LAX troubleshooting

[VFXSimmer 1,310]

Hi Nico,

First off I want to say that I am a newcomer to PSXT, but in just a few short days it has totally blown me away.  I followed some suggestions here and ran it with AIG OCI, Realtraffic and ran LiveATC for the LAX tower time delayed by about 40 seconds.  I flitted around the airport with the drone camera in VR and it was amazing to hear pilots and ATC responding in realtime to exactly what I was seeing - watching the exact planes and liveries roll to position and hold right on sync to command, watching them follow runway exit instructions and confirming the taxi signs in real time.  I put on the headset at real local sunset time (I live in LA) and next thing you know it was midnight... (yes, I might need mental help ;), jk)

Anyway, the one nagging issue I'm having at the moment is that there seems to be something plaguing some of the gates in the Bradley International Terminal - esp 148-154.  Any plane that pulled into those gates would park for a second then dissapear.  I checked the parked updates and those are the only gates that werent logging the arrivals that I had confirmed visually.

Do you have any suggestions on where I might start to troubleshoot this?  Would this occur if the airport gate data in the .xml was off positionally to where the live planes actually parked? (i.e. the live planes stopped and then shut off their transponders but PSXT doesnt think they are at a gate yet based on the airport info?).  If that is even a valid hypothesis, is there any debug or log that I could check to see what the lat/long of the live aircraft was when it "parked" to compare to the airport gate data?

Thanks so much for your help.  Your tool is a game changer!!

Edited January 21, 2022 by VFXSimmer

[kiek 1,215]

29 minutes ago, VFXSimmer said:

  Your tool is a game changer!!

Thank you!

I'm glad you like it. Please tell your friends, we need more users to keep RealTraffic in business. 

29 minutes ago, VFXSimmer said:

Would this occur if the airport gate data in the .xml was off positionally to where the live planes actually parked? (i.e. the live planes stopped and then shut off their transponders but PSXT doesnt think they are at a gate yet based on the airport info?). 

Very likely indeed, positionally off or wrong heading or wrong radius,

29 minutes ago, VFXSimmer said:

Do you have any suggestions on where I might start to troubleshoot this? 

Yes:

• Check the radius data of the gates against the half wing span (you can find the wingspan data per type in data/dbase.xml). 
• Check the heading.
• Go to Google Maps and enter the lat/lon data of a gate (like this for r154:  33.940197,-118.410858  )  and check if that fits with the gate in real live.

 

Nico

[VFXSimmer 1,310]

Just now, kiek said:

Thank you!

I'm glad you like it. Please tell your friends, we need more users to keep RealTraffic in business. 

Very likely indeed, positionally off or wrong heading or wrong radius,

Yes:

• Check the radius data of the gates against the half wing span (you can find the wingspan data per type in data/dbase.xml). 
• Check the heading.
• Go to Google Maps and enter the lat/lon data of a gate (like this for r154:  33.940197,-118.410858  )  and check if that fits with the gate in real live.

 

Nico

brilliant.. will give it a look this weekend!  Went and got the year sub to Realtraffic.  This thing rocks!

One other thing.  I've only included a liveries folder for the AIG OCI.  Does PSXT use MSFS generics for GA's by default, or do I have to include those in the search (not using automatic).  On the topic of generics, would it ever make sense to have different rules for ga (light and helicopters at least) so you can keep accurate matching of ariliners, but a looser fit for GA since those tend to be more generic anyway?

[tubbsds1 41]

1 hour ago, VFXSimmer said:

Anyway, the one nagging issue I'm having at the moment is that there seems to be something plaguing some of the gates in the Bradley International Terminal - esp 148-154.  Any plane that pulled into those gates would park for a second then dissapear.  I checked the parked updates and those are the only gates that werent logging the arrivals that I had confirmed visually.

I fixed this by doing what Kiek suggested... I increased the wingspan of the gates at that terminal in the airport xml file within PSXT.  Worked like a charm.

Dave

[kiek 1,215]

1 hour ago, VFXSimmer said:

 Does PSXT use MSFS generics for GA's by default, or do I have to include those in the search (not using automatic).  

Using "flyable"  aircraft is not recommended, they cost too much cpu/gpu time to render, stick to real ai aircraft.
You better wait till they show up in AIG OCI.
 

1 hour ago, VFXSimmer said:

 On the topic of generics, would it ever make sense to have different rules for ga (light and helicopters at least) so you can keep accurate matching of ariliners, but a looser fit for GA since those tend to be more generic anyway?

PSXT already supports that looser fit for light aircraft while there are only two similar classes defined: single props and twin props.  So any single prop type can match another single prop type, and same for two props..

[VFXSimmer 1,310]

24 minutes ago, kiek said:

Using "flyable"  aircraft is not recommended, they cost too much cpu/gpu time to render, stick to real ai aircraft.
You better wait till they show up in AIG OCI.
 

