Be the first ... GA TRAFFIC MAKER 1.0

[Guest Capholland]

Hi folks. I just recently got into playing around with TTools and AFCAD, and would like to invite you all to try out a new utility I've just finished creating. I've called it the GA Traffic Maker, and as of this evening it's on release 1.0. This program, intended to fill up otherwise empty airports with at least a minimum of GA traffic (after using AFCAD to add "missing" control towers) will randomly generate simple 2-leg, weekly IFR flight plans for any airport (or AFCAD overlay code) listed in the Airports.txt file to any other airport within a selectable radius. It can generate up to 200 ready-to-use flight plans to and from that airport in one go. And any add-on or repainted aircraft listed in your Aircraft.txt file can join in the fun, or you can simply let it run with some of the default (Professional Edition) aircraft. It will even assign proper flight altitudes based on the altitude of both airports, the distance of the leg, and the direction of flight.I intend to upload it to the AVSIM and FLIGHTSIM libraries before Christmas, but I thought I'd give you folks here a chance to play with it first, in case any really obvious bugs or flaws become evident.You can download the ZIP (only 50k) from the front page of my website listed below.Your comments and feedback will be appreciated. Oh, and it's freeware too. So enjoy!- Caphollandhttp://flightsimmers.net/va/caphollandshttp://jdtllc.com/images/RCsupporter.jpg

[Misha_K 0]

"Simple two-leg weekly flightplans" sounds like a lot of static aircraft to me. Remember that each AC# entry in the flightplans.txt is an individual aircraft, which is loaded on the ground even if the flightplan specifies a different day of the week. It simply sits around until the departure day arrives. If you're using weekly cycles remember to give each aircraft something to do on each day of the week. Two cycles won't suffice.Misha

[Guest Capholland]

Thanks for the tip. Are you sure it will load all the aircraft even if they don't fly on that day? I'll have to look into that. If so, I could revise the program to add at least a few more legs. Otherwise, however, even the "lot of static aircraft" bit is not an entirely unrealistic side-effect. You'll often see a good selection of "static aircraft" parked at most GA and military airports that only take off once in a blue moon. You'll just have to make sure you have a good selection of parking spaces at that airport to accomodate all the flights you generate.Also remember that you can generate however many or few flight plans you want (anywhere from 10 to 200) so if you prefer less traffic (and/or resultant static aircraft, if that is indeed the case) then generate fewer flight plans for that airfield. If you like or want more, generate more.- Caphollandhttp://flightsimmers.net/va/caphollandshttp://jdtllc.com/images/RCsupporter.jpg

[Forkboy2 27]

Sounds like a great utility. However, yes with weekly flightplans they will fly their one leg and sit around for 7 days until it's time to fly it again.I might suggest doing daily flightplans and have them repeat every 4 or 6 hours. One problem is that most default airports only have room for a few aircraft to park so most of the aircraft will probably disappear right after landing. Increasing the repeat perios to 4 or 6 hours will cut down on that problem a lot compared to weekly plans.Matt

[Guest Andy_YXU]

Almost sounds like a program I was looking for...OK I am no fan of the real world plans cuz they are parking hogs in many cases :-).What I was always into is making as many flights as posible and make them fly as offten as possible here is an example:ALL FLIGHTS ORIGINATE IN THIS EXAMPLE FROM INDIANAPOLISNEVER MIND THE ARROWS THEY SHOW LIKE FROM KANSAS TO CICAGO AND NASHVILLE THEY SHOULD BE ABOVE INDIANAPOLIS CHICAGO 3flights here ^ |KANSAS 3flights here <----- INDIANAPOLIS ------> CINCINATTI 3flights here | NASHVILLE 3flights hereSO THERE ARE 12 FLIGHT LEAVING INDIANAPOLIS TO THESE FOUR AIRPORTS SO ONE FLIGHT EVERY 5 MIN THIS MAKES A LOT OF FLIGHTS AND BUSY SKIES. FOR EXAMPLE ALSO THERE ARE NO FLIGHT THAT ORIGINATE FROM KANSAS BOUND FOR INDIANAPOLIS, BUT THERE ARE FROM KANSAS TO CINCINATTI THIS WILL CREATE TRAFFIC OVER INDINAPOLIS ALSO.Besically using map you make GRID so there are flight from every city to every other one and you skip on.... ehh I am not explaining it good, but the point is it takes forever create them by hand nad then you have to decomplie and see how long a flight takes so that you can set the correct repeat time 2hrs 4hrs etc... your idea of a program seems it might be able to accomplish this. It's a good idea, but like others mentioned don't make them weekly, but maybe if you can make them automatically assign the shortes possible repeat time 2hr or 4hr etc. and maybe user defined weekly or daily or on sertan day.Great idea! I hope it can be done. I know nothing about making programs but I figured since you are advertising I throw my 2cents in it and an idea for you. I sure would be happy user of your utility if it was able to do it, so far none can.Thanks you for your effort.Andy

