I’ve noticed that the way ground/road traffic is spawned and rendered means that there is often no road traffic visible unless using an external view or looking out the side windows. For smaller GA planes where there is quite a bit of visible ground from the cockpit, I often see no traffic at all. I used the debug view in Dev Mode and could see that new “cells” of road traffic would periodically spawn at or just behind my plane’s current location, which means there is never any traffic ahead of my plane. This works well in external views where most of the visible ground is behind the plane, but not from the cockpit.
I know in the grand scheme of things this is not a big deal! But, when flying low seeing some ambient road traffic is a nice detail, and it’s a shame that I couldn’t find a way to get any to render, even at Ultra.
Voted. it’s an IK to check the city below and watching cars just popping into view in a highway (just because you are watching) so they start accelerating from 0 to 70 MPH in unison. Horrid.
Please add an option to increase cars rendering distance so we don’t have to see this
Road traffic is pretty much the same bugged mess that was Alpha MSFS 2020 which has bnot had any attention now for 5 years!
We don’t need “realistic” road traffic that taxes the CPU, but we do need non immersion breaking traffic that doesn’t drive under bridges, levitate, fly through the air, drive through each other in opposite directions, ping bong back and forth in a tiny area, otherwise odd behaviours and the biggest sin of all spawn and despawn below us.
This is why I requested access to road traffic in the SDK on a dev stream, so that we could at least make some fixes in areas we fly regularly or maybe even create an app that improves things globally, but it was met with confused expressions, likely because my question was not fully understood.
If increasing the distance is something that cannot be done without issue, then perhaps what could be done is to offset the rendering “circle” from directly below the aircraft (where you can’t see the traffic) to a distance in front of the aircraft, so you can see the traffic as you’re looking out the windscreen.
As it is now, there may as well be no traffic rendered, because I cannot see it without switching to an external view.
Asobo needs to look to XPlane for this – they do road traffic properly with congested roads, headlights and tail lights, proper speeds, etc. The traffic in 2024 looks no better than 2020 or even FSX, really. Would make a huge difference in VFR flying in particular if they brought this up to XPlane standards.
yes. this. I recently saw a X-plane video by yourSimCFI flying the concorde. he was on ground and of course … x-plane looks kinda worse. but the way all the cars on ground, the vehicles moved … it looked MORE realistic than MSFS which has considerably better graphics all arounds. mind-boggling.
I agree, we need to have at least lights of cars rendered far further in distance.
Also addon devs should be able to better control road traffic. Aerosoft EDDS kills all traffic on the Autobahn due to sim limitations, so the Autobahn is entirely empty…