PSXT already supports that looser fit for light aircraft while there are only two similar classes defined: single props and twin props.  So any single prop type can match another single prop type, and same for two props..

Understood, but I thought there were AI versions of GA aircraft that Asobo uses for its GA AI?  For example, when using the in game traffic, if you are using the "generic models" setting, you do still get C172s and some others.  Do you know, by chance. if those are indeed generic models, or are they using the flyable liveries?  No worries if you dont know, I'll see what I can find out later if you dont know off the top of your head.

Thanks again.

 

As for the second point, I'm referring to airports like Long Beach, CA that have some ariliners but a lot of GA as well.  If I make my matching depth settings tight so that the airliners match reality, I worry that will cull a lot of the generic traffic.  Is that the case, or did I misunderstand your point?  Thanks so much for your help 🙂

Edited January 21, 2022 by VFXSimmer

[VFXSimmer 1,310]

44 minutes ago, tubbsds1 said:

I fixed this by doing what Kiek suggested... I increased the wingspan of the gates at that terminal in the airport xml file within PSXT.  Worked like a charm.

Dave

Great to know.  Care to share the values that worked for you?  I'll change mine tonight.

[VFXSimmer 1,310]

Hello again, so did some digging and found these

Would those be picked up by PSXT by default, or would it hurt in, your opinion, to try adding the piston & turbos at least to use as generic GA?

[tubbsds1 41]

6 hours ago, VFXSimmer said:

Great to know.  Care to share the values that worked for you?  I'll change mine tonight.

I believe I just changed them all to 36

[kiek 1,215]

8 hours ago, VFXSimmer said:

Would those be picked up by PSXT by default, or would it hurt in, your opinion, to try adding the piston & turbos at least to use as generic GA?

You can check that by running liveries scan auto, or in manual mode by setting another lfolderx parameter to the topfolder of these aircrfat. But I doubt it.

 

[VFXSimmer 1,310]

UPDATE:

@tubbsds1 suggested fix worked like a charm.  All of the Bradley gates are now logging live parking events and appropriate liveries are showing up now on startup.  I even went and updated the southern cargo ramps in the same way, and set their flags to cargo which hadnt been done already.  THAT by the way might be another interesting "learning" feature - if enough cargo variants (above a threshold) park and a gate/ramp, automatically flip the tag to cargo? 

I also played around with Asobo generics.  I made a duplicate copy of the piston, turbo, and privatejet variants, modified their aircraft.cfg to change the aircraft_type from "ASOBOxx" to something more appropriate like "BE36", etc and added an icao_airline=PVT and it works GREAT.  Smaller air fields are filled with these models flying around.  Not perfect, but a great stop gap until someone makes proper GA models for everything.

Finally, the coup de grace, I copied my H135 model over and made a generic AI version out of it making a few similar tweaks to the aircraft.cfg and now I have heli's flying around.  I know you dont condone using the flyable models, but helicopter traffic is rare enough that it doesnt have any adverse effects on my rig.  I am using an i9-11k and 3090, however, so cant speak to how well this will work for others.  Easy enough to test at any rate.

Both of the above steps will be for my personal use only, of course, and only something I'll do until proper models come along.

 

FWIW, I've been running KLAX and KBUR for several days now and have a pretty nice parking_update files.  Would be happy to send for you to distribute if you like.

Again, Nico, many thanks.  PSXT is a fantastic tool!  My only problem now is that I'm not flying, just running around my favorite airports doing plane spotting all day 😉

Edited January 24, 2022 by VFXSimmer

[kiek 1,215]

11 hours ago, VFXSimmer said:

 I've been running KLAX and KBUR for several days now and have a pretty nice parking_update files.  Would be happy to send for you to distribute if you like.

Yes please, that would be nice. Are these stock airports or addons?

Edited January 25, 2022 by kiek

[VFXSimmer 1,310]

11 hours ago, kiek said:

Yes please, that would be nice. Are these stock airports or addons?

KLAX stock, KBUR - Orbx

I'm about to try Feelthere's KLAX - will see how well it plays with my captured data.

[tubbsds1 41]

2 hours ago, VFXSimmer said:

I'm about to try Feelthere's KLAX - will see how well it plays with my captured data.

I use Feelthere's version and was able to get them to resize their gates at the International terminal.  I haven't tried it yet though. They emailed me and said their latest download has the changes.  Just FYI.

Dave

[VFXSimmer 1,310]

7 minutes ago, tubbsds1 said:

I use Feelthere's version and was able to get them to resize their gates at the International terminal.  I haven't tried it yet though. They emailed me and said their latest download has the changes.  Just FYI.

Dave

Thanks for the info.  I was going to try and just keep my parking updates file as is (with the gate info from default) and see how well it played with the geometry from Feelthere.  Will let you know once I've tested it out.