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Guest Captain Barfbag

AI Aircraft not making it to gates

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Has anybody ever had this problem before. I had a problem with all of my aircraft freezing or vanishing right after they landed and were taxiing to the gate. I downloaded an AFCAD file for KLAX nad copied it making 7 other LAX files to use as overlays to send the aircraft to their respective terminals. They were Terminal 1 - 1LAX, Terminal 2 - 2LAX etc up to 7LAX. I modified all of the gates in each terminal file so that they are the only gates in that file but after listening to the ground traffic controller every plane that keeps landing is being sent to gate A11 or the highest "open" gate in 1LAX and then they vanish because it is not really there. The gates in 1LAX are A1-A13 and 2LAX are B20-B28 and so on through 7LAX but for some reason all of them are being told to taxi to 1LAX even when this terminal is not available in any of the other files. All of my aircraft are scheduled to go to the respective terminals in traffic tools so I know this is not the problem. When I am in the "select airport" option in FS2002 and I select 1LAX only those gates I created show up as a loading option and the same with the other terminals. What could cause all of these aircraft to be sent to the wrong gates. Here is an example just in case I made this too confusing. AA 757 lands and turns off the runway, asks to taxi to gate. Tower tells him to taxi to gate A9 (A9 being gate in 1LAX), only gates for AA terminal at 5LAX are E50-E58. AA757 acknowledges taxi and vanishes. I dont know if this a FSim2K problem or a AFCAD problem because I have tried deleting and installing a different AFCAD file for KLAX and it does the same thing.

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Guest Captain Barfbag

Yeah, we've ALL had that problem before. The problem is with the way aircraft (AI and your own) are assigned to overlays when they land. They end up in the overlay whose airport reference point they are closest to when they are asked to contact ground. The airport reference point is the pink cross in the center when you open the airport in AFCAD. You would think they would end up in the overlay they fly into, huh? Well, that's unfortunately not the case, and it makes the use of overlays for terminal assignment somewhat more difficult.If you really want to separate your aircraft by airline and terminals, you should use Radius AFCAD (or RAFCAD) as developed at Project AI. This approach assigns a size to each gate, and a size to each aircraft. ATC will always put an aircraft in the smallest gate it will fit in. Setting this up seems a bit complicated, but it actually can be done fairly easily. They have a FAQ download over there for more information.Using RAFCAD, I've got a much simpler 2-overlay LAX and almost everybody goes where I expect. There are some limitations, because Microsoft defined one of the radius parameters as an integer rather than a decimal number, but they've done a good enough job that we can live with it.

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Guest

Is there a way to modify the reference point you were talking about on the different overlays. I have even gone as far as limiting KLAX to 2 overlays KLAX and 1LAX and all of the ones landing at KLAX are trying to taxi over to the 1LAX side to park at the gates. I have done many other AFCAD airports before with just 2 or 3 overlays and they all go where they are supposed too. I might have gone a little too far with KLAX and 7 overlays but even if I cut it down to two shouldnt that correct this problem I have been having. I heard a general rule of thumb is one overlay per runway, is this true?? I looked into the RAFCAD files you were talking about, downloaded all of the needed files but when I go into AI traffic mover and change the radius of one of my A/C it changes the radius on all the others that are the same type A/C. For example I use almost all Project AI aircraft and when I changed the radius of my United PAI A319 it changed all of the other A319 radius to 24 also. Is there a way to get around this because I like the whole RAFCAD concept. Thanks again for the help.Steve

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Guest Captain Barfbag

First, the Radius answer:The radius information is contained within an aircraft's "model" file. Generally, if you use the same folder for all the different paint schemes of a given aircraft, they will share a model file and thus share a radius. However, there is a line in the aircraft.cfg file which lets you select the model file, so it's possible to create a separate model file for each paint scheme. Even better, if you go into AITM and enter a different name in the "model" box, AITM will copy the existing model file to a new one and modify the radius. It will also modify aircraft.cfg for you.Next, the overlay problem (notice I didn't say "answer...")You can just drag the pink cross in AFCAD to move the reference point. That's the easy part. KLAX is well-suited to 2 overlays, or even 4 if you're careful, because the runways do not cross. I set mine up with the reference points just north of the northern pair of runways, and just south of the southern pair. Geometrically, think back to tenth grade and draw a line between the two reference points, and then construct the perpendicular bisector of that line. Aircraft which end up on one side of the line will go to one overlay, and on the other side of the line will go to the other. I used 2 overlays at KLAX so that I could use all 4 runways. I use the Radius system to send planes to the right gates. It works great, and even allows me to separate Southwest planes from America West, even though they share the same radius value.If you give some thought to the intersecting runways problem, you'll see that it's greatly complicated by what happens when the wind direction changes. You can build an overlay structure that works great as long as aircraft are landing at one end, but as soon as the wind shifts all the planes go to the wrong place.

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Guest

Okay I used traffic mover to modify my aircraft model files and I tried it out on KSAN and I love it. It is great, this was a KSAN that was already set up and I downloaded it from PAI. I am familiar with AFCAD so now I will have to go back and get rid of most of my overlays. I am really glad you pointed me in the RAFCAD direction and it is so simple. I never noticed a problem with aircraft taxiing to the wrong gates until KLAX but when I went back to them this morning to just watch the traffic flow they were all like that. Thanks again for getting me pointed in a new direction and with all of the help. One last question (I hope) do you know where I can get a good copy of editvoicepack20? I have downloaded this off AVsim and Flightsim.com and when I open it I get a error message saying "The Application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135). I have been trying to get the SWA callsign on my SWA 737's for sometime now.

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Guest Captain Barfbag

Ah, another satisfied customer.Sorry, I can't help you with Editvoicepack. I'm a traditionalist, and I still use VPEdit for the few changes I make. (I still have steam engines and cabooses on my train set, too.) There's another thread going about that - something about the "Southwest Crucible" that might be over in the General Discussions forum.

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