Supertrafficboard for MSFS

[abranpuko 369]

It would be wonderful to be able to have a trafficboard, like it was in fsx and prepar3d, for msfs. Being able to see in it the flights in real time: arrivals and departures. And see, among them, ours in process.
I do not think that it is that hard. There was a guy who did it for MSFS, taking Flightradar24 into account and inserting the users plane... but I lost track of him, or nothing has been heard from him anymore. His idea was very good.
Any creative developer dare???

[Ray Proudfoot 8,961]

Ai Companion works great for P3D and now MSFS. Been using it for years.

https://www.alpha-india.net/forums/index.php?topic=35642.0

[okupton 309]

58 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Ai Companion works great for P3D and now MSFS. Been using it for years.

https://www.alpha-india.net/forums/index.php?topic=35642.0

Ai Companion is a great program.  And free!

[Ray Proudfoot 8,961]

4 minutes ago, okupton said:

Ai Companion is a great program.  And free!

I tried a few times to convince the author to make it donationware but he wouldn’t have it. Koala is one of the best around. 👏

[abranpuko 369]

1 hour ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Ai Companion works great for P3D and now MSFS. Been using it for years.

https://www.alpha-india.net/forums/index.php?topic=35642.0

Thank you! im going to check it!:) 

 

[abranpuko 369]

I have checked it. With PSXT is not very good, because we cant know the arrive or departure time of every ai plane, as PSXT injects traffic without ATC. 

Thats why it wuold be nice the same thing, but with data of realtraffic software, or flightradar24....

anyway, thanks!

[Purr 125]

Does this only work with AIGTraffic or would it work with JustFlight Traffic or FSLTL?

 

Thanks!

[Bad_T 581]

Hello guys 🍻

unfortunately i can't really recommend it for MSFS for most users (i'm the author so i can bash it 😵 ).

For P3D, i think it was a very good program fine tuned over the years and sometimes, when i see it running with the gazillion of options that were included, i'm quite proud of what i could achieve (that it for the self-esteem part of the message 😁), but in MSFS the AI system is quite bad and the SDK very limited. Despite my early efforts, i could never really get it to the point i wanted and, for the time being, i've pretty much stopped working on it waiting for some miracles. With 2024 on the horizon, there's even less chances that they will ever fix AI issues in the 2020 version so it looks like a dead-end.

MSFS has several AI solutions, the probably most popular is FSLTL, that one is injecting traffic dynamically, my tool will not work with that kind of tools because there are no schedules, only the programs knows what it will spawn so it's impossible to make a board for the traffic for an external application like AIC (yeah sure AIC will show some aircraft with incomplete data in the live view, but that's just 2% of the program).

to sum up :

• with AIG traffic it should work fine, it requires WCF communication with AIG controller which should work out of the box (huge thanks to AIG team for providing the info that allowed AIC to run with AIG)

• with standard BGL traffic, it should work perfectly (it was developped for BGL traffic in mind) ... oh wait NO 😱.. it's MSFS 🤑 .... in MSFS the BGL traffic is completely broken since SU10 😥, the aircraft are not spawned based the date/time that is specified in the BGL files 👿, it's just a big bug that was reported but obvously no one cares @ms/asobo and i can understand that (probably not many people are using BGL in MSFS and they have millions other things to do and unless you use a specific tool like AIC most users won't even care/notice that it doesn't work properly 👀). So the timetables in AIC will show correct data base on the BGL, but it will not match with what the sim spawns because the sim is broken and there's nothing i can do to fix, it's just a game bug. I haven't tested this in the last 1-2 months but i'm 99.99% sure that it's still broken.

• aerosoft simple traffic is based on BGL, so it should work but it doesn't properly due the the previous sim's bug explained above

• fsltl / psxt / other injectors based on 'live' traffic : those programs spawn aircraft based on data that they only know, it's not possible to do timetables for those so AIC will not work properly

• JF FSTraffic : i think it also spawn traffic dynamically, based on TXT files specifying when an aircraft should appear on an airport. These are not really 'schedules', it's 'airports based', not 'planes based' and it's all a bit weirdish also in the way aircraft are declared (i think the goal of that tool is just to spawn some aircraft taken randomly from a specific company at a specific time on an airport, not to simulate the real schedule of a specific plane like the bgl files or aig traffic do, it's not a really deep realistic simulation of the traffic but that's probably not a bad thing, it's probably what most people want, just see some traffic at their airport with an 'out of the box solution' that is easy to install and not too 'resource hungry', i can certainly understand that it's popular and they had probably a good idea in creating something like that) .. i have not investigated too much so AIC is not compatible with that and probably will never be because the structure of the data doesn't really match with standard scheduled based traffic.

So yes the tool is there, you can try it if you want, but you're mostly going to end up disappointed unless you use AIG traffic and are a die-hard AI traffic tweaker-lover like i used to be 😁 🙄

Ok as always bit too looong boriing reply 🙈, but i just wanted to add this here because i know that it's not good enough for most people in MSFS so you've been warned 👅.

Take care my friends ! 🍻

 

Edited July 18, 2023 by Bad_T

[dmarques69 316]

33 minutes ago, Bad_T said:

fsltl / psxt / other injectors based on 'live' traffic : those programs spawn aircraft based on data that they only know, it's not possible to do timetables for those so AIC will not work properly

 

I was about to ask if it works with FSLTL, bummer. Thanks for the details.

[KL Oo 700]

Hi @Bad_T (I prefer Koala),

Mate thank you so much for your contribution to the hobby. Notwithstanding the challenges faced with MSFS and its sub standard AI system, you're AI Companion app has been bloody brilliant and I implore you to keep an open mind to future development in FS2024 or whatever may come in the future.

Thanks for all your support.

[Alvega 2,124]

13 minutes ago, KL Oo said:

you're AI Companion app has been bloody brilliant

And his Addons Linker app too. 😉

[Purr 125]

Thanks for your response, really appreciative of the time you took to explain and all your work previous. Fingers crossed that MSFS 2024 yields some more options for traffic and better developed sdk.

 

Cheers

[Ray Proudfoot 8,961]

7 hours ago, Bad_T said:

For P3D, i think it was a very good program fine tuned over the years

Why the use of the past tense? 😉 I remain a keen user of P3D and never fly without Ai Companion. Nice to see you here. 👍

[ConstVoid 110]

11 hours ago, Bad_T said:

with standard BGL traffic, it should work perfectly (it was developped for BGL traffic in mind) ... oh wait NO 😱.. it's MSFS 🤑 .... in MSFS the BGL traffic is completely broken since SU10 😥, the aircraft are not spawned based the date/time that is specified in the BGL files 👿, it's just a big bug that was reported but obvously no one cares @ms/asobo and i can understand that (probably not many people are using BGL in MSFS and they have millions other things to do and unless you use a specific tool like AIC most users won't even care/notice that it doesn't work properly 👀). So the timetables in AIC will show correct data base on the BGL, but it will not match with what the sim spawns because the sim is broken and there's nothing i can do to fix, it's just a game bug. I haven't tested this in the last 1-2 months but i'm 99.99% sure that it's still broken.

Thanks for this. I was trying to 'spot' some BGL traffic using FSHud's schedule display panel (in order to report some issues to them about weird callsigns for GA traffic) but could never find the traffic at the expected time. Now I realise it might well be due to the same bug - so I can confirm it still exists as of a couple of weeks ago.

[GCBraun 2,392]

With live traffic provided by RealTraffic, I just use FlightRadar24 or some specific Flightboard App. No need for yet another add-on for such a simple use case.