Live Traffic - My reason for disliking it

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I get that live traffic is probably easier than having to develop thousands of schedules like Offline Traffic or AIG. However, the key reason that I dislike traffic is that I like to set the time of day when my flight operates, and I want the AI traffic to match that.

For example, I live in the United States. I typically only play MSFS in the morning ~8am Eastern time zone. I will make flights anywhere in the world; recently I’ve been flying in Australia, NZ, Indonesia, Japan. 8am Eastern is roughly 6-10pm in those regions, but if I depart Sydney at 8am, I want the traffic for 8am, not late evening.

That’s it in a nutshell.
And because AIG uses schedules, I prefer it and will continue to use it.

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Yup. Live is great if your flight simming coincides with an active time of day in your own geographic location.

There seems to be a lack of acknowledgement for flight simmers that fly:

  • in different parts of the World to where they live
  • at times of the day that have zero/little irl traffic.

This goes for weather as well.

Try to fly a daytime flight from Hong Kong at 9pm UTC and see how live traffic and live weather looks…

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Personal Comments and Observations

Live Traffic is a FlightAware API - so collecting/scraping the data for historical purposes is likely against Terms of Use. Same thing for Meteoblue API.

That’s why Offline AI is available. Then you have injectors from AIG, FSLTL, FSTraffic, Simple Traffic, etc., some of which have historically accurate and trended flight plans.

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On Xbox we’re still SOL on such things. I fly in post-kids hours after 9, so areas like the Bahamas or key West are ghost towns. Rather just have better AI. Live traffic still is just mostly airport clusters and marching lines of ground aircraft. Just put em in the sky where they fly with a density slider. They make these things so difficult ans missallot resources. Make defaults look like airliners and send them on historical flight plans and inject some ga. Done

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Do these interact at all with the default (built-in) ATC?

I feel like there’s no “perfect solution” in terms of…

  1. Somewhat realistic levels of air and ground traffic to see, wait for, avoid, etc.
  2. Ambient ATC “noise level” of comms other than your own

Right now, those seeking a good feeling of immersion (on either platform) should be using Live Traffic or AI Traffic, and built-in ATC, correct?

PC users can go “full VATSIM” but for many people that’s perhaps [A] a bit intimidating (it’s your voice on the Internet, after all), [B] cost- and/or schedule-prohibitive (hello, fellow dads!), and [C] impossible for Xbox users.

But, with all that said… do PC plugins like FSLTL or FSTraffic also inject into the ATC? (I think not?)

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all injected traffic interacts with ATC as far as I know (at least that was the case for the ones I’ve used), since they’re still handled by the MSFS AI system (apart from vatsim injected traffic for obvious reasons).

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Yes, AIG absolutely interacts with ATC.

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If we could have just one of them on Xbox, that would be great. Just one… :roll_eyes:

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Agreed, would set all other traffic to zero with anything 3rd party

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