Yes I have, but only with Offline AI traffic.
I am the same as the OP in that I fly mostly around the UK and always low and slow from small airfields but on PC not XBox. I live in North Wales and fly a fair bit from EGCK, EGCW and EGPA. Traffic Settings are:
All three of my sort of primary airfields are, IRL, busy places with a lot of activity. In all the time I have been flying here I have never seen another moving aircraft on the ground and rarely in the air. I am currently having myself a tour of Ireland and in over 30 hrs of flight covering the whole of the West Coast I haven’t seen any aircraft at all - and I have flown a fair bit around Shannon and more recently Cork. My last landing was at EIKK which is a very busy place IRL. I quote from Pooley’s - “Intensive parachuting and flying training 7 days a week”. Not a thing in the air or on the ground! There is an ATC IRL and it is depicted on the ground, but not a sound coming from it. There is also one of those weird pylon mounted ident beacons which I have never seen in the UK or Ireland IRL. Additionally, although there are occasionally the odd groundcrew guys around rarely a marshaller and if they are there they are standing in the wrong place and can’t be seen from the cockpit of a taildragger. The lack of airborne and ground traffic (other than refuellers that appear from nowhere directly in front of the aircraft whilst taxiing) and the rubbish air traffic are the biggest downers for me with my Sim experience.
Having said all of that I love the sim and fly daily.
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I nearly fell out of my chair today! I flew into a smaller airport in Virginia, upon landing as I was taxing to parking, I notice a Cessna taxing to departure. So I follow him…the plane actually took off…the AI piloted plane actually took off. I was stunned!!! I took off right behind him and followed for a little bit, then turned back and landed at the same airport.
I spent the next hour waiting…waiting…waiting… no further activity coming or going.
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Departures do happen in Live Traffic. It’s just really rare. Offline, with the right flows like Simple Traffic builds? Very commonplace. So much so you will dislike departing from mid-sized/regional airports if you’re like me and wince at burning gas on the hold-short.
I hope this is an area that gets improved/expanded upon along the way. I’m on Xbox and we don’t have those mods. Would be nice to have a little more traffic, everywhere.
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A cessna has no retractable landing gear.
So the no departures bug seems to be indeed caused by the planes spawning with the nose gear retracted.
Hmmm interesting, I did not hear about that.
There aren’t millions of airports on the planet
Made another post elsewhere to expand on one more reason why Live Traffic “not knowing about” some GA traffic is something I do not think is in Microsoft’s control to improve upon.
Actually, I typed that post as a response to this thread first but decided not to derail the original poster’s thread with that stuff, which in hindsight was a good call! But in case anyone is interested it is here:
Offline AI traffic needs to remain the primary means for displaying GA traffic for real-world privacy reasons - Self-Service / Wishlist - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums
It’d be cool to have an AI traffic function for GA training at smaller ( but not pvt / bush strips )
1 or 2 planes flying the pattern and doing touch and goes. Alternate between C152 / C172 and have a path to spawn, startup, taxi out, fly the pattern for 30 minutes, then full stop, taxi back, shutdown.
Have this as an player option to run between 0800 - 1800
I’ve run flight recorder and set playback to have 2 AI planes flying my previous pattern, and staggered the time that the AI starts… It does add a lot of life to a small airport.
That should already be supported with Offline AI traffic. The configurations you talk about (what airports, how many aircraft, how long, and so on) are done at the time of generating the offline traffic .bgl files, not at runtime in the sim, but the functionality can be supported.
Caveat: Not sure whether MSFS2020 correctly renders flights defined as touch and go flights in the offline traffic .bgl files, I have not played with them yet.
This thread being tagged xbox complicates things a little. On PC we could set this up ourselves using AIFP: Stuff 4FS - AI Flight Planner, (note the TNG checkbox in the flightplan editor window for configuring a flight as touch and go) or share the resulting traffic files at places like flightsim.to.
For xbox some developer would have to productize the GA training idea implemented using AIFP and release the resulting AI traffic update on the marketplace. But I see no obvious reason why it couldn’t be done.
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