Microsoft need to stop advertising that this simulation has live traffic. It never works. Regardless of the time of day, even after online services show hundreds of aircraft in the air, live traffic in simulation shows nothing or minimal aircraft. Any idea at all when this will actually work.
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AIG (Air India Group) , RealTraffic and SimpleTraffic
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I see tons of planes using SimpleTraffic. It’s one of my favorite add ons.
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Personal Comments
It’s partly dependent upon region and local time in that region, as well as use for Real Time in-sim.
For the most part, I fly out of CONUS and EU, and as long as I’m on Real Time, there’s always traffic.
Other areas, FlightAware may not have as good a coverage of tracking, and thus, less or no data being passed via Firehose API.
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I agree, I always see traffic if I’m in the right part of the world for the time of day. I’ve even had two RAs on one flight (both responded appropriately by the FBW A32NX)! Then many landings and takeoffs, taxi outs.
I’m a fan of live traffic.
It DOES have live traffic, it just doesn’t fill the skies. My sister-in-law flew into St Louis from Seattle a few days ago, and I recorded her flight landing. It was about 10 minutes behind, but that’s the norm. My guess is that if they had even 25% of the actual traffic, the simulation would slow to a crawl [insert your joke here].
While AIG and Simple traffic offer solutions, it’s not “Live”. I live in the UK, always fly in real time. I can check various online services for what’s supposed to be in the air, including Flight Radar, but from my view that’s never been represented in the sim.
Flight radar for instance, will show plane after plane coming into and taking off from Heathrow at the busiest time. But in sim I might get, and I’m being generous here, about 5% of what should be there.
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Live traffic at EHAM yesterday, EU server. It’s less than real, but it’s definitely here. This was a 12m line up
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In the case of Simple Traffic, it can be Live.
ST at it’s heart does two things:
- And very easily managed - it overlays a wide variety of real-world liveries onto sim traffic - Live or AI (injected).
- You have a choice of running it in Live Traffic (in which case all it does is No. 1 above) or turn on AI (injected) traffic in the sim and it will overlay the existing sim BGL file with a historically accurate, Pre-Pandemic, set of jets and routes - which also uses No. 1 above. Put it at 30 percent and you will have a wealth of traffic around the player for 80NM radius.
Unlike the competing product which has it’s own Traffic Scheduler, download process of liveries, etc.
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Keep in mind that our SImple Traffic only makes sure the right liveries and shown and we do not show any traffic when the MS Servers do not spawn traffic. I believe it is the same for the other tools. For offline line traffic, we do increase the amount of aircraft shown.
This weekend I also had a few hours where I did not receive any real-time traffic. For me, not an issue as I seriously prefer offline traffic. More reliable and more varied with Simple Traffic.
Mathijs Kok
Aerosoft
Yes, but how realistic is that? If there are 12 aircraft in a traffic jam for a runway, the airlines would shout bloody murder about the amount of fuel they lose. It indicates the ground controllers are not doing a good job of scheduling. Not saying it will never happen, but this Saturday, at that airport. no.
Doing real-time traffic is incredibly difficult. I know, we tried it for FSX and we tried it three times for P3D, but it all depends on a steady and stable datafeed. Certainly with aircraft on the ground that is at this moment not available. Does not matter if you are Microsoft and can afford the data.
Just watch ground traffic at the know tracker sites and you see how locations jump, aircraft simply disappear and sometime they pop up. Now try to combine that data into something that looks smooth in the sim. What Microsoft has done is pretty amazing in my book.
12 minutes wait is actually pretty normal for EHAM ground ops in single takeoff runway available. It doesn’t happen often, but I checked FR24 and it was accurate for that time
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Okay, if you say so. Of course, you merge ‘pretty normal’ and ‘does not happen often’ into two sentences, but having used Schiphol airport for over 40 years many times a year, I can only say I never experienced this.
But I love to be proven wrong. As I do not have access to FR24 data from last Saturday, can you show us a screenshot? Schiphol was using two departure runways this weekend when outbound traffic was high and only went to single runway outbound during the easy hours. This was yesterday 14:25
Looks like I was wrong! This was from around the time the screenshot was taken
I took a quick look in the queue while finishing my checks, so probably saw the ac waiting to go on twy Q. And since everything in the sim was lining up for 24, I got some confirmation bias that this was the correct situation
It happens all over the world every single day. 12 minutes is nothing, particularly at peak times at big airports.
You should see JFK when it’s busy, it makes you want to weep sometimes.
LAX when going is mind bottling … and I mean you have to have a drink and sit back to even try to grasp it, it’s not a typo.
Would you please explain that for me? If so, thank you in advance.
Companies or organizations that want to utilize FlightAware data can pull that information directly via the Firehouse Application Programming Interface (proprietary to FA). This is at a cost likely since MS is reusing it to feed the sim Live Traffic, notably at no additional cost to us as users.
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I am sitting at Kastrup EKCH and comparing LNMap AI against Flight Radar 24 and RadarBox and actually see many matching flights although a little delayed by a few minutes as expected but good enough.