First of all, thanks for all your efforts with LLTX to provide a medium to display live aircraft. After some experimentation, I do not appear to be able to obtain much landing traffic in Hybrid mode. A few aircraft do make a landing, but the majority appear to be "stuck" and are not transitioning to the approach in Simulator AI mode.

Should I be able to see a steady stream of landing traffic at e.g. EGLL, or is this a feature of the Hybrid mode?

Edit:

After quite a long period of time, I now have more aircraft landing. I would say that the approach is positively ablaze with activity now, but the aircraft separation is not good, with some aircraft tailing each other very closely. Would AI Controller separate the traffic better (assuming it could operate on the approaching aircraft)? One further thought, is RealTraffic still throwing up some anomalies which might explain aircraft "on top of each other" (I am using historical live traffic at e.g. UTC-6 hours)? Watching RealTraffic, it would appear that occasionally two aircraft do appear on top of each other on the approach. I am not sure if this is a glitch in RealTraffic at the moment or a quirk of how it processes the data.

Edited January 7, 20206 yr by LecLightning56

Hello,

you can try and increase the distance where aircraft are switched to Sim AI mode with the Hybrid Mode Settings (initially that is 30nm). Maybe that will help. After that point the aircraft are under 100% simulator control. I don't think that AIController can help, because the aircraft don't even exist as AI up to that point. When they are in live mode, they technically are not AI planes.

There are several issues to consider

1. The airport in the sim usually does not correspond to the real world situation. The sim directs approaching aircraft to different runways than in reality, and worst case the whole airport is reversed, and the real world aircraft approach from the wrong direction (so the sim will first direct them to an approach from the other side).
   This is the main reason for switching the aircraft to full simulator control in the first place, because otherwise you have constant runway conflicts and traffic taking off on collision course with landing aircraft.
2. Aircraft in SimAI mode are under 100% simulator control. Whatever they do, they do, there is no reliable way of controlling them without losing simulator control altogether (=no ATC, no collision detection, etc. worst case: no departing traffic = no taxi-out)
3. The data quality of RealTraffic has become really bad, at least for my purposes. There is no other way of saying it. I see the following:
   • flight datasets (=plus 10000ft) for aircraft that are no longer in the air
   • flight datasets that are not moving, making the aircraft circle at the initial altitude
   • alternating datasets, aircraft is there in one update cycle, and gone the next, on and on
   • outdated datasets, where departure and arrival airports are those of the last flight, not the current one
     That is actually very common, almost every new aircraft that is coming up in the data stream has this wrong. And that of course plays havoc with the sim AI logic which is based on flight plans.
   • duplicate datasets, several different locations for the same aircraft at the same time
   • duplicate datasets of the same aircraft where one is showing the callsign, the other the tail number.

I tried to work around some of those issues, but there are days (like last Monday) where just about everything seems to be wrong, even in Live mode.

To be honest, at this stage, maintaining LLTX is a major effort (it has more than 40.000 lines of code). Unfortunately the inherent issues of the live data and limitations of the simulator AI logic make it very hard to justify investing even more effort. Whenever you work around one issue, the next one comes up, this is an endless (and pointless) struggle. So I tend to not look that closely and just stay in my cockpit. My main reason for creating SimAI and Hybrid mode is the ATC interaction, I don't like it when aircraft fly around in my sim silently. For plane spotting I use Live mode, but running the LLTX GoogleEarth map alongside FlightRadar shows so may errors, that I don't really enjoy it anymore. I usually just let it run in "Auto Spot" mode in the background while I do something else (household chores). 

Best regards

 

 

Edited January 8, 20206 yr by Lorby_SI

Many thanks for your exhaustive explanation of "where we are at". Somewhat shocking about the quality of RealTraffic and I hope this improves in due course. 

On the ATC side of things, the built-in ATC interacts well with the AI aircraft but I cannot get Pilot2ATC to do the same. Have you managed to get any external ATC software to operate similarly to the built-in ATC?

13 minutes ago, LecLightning56 said:

Many thanks for your exhaustive explanation of "where we are at". Somewhat shocking about the quality of RealTraffic and I hope this improves in due course. 

On the ATC side of things, the built-in ATC interacts well with the AI aircraft but I cannot get Pilot2ATC to do the same. Have you managed to get any external ATC software to operate similarly to the built-in ATC?

Unfortunately not. I tried RadarContact, but couldn't get it to work on my devel computer (RC crashes when it is supposed to play a sound). My license for PFE is lost somewhere in my email archives.

When in SimAI mode, the aircraft tick all the right boxes in the sim internal data structures, same as any BGL traffic would. You can verify that with the P3D Traffic Toolbox. So there is no reason why an external program shouldn't be able to see them and act accordingly. Unless they expect some datapoint that LLTX doesn't care about, that is always possible. Does Pilot2ATC work with UltimateTraffic? That program uses the same "injection" technology as LLTX.

