TTools Newbie - Yes Again

[Guest GiZBUG]

Where am I suppose to find full packages of planes to use with this?I downloaded an AA flight track for it, but there is a huge list of planes I ened. Is there somewhere where I can download a bundle of all planes required?

[Guest GiZBUG]

BUMP

[Guest Martin]

As far as I know there aren't any packs with many AI planes. But you can find most repaints here or at flightsim.com. Worth noting is that you don't need all the planes listed with the flight plans - if you don't have a plane it just means that the flights flown by that plane will not show up. So you can add planes when you find them.MartinIt's a lot like life and that's what's appealing

[Guest GiZBUG]

To use TTools...all i do is take for exampe, americanairlines flight plans, and compile them, then im done?Or do I need to edit anything

[Guest Martin]

It depends on a lot of things. To make the flight plans work properly, you need to have aircraft installed that match the titles of the aircraft in the aircraft.txt. And also if you compile just your AA flight plans (i.e. you have a file called flightplans.txt with only AA flight plans in it), you will only see those flights and no others in the sim.So as I said it depends on a lot of things, and how you want to have it. The best thing to do is to carefully read the (very good)documentation that comes with TTools, and learn exactly how it works that way.MartinIt's a lot like life and that's what's appealing

[Guest GiZBUG]

So basically this program takes hours, maybe days, to learn and get traffic tracks import correctly? There isn't an easier/less time consuming (spend many hours flying real world) to get realistic traffic tracks in FS2002? As of today, this is the best out therE?

[Guest Martin]

There are a few programs that use TTools, but as far as I know they are not of much use if you want to import a large number of flight plans, such as the whole AA timetable. They can be useful for making your own flights in a more intuitive way than adding lines to the TTools text files though.One of these programs is an exception: It's called AI Shuffler and basically rearranges the flight plans so that they will be flown by airlines of the "right" nationality. That is, it will make sure no AA planes fly domestic flights in the UK for instance. It doesn't add any new flights however, so often the city pairs are a little off. (When I used AI Shuffler the only route for my Qantas 747s was Sydney-Abu Dabi or something like that.)MS also released an SDK for the traffic which included the TrafficDatabaseBuilder. It's similar to TTools but has some more functions, and it also requires some knowledge to use (it's also a DOS program).I currently use a set of TTools plans called World AI (worldai10a.zip). It includes flight plans for almost 200 airlines, with real schedules and flight numbers. The aircraft.txt totals almost 1100 aircraft, but of course I don't have that many installed. I have downloaded the planes and repaints I have found, and made sure they match the aircraft.txt (i.e. have the same title in the aircraft.cfg and .txt). When I find a new repaint I install it and match it to the aircraft.txt, compile with TTools, and the flights using that plane will show up.If you want to use the World AI it might be a good idea to make a "GA only" traffic.bgl and then add all the airline flight plans, unless you don't want GA or are happy with having both GA, fake MS airlines, and real airlines in the traffic. (With both GA and World AI traffic you will have around 35,000 flight plans, compared to roughly 23,000 in the default traffic.bgl, so at busy airports it will become very congested unless the airports are edited with AFCAD or Add-A-Gate to get more gates and active runways. Either way this makes busy airports extreme framerate hogs, because 50+ reflective, high resolution texture, full moving part airplane at one airport is a challenge even for the fastest PC.)As you see it will take hours no matter how you do it if you want many different planes and somewhat realistic routes. I'd say the fastest way to get reasonably realistic traffic is to use AI Shuffler, but you still have to download all the repaints/new planes if you want to see them. The more realistic AI traffic, the more work, at least that's how it is right now.Whoa, that was a longish reply, so it better help you. ;-) Or if it didn't help, it was at least clear information (uh, I hope :-)).MartinIt's a lot like life and that's what's appealing

[Guest]

Superbly stated Martin!!