[Guest Capholland]

Hi Andy. Thanks for the input. The short answer to your question is that GA_MAKER can generate flight plans out of INDIANAPOLIS (or any other airport) to any airport within up to 500nm of it. I'm not sure right off the bat how far KANSAS, CHICAGO, NASHVILLE, or CINCINATTI are from INDIANAPOLIS, but if any of them are within 500nm, and you select 500nm as your distance, then there's is a chance that they will be used for a flight plan.I say chance, because there are a lot of other destinations within 500nm, and GA_MAKER will randomly choose from ALL those destinations. So if you generate 20 flight plans, but GA_MAKER found 200 airports within range, then there is only a 1 in 10 chance of a specific airport being chosen, and even less for it to be chosen more than once.Everything about GA MAKER is random, to reflect the very random nature of this class of aviation. That's one of the main reasons I'm not simply changing the plans to a daily repeat format, because then you'll always have the same plane taking off at the same time from that same airport no matter what day you fly. I'm not a big airliner fan myself, and prefer to fly in smaller planes from smaller airports. But most smaller airports have little if any traffic by default, which makes it less appealing to fly to/from them. With AFCAD it's very easy to make smaller airports able to accept/handle AI traffic. But then you still have to add the traffic yourself--and since the kind of traffic at those otherwise deserted airports would most likely be the general aviation kind of traffic, that's what I designed the program to generate.But stay tuned. I will probably announce on this thread when an update is on the way.- Caphollandhttp://flightsimmers.net/va/caphollandshttp://jdtllc.com/images/RCsupporter.jpg

[Guest lmoelleb]

The Microsoft SDK can already do much of this - it supports min and max distance for each plane, max altitude, min runway length, runway type (hard, soft, snow, water) and a few other things as far as I remember. The main problem with it is that not all airports are in it's list....I would suggest you at least match the Microsoft SDK functionality and add adjustment of the tail number "pattern" to match at least one country the plane flies though (drop me an email if you are interested in an XML file with this data) before releasing. Another cool feature would be to make it mroe likely planes fly in their own country/state (I guess the two first letters of the ICAO code would normally indicate this).. I see far too many foreign planes in the smaller European contries.

[Guest]

This is actually really great. As a matter of fact, I was just about to come on here and ask if anyone knew of a tool that could do this. I fly from a couple of small airports (i.e. KTIW) that only have a few flights by default. It's a bit of a pain to create new flights, and I was hoping someone had come up with a way to just quickly generate some random GA flights.So, you must be reading my mind ;)I will download this and give it a try. Thanks!

[Guest]

Some quick comments after trying it out:First of all, nice work! It's quick and simple, and the DOS-based front-end gives me warm fuzzies.I would agree with the earlier suggestion that you use daily flight plans rather than weekly. That way we can add handful of flights and have some activity without loading up the airport with a bunch of static planes.Other than that, everything seemed to work, though I found that I had to trim out the comment at the end of each line (" // GA TRAFFIC MAKER") to get the flights to shuffle properly in the AI Traffic Mover program.Let us know when you have an update to this program. I think the most worthwhile change at this point would be to use daily flight plans.

[Guest Capholland]

Hi Mac. Glad you like it. Will look into updating it today. As far as flight plans go, I'm leaning more towards multiple leg, weekly plans, to solve the static aircraft problem.Am also considering adding a "single-destination" option, specifically for the purpose of military flight operations. It would be a little funny to have military aircraft flying from their military airbase to all sorts of random fields around, so I figured that with a "single-destination" option you could select a second military airfield, and generate random traffic between the two. Those flights would then probably be daily flights instead of weekly ones, and could be used to generate daily plans for GA Traffic as well, albeit to one destination at a time.About the comments, you should contact the author of that AI Traffic Mover program to ask if he can incorporate the use of comments into his program. TTools now supports these comments, and I can imagine other users will be wanting to make use of them as well to identify their flight plans.- Caphollandhttp://flightsimmers.net/va/caphollandshttp://jdtllc.com/images/RCsupporter.jpg