Best regards

Edited January 8, 20206 yr by Lorby_SI

7 hours ago, Lorby_SI said:

Unfortunately not. I tried RadarContact, but couldn't get it to work on my devel computer (RC crashes when it is supposed to play a sound). My license for PFE is lost somewhere in my email archives.

When in SimAI mode, the aircraft tick all the right boxes in the sim internal data structures, same as any BGL traffic would. You can verify that with the P3D Traffic Toolbox. So there is no reason why an external program shouldn't be able to see them and act accordingly. Unless they expect some datapoint that LLTX doesn't care about, that is always possible. Does Pilot2ATC work with UltimateTraffic? That program uses the same "injection" technology as LLTX.

Best regards

I don't think Pilot2ATC interacts with AI traffic generated by LLTX. I have managed to get Radar Contact working in P3D v4.5 and it does indeed interact with the AI traffic from LLTX in sim AI mode (if you tune the correct frequency for tower/approach etc.).

17 minutes ago, LecLightning56 said:

I don't think Pilot2ATC interacts with AI traffic generated by LLTX. I have managed to get Radar Contact working in P3D v4.5 and it does indeed interact with the AI traffic from LLTX in sim AI mode (if you tune the correct frequency for tower/approach etc.).

Pilot2ATC doesn't interact with any traffic addon. It may see it but it doesn't direct it.

3 hours ago, mwilk said:

Pilot2ATC doesn't interact with any traffic addon. It may see it but it doesn't direct it.

I don't think that any of the external ATC programs "direct" anything (except for the one that also creates its own AI traffic, don't remember which one that is). And neither does the internal ATC. 

With the one exception, all ATC is just a narration of what the aircraft is doing anyway. The sim AI aircraft are not -ATC controlled-, ever. Which explains why they behave so funny when under simulator guidance.

A bit more detail, from the Learning Center and personal experience from developing 5 addons that handle AI traffic one way or another: On this platform you have three choices how you create an AI aircraft: "ATC", "NonATC" or "SimulatedObject". All objects created at runtime, no matter what they are, are "simulated objects". The simulator has special logic to make them move, simply by sending them a list of waypoints. That goes for cars, ships, aircraft etc. As long as the simobject can move, the simulator will control it according to the parameters in the cfg and .air files (which objects are able to move and how has evolved over the years. P3D can now also move helicopters using a special FDE). The next step above this are "NonATC" aircraft. They still are just simulated objects, using the same logic to move, but they are aware of what aircraft do and one can trigger additional functionality. The most sophisticated option is the "ATC" aircraft. They only fly when you give them an actual flight plan. They are controlled by a special "module", that utilizes the underlying simobject movement logic to make these aircraft fly a full route from gate to gate (in a way this is the same principle as with an FMC that uses the autopilot to fly your plane). This module also interacts with the ATC logic, sending cues to the same ATC module that is interacting with you too - which is the reason why it reacts in exactly the same way to AI as it reacts to what you are doing. But that is it, ATC is not controlling the AI module anymore than it controls you. Collisions, go arounds, taxi halt, are all part of the AI program that the aircraft is going through anyway. To put it differently, no supervisor/MCP process is managing all the traffic, instead every single aircraft is handling its own life.

The external ATC programs work the same way, when it comes to AI. They read key variables from the ATC aircraft (AI traffic state mostly) and play the sound files that are appropriate.

• BGL based traffic: the internal module injects the planes into the same AI module at the appropriate time as instructed by the flight schedule in the BGL.
• UltimateTraffic makes use of the create "ATC" AI functionality, it injects planes using flight plans - which is why they interact with ATC.
  (so ultimately there is no big difference between UT traffic and BGL traffic once it is in the sim. Only the methods how they are created are different and possibly the flight plans)
• LLTX/PSXT in Live Mode only create "NonATC" or "Sim Objects", so the apps can keep full control over them - which is why they can't interact with ATC. The actual methods that both apps use to control the aircraft are very different though, and the actual movement of the planes in the sim looks different in both apps.
• LLTX Sim AI mode is the same as UT, just with the real world traffic. LLTX Hybrid mode is a bit of both (ATC around the airport, and Live(no ATC!) en route)
• When you start influencing an "ATC" aircraft from the outside (which you can, that is not too hard), the ATC module goes crazy, because the AI logic says that the plane will do one thing, and then you make it do another. It will keep calling out the AI for frequency changes, will constantly nag when the plane does not fly in the correct direction or at the correct altitude, and it will ultimately cancel the flight plan. But it will not force the plane to do something else than you intend, there is no functionality for that. And neither will it adapt to what the AI is doing (which is kind of sad, because I am pretty sure that it could).

Bottom line is, that you can't have it both ways. You either have ATC (internal and external) or you control the plane. Having both at the same time is not possible (except for the one ATC program that makes its own traffic). So all wishes for aircraft to fly SID/STAR/transitions while at the same time having ATC are utterly futile - unless you write a program that does both.

 

Best regards

Edited January 8, 20206 yr by Lorby_SI

Oliver,

            You are correct. VOX ATC created its own AI traffic so it was able to control it. Not a perfect solution but it was something.