Hey, so I prefer to fly small general aviation aircraft, mostly in my home country the UK, and around my local airfields. What I’m finding really sad is that I never see any activity around the smaller airfields, whether it’s Ai traffic or real players. It’s boring and not immersive. Infact if I want to see any kinds of life, I have to use Heathrow Airport, and that’s not very realistic when flying small light aircraft. Even when at Heathrow it’s mostly just ai traffic for real world flights. Not many people around for a popular simulator. I’m on xbox series x using weston Europe server, and tried automatic. Am I missing something?
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Hm… I do not know about xbox series x… but on PC I can set A.I. Airport Traffic Density in General Options once the sim is up and running.
As for real players… Planet Earth is a big planet. A few million players are like islands in the Ocean.
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There is ongoing traffic issues that, fingers crossed, will get iron out eventually. I’m keen on grabbing Aerosoft’s Simple Traffic add on that should see its way here on console, hopefully that will help populate the skies in a way that stability isn’t affected. Plus the real liveries are a big selling point. You’re not missing anything. The whole player base is spread out over several servers so it’s naturally going to feel lifeless at times. I know that feeling of isolation and being made to feel like the only one out there. It sucks but we’d need a boost in player numbers in order to have a chance at mitigating this.
Yes, it seems all the small airports are deserted, I would love to have this fixed as well. Perhaps down the road it will.
I fly the south part of UK quite often I’m my Stearman, maybe I will see you in the skies some day.
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If you enable name-tags on the traffic, you can easily look for other players.
I have ST and it’s a great mod BUT - all it does is put accurate skins on the regular jets in the sim. It does nothing to improve AI traffic patterns or anything else. Simply a visual mod.
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Thanks for the reply guys, I see plenty of airliners and jets at bigger airports, would just be nice to see some AI cessna’s and beachcrafts and things at the smaller airfields. Hope someone brings out a traffic mod soon for the xbox
Live traffic and multiplayer traffic will leave small airports rather deserted. Nothing can be done to fix that, it is a fundamental limitation of those technologies.
With AI offline traffic I find quite a bit of traffic on smaller airports, not super busy but not empty. Is that what you tried already?
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I haven’t tried that one, have always used live traffic and multilayer. I will try turning multiplayer off and live traffic and see how I get on. Thanks for the tip 
So I turned off live traffic and switched it to AI only, and turned off multiplayer. I had the joy of following one other aircraft on the taxi way at my local airfield so I guess that means you can’t mix live traffic with AI, and live traffic doesn’t show general aircraft, only airliners. Next step, turn multiplayer on with AI, and leave live traffic off.
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I think the reason of the different modes was to ensure that if your internet goes down, you have a backup being AI instead of live stuff, same as with weather as well. You can play the game entirely offline if you want to, while still having a form of air traffic/weather. You’re just not getting the awesome Photogrammetry and Bing map data that makes it proper shine and photorealistic.
It’s great that if your internet takes a dive, you don’t suddenly get dumped out of the game and you can still complete your flight, it acts as a safety net. Plus the game auto attempts reconnections constantly so you’ll likely be good to go in only a couple minutes or so.
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Live Traffic definitely has GA planes, I see them all the time in my region. Both airborne and on the ramp.
Flight Aware is the Live Traffic basis provider, so it’s better coverage in CONUS than other places.
Offline Traffic, if you look at the BGL file, it has a mix of Commercial and GA - in fact, that slider was combined post SU5 in the menus but most users never noticed. So cranking that will give you a mix, you just need to balance the load against your PC performance.
Simple Traffic can be used with both Live or Offline AI. If Offline AI, it will be supplemented by GA traffic from the sim’s stock BGL file, while most of the commercial traffic will be Aerosoft’s with historically accurate flight plans, liveries, and yes, even departures. I’ve been stacked behind liners and even received a rare “Line up and wait” as opposed to Hold Short.
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The default low poly ‘pointy nosed jets’ too. I wish it could have replaced some of the low poly default plane shapes with rounder nosed ones. But despite this they look a whole lot better with real liveries it has to be said.
That being said, once in a while I see a very accurate A320 / CRJ model at the gates. No idea how / why they show up and other times I just get “pointy nose” models. On that subject, why the heck would Asebo have gone to the trouble of purposely modeling such a strange aircraft?
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That is strange, must keep a lookout for those. Maybe the pointy nosed ones are just low poly count and rounding the noses would just increase the poly count or maybe they are a carry over from old FS versions and haven’t been worked on in a while? I can’t comment as my previous reference point with FS was from FS2000/2 era. I just know that they don’t disturb me as much with real liveries on them, maybe I’m just pre-occupied by looking at the liveried tails. Also worth noting is the propensity at which A380s show up as static traffic. They can be found at regional airports!
I completely agree the only problem we have is that the a320 neo is the smallest default aircraft and as a result we don’t have any regional aircraft to counter that traffic I actually hope that when the Asobo atr dlc comes they could design an ai model for it so we could have ai atr versions running around to help small airports
I don’t think I have ever seen an AI Cessna fly into a small airport. Has anyone seen this?
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There is some GA Live traffic, but not much in some parts of the world, and pretty much none in large parts of the world.
Yeah, numerous times. It certainly happens when you use Offline AI traffic. But again, very unlikely if you use Live Traffic.
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On my worldtour i have seen a single beechcraft over marthas vineyard, it was circling over the airport at about 200feet. So i circumnavigated the world, and the only small GA i have seen on the on live traffic was buggy XD
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