Is the game aware of your existence with live traffic enabled?
For example, if a plane in real life is heading for the runway to take off, and in the game you are coming in for a landing at the same runway, will ATC tell that “live traffic” plane to hold until you land, or will the live traffic plane take off since it is following the real world flight?
How do you play? Do you play with live real world traffic, ai offline, multiplayer, or no traffic at all? Is live real world traffic better for the game’s performance than AI offline?
Yes the game is aware as much as you’re an object that is moving along the taxiways/runways. You’ll hear ATC tell other aircraft to hold position if you’re in their way or when airborne they’ll give out traffic advisories to both you and AI traffic. I like to use real world AI. Due to the limitations of the AI/ATC engine and with issues of compatibility between 3rd party aircraft/models and the sim (in the beta), I’m using a non MSFS based solution that injects AI traffic based on ADS-B data and uses models/liveries pinpointed down to the aircraft registration. This solution/product is payware but it’s a small amount for having real aircraft movements and matching within 15-60 seconds of the real world aircraft. Only negative is no ATC interaction as it operates outside and independently of MSFS but the tradeoff is acceptable when compared with the issues that exist when using or relying on the MSFS engine such as go arounds, inaccurate altitudes, speeds, not flying the routes, etc. What’s going on outside my window is going on in the simulator 1:1.
Performance wise, when using AI you’re going to get some type of impact. If using MSFS live traffic you’re pretty much restricted to using only the Asobo generic models and they’ve been optimized but you don’t really have livery selection. For other products like FSLTL, you’ll also get a performance hit as you’ll have more variety and more airline textures and liveries showing up. Most of those are 4K/8K which will impact performance. You just have to trial and error and find out what works best for you, your system, and what you’re expectations are for AI in regards to realism/immersion. They all have tradeoffs and their own strengths and weaknesses. You need to determine which one suits you best.
As told before ATC is aware of you and surrounding aircraft in virtual space and is able to provide some advisory. However traffic or ATC will not provide any resolution, neither to you or to other traffic. So if you are an some collision course you will just collide if you won’t do anything.
Holds are also not performed by any traffic and also no spacing is done. That’s a general issue of the traffic system in its current state, independent of online or offline.
“Live” traffic also does not mean that the position of the aircraft is the exact position you see on screen. The position from the live traffic service Flightaware is internally handled as offline traffic. Basically a flight is monitored for some minutes by the servers MSFS uses. Out of these information a flight plan is built (likely including some waypoints next to the route) and interpolation done. After that the plan gets injected to be used by the internal “offline” traffic system. Also this plan includes altitude, destination, callsign and arrival airport.
When the aircraft arrives at the last waypoint enroute ATC choses the “best” approach to the runway marked as active in sim. That’s why “live” traffic also has a delay of about 15 minutes.
I personally use AIG often or default live traffic with the same models for variety. On AIG are some workarounds in place to conquer the aircraft behaviour in some situations like goarounds. The performance impact of a full AIG install compared to live traffic is for sure measurable but that’s because of the workarounds and the sheer amount of flight plans using the proper liveries (you won’t see the same aircraft with the same livery used a second time in the same session)
Thank you for clearing these up. So the real world flight is not being streamed by the game, they just take the flight plan and input it into the game?
It might be dependent on the current flight leg but in general yes as ATC controls also live traffic aircraft. If they just would stream the data in real time aircraft would jump across the sky unpredictably
However they cannot “just take” the flight plan as there is no complete flight plan available so they build their own out of the aircraft positions to ensure the aircraft is at least close to the real world position.
Also there is a lack of live VFR flights which also is an indicator that live traffic relies on waypoints (you mostly only see live IFR flights when using live traffic, there might be few ones around on which destination and arrival is set at least).
Anyway I’m not part of the development team here so take that as an educated guess on how it works
Live traffic seems blissfully unaware of user aircraft on approach to an airport. Several occasions I’ve been aware of another aircraft heading for my destination, via ATC instructions to follow my own airplane on finals, then being told to go around and missing me by what seems a few feet! If wake turbulence was featured in the sim I would have been blasted out of the sky by these encounters.
