I’ve just downloaded and installed FSTL to make my airports have a bit more life to them. I’ve installed the Base models & the injector from the Flybywire website.
Looking for a bit of help & info for those a bit more familiar with the program.
Does the injector need to be opened every time I start the sim & running in the background?
Do I need a new API key every time I open the sim or does the API key once pasted into the injector last a few days or indefinitely? So if I close the sim & then later in the evening say fire the sim up again do i need a new API key?
As I also fly from to some GA airfields do i need to have the injector running & with API key?
Will FSTL inject GA aircraft coming & going at my burning blue design airfields I fly to & from?
I gone with just the default settings in the injector but is there any tips as to get the best out of it or best leave as default?
The injector needs to run every time you start the sim but no need for an api key each time.
Standard settings are pretty good but play about with it, adding more or less depending on performance (fsltl is a massive resource hog).
GA airfields & aircraft are unfortunately not fsltl strong point, they will still feel pretty abandoned I’m afraid, definitely an area which could be improved in the sim.
FSLTL data is provided by FlightRadar24, so if it’s not seen by FR24, which is generally (but not always) the case with light GA aircraft, you won’t see it with FSLTL.
The only irritating thing is that it uses the awful sim ATC, which you can of course turn off if you wish.
Their modelling is, however, very good at 4k although on a low end system this may cause a small performance loss. It is possible, using an external programme, to reduce this to 2K or even 1K but with a loss of fidelity.
For GA traffic look no further than https://flightsim.to/file/51413/gamod-offline-version, but whether this works fine with FSLTL it’s anyone’s guess. This is clearly an area where MSFS2024 needs to be heavily improved so that we don’t rely on external mods to inject the traffic that should be there in the first place.
FSLTL does have GA aircraft, but they are basically just there doing traffic pattern circuits around airports and not really flying to destinations. It’s technically a beta feature, but does give some extra activity. It has its own slider adjustment, and I keep that fairly low.
For other settings, that’s largely user preference. I prefer to set historical parking at zero. I keep IFR at about half or less so they are not clogging up the ATC frequency as much.
A couple extra tips:
the injector will automatically close when you exit the sim for any reason. I actually hate this feature. If and when the sim crashes, you have to manually restart it along with the sim if you want to keep flying.
Make sure you turn AI air traffic off in the main sim settings or you’ll have so much traffic that it’ll be a slide show. The exception for me is I will keep the ground aircraft density up a bit to fill in terminals and parking with static aircraft. FSLTL has a historical parking slider that basically does the same thing but is more resource intensive.
This keeps me humming along at about 45-50 fps at most any airport on a 5800x3d, but do keep in mind performance will take a hit on initial startup when you spawn at an airport. The sim does get a bit laggy during the initial spawning of all the FSLTL, but settles down once they are set.