Ultimate Traffic 2

[sddjd 117]

Lol, yes it's alive but generally with users like me posting questions to the development team that go unanswered. It's a good place for peer-to-peer help, but issues such as powerpack errors and the heart of the program itself having issues never elicit a response from the team. 

It's an old program, so I'd be fine with them announcing an end to support (considering the developer moved on and they're mostly unable to do so anyway), but IMO if they're going to keep selling UT2 they need to actually support it.

[Farlis 2,281]

On 5/11/2018 at 1:29 PM, F737NG said:

the program was promised to be updated by the developer, but he has gone very, very quiet

So still same old procedure with UT....

[F737MAX 5,579]

2 hours ago, Farlis said:

So still same old procedure with UT....

Sob story aside, there was very little news until just a few weeks ago when Flight1 announced that the developer would be returning to work on new features for UT Live v2.0 (free for current UTL users). The success of these features would mostly depend on community involvement.
 

3 hours ago, sddjd said:

It's an old program, so I'd be fine with them announcing an end to support (considering the developer moved on and they're mostly unable to do so anyway), but IMO if they're going to keep selling UT2 they need to actually support it.

I've given up on payware AI.

The frankly excellent 'AI Manager' from Alpha India Group (despite their erroneously named 'One Click Installer' version of it for P3Dv4 users) is far superior to any payware option at the moment. I would not hesitate in deleting all of your airline AI (not GA or Military) payware and replace it with this:
 

Rapid and helpful support, lots of options, choice of AI models, hundreds of airlines schedules to choose from, very few problems encountered and most importantly both the base program and schedules are still being actively updated.

Oh, did I mention that it is free?
(Though please consider a donation)
 

[AnkH 2,260]

It is free, yes. But it is still somehow a handicraft solution... and .bgl based flightplans still have the huge disadvantage that planes fly from A to B on a straight line. This is basically what I still like most with UT2: that the AI planes follow actual routes and not A to B...

The only advantage I currently see for AIG based AI traffic is the possibility to basically use flightplans where each aircraft registration has it's own FP, this is not really possible with UT2 (or only with an extremely cumbersome and messy approach). But then, do I really need for example all tail variants of Frontier Airlines flying their correct route? Or can I live with the random selection of all variants by UT2? Yes, the latter one is sufficient for me...

[Dave_YVR 971]

26 minutes ago, AnkH said:

This is basically what I still like most with UT2: that the AI planes follow actual routes and not A to B...

The big problem here is that the routes are well, word not allowed. They are nothing more than generic garbage, the same as you would get from the default FS flightplanner. It's really not any better than direct A to B, it's just different.

[AnkH 2,260]

That is your opinion. At least the AI planes do not turn directly in the direction of the destination after take off but rather follow a route, even is this route is based on the default flightplanner database. Yet I encountered many times AI planes turning at the very same waypoint I did, I encountered several times AI planes following at least partially the same airway I was using. This  gets especially obvious for long haul routes, where even with the so called bad generic routes, an AI plane from UT2 does not fly direct to but rather has a flightplan with turns and deviations. Something you never see with .bgl based AI traffic, they simply fly straight to their destination...

[Dave_YVR 971]

 You are absolutely correct, it's all to each users opinion. Far too often with UTL, I noticed departures while flying these "routes" will fly the opposite direction on airways/airspace that are used by the Stars and vice versa. There may be some times when they happen to follow a portion of a realistic routing, but it doesn't make up for the many quirks one of the big ones being that the routing between each city pairing leg all use the same cruise altitude. There are many others.

 I'll take the higher quality schedules with BGL traffic, with varied cruise altitudes and where aircraft aren't just spawned at the departure airport even though the arriving aircraft that will be doing that flights turn-around hasn't arrived yet etc. 

[F737MAX 5,579]

10 hours ago, AnkH said:

 At least the AI planes do not turn directly in the direction of the destination after take off but rather follow a route, even is this route is based on the default flightplanner database. Yet I encountered many times AI planes turning at the very same waypoint I did, I encountered several times AI planes following at least partially the same airway I was using. This  gets especially obvious for long haul routes, where even with the so called bad generic routes, an AI plane from UT2 does not fly direct to but rather has a flightplan with turns and deviations.

 

1 hour ago, Dave_YVR said:

Far too often with UTL, I noticed departures while flying these "routes" will fly the opposite direction on airways/airspace that are used by the Stars and vice versa. There may be some times when they happen to follow a portion of a realistic routing, but it doesn't make up for the many quirks one of the big ones being that the routing between each city pairing leg all use the same cruise altitude. There are many others.

Happy medium for using .bgl traffic and getting it to act a bit smarter.

Using a Navigraph subscription (even a one month one will do) or the legacy PMDG navigation data and get hold of the freeware program AI Controller v1.4b.
There is an option to force departing and arriving AI to use SIDs and STARs once they have been converted from the source subscription navigation data.

The whole program has made my AI a whole lot more realistic.