Flight plan and aircraft text question.

[Guest Tim13]

I'm very, very, new to the wholt TTools/AI part of FS, so forgive me if this is a basic question.I have TTool in a folder of it's own, and when I ran the Dcompiler exec the first time, it created the acft and flight plan text files. If I modify either of these files, and then run the Dcompiler, will it overwrite these files with the current ones in the traffic.bgl? Is the correct procedure to Dcompile, modify the text files, and then recompile? I'm a little confused as to how to keep track of changes to be able to go back to a previous aircraft and flight plant text file. How do you guys do it?Thanks.Tim13

[Holger 0]

Hi Tim:TrafficTools TCompiler.exe will NOT delete or overwrite your set of files. So, after each run of TCompiler you'll still have a set of uncompiled files in your folder. Therefore it is not necessary to run TDecompiler each time you want to make changes. If you do run TDecompiler it will overwrite any existing set of files in your TrafficTools folder. For backup and safety I always keep one set of traffic files in a separate folder. Finally, TrafficTools also makes a backup file of the previous (not sure about that one - anybody else knows this?) run in the FS2002SCENEDBATCScenery folder.Hope that helps. Cheers,Holger

[Guest Captain Barfbag]

It's a detail, but users should be aware that Tcompiler DOES update the flightplans.txt file. You will see this if you look carefully at the arrival times. When you add a new line, or change the aircraft on an existing one to one with a different cruise speed, Tcompiler will adjust the arrival time accordingly and write the new value into the file so you will know when the plane will be showing up. This update will NOT affect comment lines (those starting with //) so you can keep those. If you want to explicitly set the arrival time, TTools has a special character (I think it's @) which will force the arrival time and instead adjust the cruise speed for that flight.If you run TDecompiler, you will see that all of your comment lines will go away.I think AITM will overwrite your flightplans.txt file, removing comments, if you use it to update flight plans.

[Guest Tim13]

Sometimes I'm a little thick in the head when it comes to these things, so let me see if I understand the sequence.After uzipping TT in it's own folder, run the airport collector one time, and this shouldn't have to be done again unless additional airport sceneries are added to my sim.Then run Tdecompiler which creates the aircraft and flightplan text files.Update the acft and flight text files as I wish, and then run the compiler to get them into the sim.Now when I want to add more AI, I shouldn't run the Tdecompiler again. Instead, I should update the the acft and flight text files (that have already been updated by me once already) and run the Tcompiler to put my second set of additions into the sim.Is this correct?Thanks for all of your input so far, it is greatly appreciated.Tim13