up with a pretty robust solution to mass convert textures. Textures with more than pure black/white alpha channels still refuse to produce usable results, but that's due to limitations in the tools involved.

I'm still a bit miffed about it though because I've had to work this out in the first place for the sake of restoring a degree of efficiency, that it cost me quite a bit of time that I'd have preferred to spend with something more relevant and because the solution involves batch script, which is the scripting equivalent to waterboarding or any other fancy form of torture. If I still had hair, I would have lost it by now.

But I'm getting there. I guess.

[Dave_YVR 968]

1 minute ago, Bjoern said:

 

I'm still a bit miffed about it though because I've had to work this out in the first place for the sake of restoring a degree of efficiency, that it cost me quite a bit of time that I'd have preferred to spend with something more relevant and because the solution involves batch script, which is the scripting equivalent to waterboarding or any other fancy form of torture. If I still had hair, I would have lost it by now.

But I'm getting there. I guess.

 

 Oh boo hoo. I've resized and converted one by one, many thousands of AI textures over the years only to swap them all out for their full sized versions since P3d V4 was released. None it has even been a nightmare or even complaint in the slightest.

[Bjoern 1,153]

10 hours ago, Dave_YVR said:

 Oh boo hoo. I've resized and converted one by one, many thousands of AI textures over the years only to swap them all out for their full sized versions since P3d V4 was released. None it has even been a nightmare or even complaint in the slightest.

If you've got the time for that and are willing to do nothing else, good for you. But I. Just. Don't. Have. The. Time.