So I’ve been messing around with a mod that uses real world flight plans to inject offline AI traffic into the game and yesterday something went wrong whilst I was changing time/weather in flight.
All of a sudden I could see tens of aircraft around me, in the far distance. Probably more than is actually realistic but it’s much closer perhaps vs the current implementation. Thought this gave an interesting look at what it could be like if we had something similar to ‘realistic’ air traffic.
Don’t think so. Judging from previous simulators, there is little difference in FPS impact between flying AI aircraft and AI aircraft on ground. I have seen airports in MSFS with perhaps 100+ AI planes on the ground, and FPS was not impacted.
AIG have posted an update recently that after some SDK fixes Asobo have made, they were finally able to inject AI planes. So we are inching our way towards the right direction.
I am referring to stationary (parked) AI aircraft on ground, not planes part of scenery. However TBH I cannot say whether MSFS handles “Airport life” planes as AI or scenery.
AI Offline Traffic uses a lot of resources. AI has to control the planes and simulate their flight paths dynamically. Real-Time Online Live traffic shouldn’t really have that same overhead since it’s just planes following a pre-determined path based on what a plane in the real world is doing. It’s more of a playback of a flight than simulating a flight like AI.
Correct. If it’s not moving, it’s a set dressing. It’s visual only. It shows up in the game as a “plane”. As in, if you look at traffic in LNM, you’ll see all the planes sitting parked and at gates. The game reports them as planes, but they take no resources other than GPU when they’re in line of sight. There’s no AI controlling them.
That’s because AI traffic in the ground are fixed objects like for instance the terminal building or a house, but those objects use very little FPS, but moving needs a whole other system because they can’t be fixed in one place.
Note: Limited by main Thread (CPU)
The CPU cannot handle “FLYING” that many AI aircraft.
GPU has no issues, most are outside rendering range.
If all the AI planes were on the ground, static, then the CPU would find it a lot easier.
Note: the 10.0 FPS ( never gets lower, no matter how many more planes get added )
which would seem to indicate that other CPU tasks are getting sacrificed to maintain a min 10.0 FPS ?
Never seen the FPS fall below 10.0 when being limited by excessive AI Planes.
If I am flying down in Mexico, why should I (or the Sim ) have any interest in Planes flying in CA, or Chicago. I would not even hear them on the Radio, if I tuned to their frequencies (well I hope I would not !!)
Yup. I noticed the same thing testing Offline AI mode using LNM. It’s really borked. It really only should show planes that are within a certain radius of your own. Maybe 50-100NM tops. Whatever, an exact number doesn’t matter for the purpose of this discussion. Just that outside of a certain range, they should be removed and cleared out as “garbage”. But they don’t. They persist and slowly slow down your computer as more and more of them get generated.
That picture shows is a whole load of flights over a massive geographical area. The sim doesnt need to track anything like that many flights though, just those within a 50-75 mile radius of the user and even then it can limit it to something sensible like 50 for decent performance and minimal resources hogging. This is how add-on ai applications like World Traffic 3 and Global traffic work for XP.
But if you’re using AI OFFLINE Traffic, it IS doing exactly that. That’s why it’s such a performance killer. I’ve tested it as well just like N6722C and had the same results. It just keeps generating more and more AI aircraft over a large area and never cleans out the garbage that’s out of your range.
With Real-Time Online traffic, that’s not the case.
