@psolk, good luck Paul. I'm never an early adopter preferring to wait until a new process is robust and easy to use. We need pioneers like you! 👍

3 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

I've noticed but no major airlines that I can see. And after 'koala's' post this morning about the difficulty of reworking Ai Companion to read AIGFP files I'll be staying with BGLs for as long as possible.

I'm reading that same post as AI Companion for P3d is basically not going to be be updated either for a long time or maybe never. You've heard of the Tower of Babel and its aftermath? This is the Tower of BGL. 

1 hour ago, jabloomf1230 said:

 You've heard of the Tower of Babel and its aftermath? This is the Tower of BGL. 

Because one program won't work?  Perhaps it's not the Tower of Babel but expanded knowledge furthering evolution?    I guess it depends on if you see this as a catastrophic change or are excited for the sim to expand and grow.  Some people are much more change averse than others.  Personally I am of the belief that change that moves us forward is a good thing and this appears to be moving us forward and I wouldn't expect Kai and the team to forego improving their product to work with a product that 

Quote

 is basically not going to be be updated either for a long time or maybe never

 

2 hours ago, jabloomf1230 said:

I'm reading that same post as AI Companion for P3d is basically not going to be be updated either for a long time or maybe never. You've heard of the Tower of Babel and its aftermath? This is the Tower of BGL. 

Never say never. Koala clearly has plenty of skills and I wouldn’t put it past him to come up with something. For now I shall stick with the tried and trusted.

21 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Never say never. Koala clearly has plenty of skills and I wouldn’t put it past him to come up with something. For now I shall stick with the tried and trusted.

I really don't blame koala for being demoralized. AI Companion is an excellent add-on and now its future is in doubt. If I was giving him advice, I'd say that he should just stop all work on the the P3d version and focus on an MSFS version.

1 hour ago, psolk said:

guess it depends on if you see this as a catastrophic change or are excited for the sim to expand and grow. 

When AIG announced the new AI schedule format I was excited about the prospect of actually seeing rotorcraft take off and land realistically. But then when they started hinting at eventually replacing the BGL format entirely, I figured that I could always stop using AIG Manager and go back to manually creating AI schedules with AIFP, as painful as that archaic process can be. Fortunately, I've moved on to MSFS and I really don't care anymore what happens on the P3d side of things.

Change is great, but there are always unintended consequences and we are already starting to see some of them with regard to AIG's decision.

22 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

I really don't blame koala for being demoralized. AI Companion is an excellent add-on and now its future is in doubt. If I was giving him advice, I'd say that he should just stop all work on the the P3d version and focus on an MSFS version.

Given he developed it originally for personal use then released it as freeware for users he would need to have the enthusiasm to start again. It must be very demoralising when big changes reduce the usefulness of a very nice utility.

It all depends on how long BGLs are available from AIG. As for switching to MSFS until the SDK is complete I don’t think it’s worth the effort.

sorry for my ignorance but what is Ai companion and why should it care about bgl files?

Edited January 17, 20215 yr by ha5mvo

48 minutes ago, ha5mvo said:

sorry for my ignorance but what is Ai companion and why should it care about bgl files?

It’s an executable that displays flight details for AIG Ai aircraft injected via BGLs into P3D. It can also show a timetable for selected airports plus other useful features.

It can also limit the amount of ai aircraft in the area. This is what i use it for mostly in p3dv5.

For me, it has been the difference between the sim crashing due to memory and the sim working flawlessly

18 hours ago, jabloomf1230 said:

I'm reading that same post as AI Companion for P3d is basically not going to be be updated either for a long time or maybe never.

From how I read it, the features I use (only very occasionally mind -- I prefer to stay in my cockpit when flying) are already working in a version the author has but unreleased. He said he's not releasing it because of what are, to me less used, non-working facilities. Perhaps he can be persuaded to release a partial implementation for us AIGFP users.

I do far prefer AI to fly proper routes. Unlike Ray et all I don't care about proper departure times. As long as my airports are reasonably busy then how they become that way doesn't concern me. But when I am flying 'proper' routes, using airways, I do like to see (or just get TCAS images and warnings for)  other aircraft around me, also following such routes.  Having them all haphazardly doing what appear to be random routes across my airspace doesn't look right at all.

Since I stay within my cockpit whilst flying there's not a lot of point having a fancy display on another PC out of my sight showing all sorts of details which I've no time to look at in any case! 😉

As for Asobo "deciding" to stick to BGLs for AI traffic, this to me wasn't so much a design decision as a result of trying not to have to develop any new code they didn't need to when doing what they really know how to do -- graphics. Just use the FSX technology where it fits.

Whilst all default AI traffic for FSX, FSX-SE, P3D1-5 is via BGLs, SimConnect was and is capable of allowing objects to be injected and controlled from an external program. This is what AITC is using, as does UTLive and VoxATC. SimConnect facilities are provided for such purposes. If Asobo or L-M were to ever do the same then it could just as easily be an external program as an internal DLL (as could in fact UTlive and AITC).

I sincerely hope all these objections to having injected traffic is not going to put Kaiii3 and others off going ahead with making all of the airlines, especially, into AIGFP form! 😞

Pete

 

Pete

 

 

Edited January 18, 20215 yr by Pete Dowson

Amongst the extra features Ai Companion has is the ability to switch flights from one airport to another with considerable ease. The most recent example being Berlin Tegel and most flights transferring to Berlin Brandenburg. Enter a few bits of info, press and button and then generate updated BGLs replacing the existing ones.

How can that be achieved with a different file structure? Can AIGFP files be edited? From a quick look they seem to contain non-ASCII characters suggesting a compiler / decompiler program is required. Does a decompiler exist?

1 hour ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

How can that be achieved with a different file structure?

If it's needed someone will build an app to do it. @Kaiii3says the format is published and there's some clever people around these fora more than capable of knocking a few lines of code together to make it happen...

@kevinfirth, agreed there are plenty of clever people around. As for "knocking a few lines of code together" I think there's a bit more involved than that.

29 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

@kevinfirth, agreed there are plenty of clever people around. As for "knocking a few lines of code together" I think there's a bit more involved than that.

the code is actual done and uploaded to the AIG Forum 😉 Developer just need to import our C#-Libary into theier own project and done.