fsx ai traffic

[olaf1924]

I need help in choosing a program that will add ai aircraft to the airports that I fly out of. Seatac along with s.f. international are my favorite airfields. I found a program called world of ai and would like to know if any soh members are using it and what are the reviews ?

[mjrhealth]

I use WOAi and a few other ai . They are way better then default and continually upadte the models and plans. There is an issue that they are fs9 flight plans and therefore will disable your default ai. There are some utilities around that will covert them but it takes time. Hope fuly soon they wil include hat feature in the install tool to make it easier. They also have a menu that allows you to eneter an aiport on therei website and it will tell you what airlines they have that fly in and out of there.

[IanP]

They're also FS9 models, which kills a lot of peoples' frame rates far more than using the more complex default models.

The only "native" FSX AI is JustFlight's TrafficX. MyTrafficX (available via simMarket) is partially FSX native, partially FS9 native. There is no even partially FSX native freeware package yet available and none of the freeware organisations have expressed any intention of producing FSX native models.

With that in mind, WoAI, with Military AI Traffic, is certainly the freeware package I'd recommend. They have a lot of traffic and are regularly updated. I used AI Flight Plan Converter to change all my WoAI plans to FSX format, but it's apparently easier using AI Flight Planner - available from Avsim.

[Bjoern]

They're also FS9 models, which kills a lot of peoples' frame rates far more than using the more complex default models.

Well, compared to the default traffic, WOAI makes airports *way* busier. No miracle that your FPS will suffer.

WOAI's biggest advantage is the pricetag, which by far outweighs the performance hit.

[IanP]

20FPS to 5 FPS with limited numbers of AI and the default Cessna? It can make the sim unflyable. That was with a single airline installed and about ten aircraft on the ramp, which was actually fewer than the default FSX AI put there (about 15).

It's not about numbers of aircraft, it's about how well your rig handles what you give it and some handle it better than others.

That wasn't my rig, by the way. I was asked for a recommendation to solve it by PM and my immediate suggestion was to try PAI, in case it was a scheduling or specific model problem, but that was the same. He switched to MyTrafficX in the limited DX10 mode which only uses FSX native traffic and I haven't heard from him since so assume he is now happy!

Personally, I saw a moderate slow down - about 2 or 3fps with similar amounts of traffic on my pre-upgrade setup, but now run no add-on AI at all other than that which I have programmed myself, so it's all a moot point for me.

I have no problem recommending WoAI to anyone, but if you have problems, it's nice to know there are alternatives too! :)

[Bjoern]

I have no problem recommending WoAI to anyone, but if you have problems, it's nice to know there are alternatives too! :)

Fair enough.

At least WOAI has the advantage of pretty regular, modular updates. I don't know about Traffic X, but the other payware programs only get updtes from time to time.

[olaf1924]

I downloaded southwest,delta,alaska,united and ups with no problems and the fps seem to have changed very little so far.

[gavinc]

I have read (on another forum) a couple of tips to improve the performance of the FS9 origin ai traffic.

Not sure whether they are effective or not but I would be interested in the comments of the experts here.

1) make sure that there is a texture.cfg file in the texture folders. This ensures that any global textures are found easily.

NB - It is also stated that there is bug in all the texture.cfg files that shipped with FSX. Apparently the last line refers to a texture folder that was part of development and not included in the released version.
The last line should read
fallback.x=..\..\..\..\Texture
2) Convert the ai textures from BMP to DDS format.

Not sure about this one since the texture name is encoded in the model with the bmp extension. Perhaps it will improve performance if one hex edits the mdl file to change the bmp reference to dds.
I must admit that I have done the above for a large portion of my ai traffic (I use a mix of WOAI, Utlimate GA and customized personal stuff) and performance is reasonably good. Not sure if my messing about has improved the performance or not tho.

Anyone have any opinions?

Gavin