AI (offline or online) currently are in a few different states based on the stage of their approach to land and subsequent taxi to gate.
They’re either in a Begin Descent state, a Touchdown state, or a Taxi state.
Currently the SDK does not have enough information on how to adjust the AI parameters of these AI states, but you can watch the transitions if you open up simobject debug and turn on various settings for the airplanes.
Begin Descent state: What is essentially happening is that the airplane is at 50% thrust (notably with no flaps) during the entire descent/final approach. It’s essentially on rails and you can see this because again if you debug the AI pathway, you can see the exact line the airplane will follow.
Touchdown state: Here, the airplane decelerates faster than conceivable in real life and comes from about 140kts to 30kts in like 250 feet. It spends a very brief amount of time in this state, usually no more than 2-4 seconds.
Taxi state: In this final state, the aircraft enters taxi mode at around 30kts and then slows to 10-12kts where it will then spend the next 5 minutes trying to taxi at 10kts off the runway looking for the taxiway that is often located 2,000 feet down at the other end. It will stay in taxi mode until it arrives at the destination parking and then enters a sleep state.
The overall issue here is that if you have a line of two AI aircraft on approach back to back that are what would be appropriately spaced, the first airplane lands and then spends the next several minutes trying to leave the runway in taxi mode. This causes a massive backup and sends all other AI airplanes on a 500’ AGL buzz around the airport as they try to circle back around after being told off by ATC (separate issue that can be addressed later). You can hear ATC constantly yelling at the poor AI pilot “Delta 5273 exit the runway when able,” who has no control over their aircraft at this point and I’m sure is just as frustrated.
The issue here is not the taxi state, however, it is in fact the touchdown state.
The airplane spends far too little time decelerating and comes to much too slow of a speed far too quickly. A simple fix would be to extend the time spent in touchdown state at a large rate of ground speed until approaching the appropriate taxiway, at which time the airplane would slow to taxi speed and switch to taxi status.
I would very much love to be able to make this simple programming change, but I cannot. It’s not in the SDK and I’ve crawled all over aircraft directories and adjusted a few AI-type documents, but I’m apparently not able to get into the AI airplane simobjects as those are BGL files.
It really kills the immersion.
Pleas either update the SDK (you actually have the section headers, but no info) or make the improvements.
Please vote to support this. Many thanks.
