I’ve purchased the Piper Seneca V & Beech V35 Bonanza. I fly them both all over N America, coast to coast from my home base of SRQ. When I’m visiting another airport what do the other simmers see in the plane that I’m using. Do they see the actual plane with the livery & custom N# or do they just see a generic white airplane???
Unless other people own the same aircraft, they will see a generic stock aircraft from the base sim. This can even occur if they own the same aircraft but don’t have the same livery installed that you’re using. This is a long-standing issue in the sim. Do a search for “model matching” and you should find many posts and threads about it.
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As stated, the other simmers would have to own the same aircraft otherwise it’s up to model matching.
As a PC Simmer, we have other options open to us though. I use AIG for model / livery matching.
As for tail number, no you would never see another simmers tail number as it just shows up as a white block, regardless of model matching efforts.
The livery itself may show up as the same, or another livery associated with that model (if you’re using a default livery then chances are pretty good it would match up otherwise it will use one in its library).
I hope that helps.
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I would think the 3rd party aircraft’s would want to have their planes show at all times. It’s kind of like advertising & may help with increasing sales of their planes.
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I’m sure they would. However, without having THAT aircraft, and ideally THAT livery, installed on every simmer’s machine, it is currently not feasible. An alternative method would be for MS/Asobo to maintain 3D models of every single available add-on aircraft for the sim, then download them in real-time to every simmer who spawns into the visible area around another pilot. That would be a very difficult challenge. Not all aircraft devs produce well-optimized models amenable to easy download, and even for those that do, 3D models in the sim have what are called LODs, Levels of Detail. That means, the closer you are to another aircraft or object, the higher detail it will have, the further away the lower the detail. There are sim guidelines for developers about this, but not all devs adhere to them, and determining which LOD to display at a given distance, and therefore which version of the model to stream out to everyone observing that aircraft, gets messy. Plus having models of every possible aircraft in your rang of view in a busy multiplayer session will heavily impact system memory and (more importantly) GPU VRAM usage.
Model-matching utilities exist, and they work reasonably well for airliners at least, but they can easily take up many gigabytes of additional storage for all the 3D models. I think FSLTL’s library is close to 30GBs; JustFlight’s FS Traffic is like 15GB or something. I believe AIG’s is even larger but I have never used it so don’t know for sure.
So for now, that’s why unless everyone has the same aircraft installed that you’re flying, they will otherwise just see a generic base-sim model.
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I believe they are doing exactly what you are suggesting for 2024, working with AIG to supply a ton of planes for model matching, of which I’m sure the Bonanza and Seneca will be included (they already are in the form of AI Bonanza and Baron).
But, as you noted, they won’t be the same plane geometries, and, of course, liveries will be an issue since, except for airlines (and not specific liveries for airlines I imagine, at least not all the possible combinations), they will be generic liveries (and hopefully they’ve solved the registration number white box issue).
I hope they’ve considered approaching the developers to have them submit a low poly version to MS when delivering Marketplace planes to be used with 2024’s model matching facility. The tech for it is in 2020, but, none of the 3P developers ever included AI plane versions beyond the 8 I think it is originally supplied planes (well, maybe a couple did, but I don’t know who).
And now with 2024, it sounds like it’s going to be a whole separate function developed in concert with AIG. Hopefully they’re not creating yet another whole separate mess that’s going to make things difficult keeping things in sync.
Even with that, liveries will be nearly impossible to keep up with to have those share properly I imagine, at least not without a whole ton of work. I have something like 70-100 3P planes now, with likely thousands of liveries spread across them. I can’t imagine keeping that up to date and making that shareable.
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74.2GB full install with all liveries and flight plans.
As an aside, I’m not interested in additional AI traffic from the addon (IOW, I don’t need the flightplans), but I would like the model matching models for live and user traffic. But when I tried installing, it refused to connect to Avsim (I’ve been a user there since the '90’s) and wouldn’t download the models. I tried all sorts of things, but nothing worked, so I gave up.
I do appreciate all the work they did and how hard it is to do what they did. I look forward to the 2024 solution.
The flight plans are what gives you the models, you just don’t launch AIG Traffic Manager and it won’t inject but still allows Model Matching to work.
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Yes, but, the install process didn’t work for me either way. I don’t know why. I followed every step, I searched the forums for answers, but didn’t find any. I did see other people had the issue, too. But we’re off topic now. Thanks!
Well they already have all that information if this compatibility only extended to planes available in the marketplace w/default liveries or marketplace livery in the scheme of all the scenery being dynamically streamed it doesn’t seem like adding some very low res plane models would be terribly difficult. Don’t need to be to the same visual level as the purchased plane, and it’s understandable how it would be an impossible problem with aircraft not available in the marketplace.
I mean on their servers just pull the model of all the planes and liveries, downscale it, find a way to id them, and load it up like the rest of the scenery and stuff, and stick it in place of the generic models flying around.
So far, that seems like EXACTLY what MS is doing for 2024. Remember that, given MS’s behemoth size, there are licensing issues involved, but, apparently that’s been resolved.
As was written above, apparently MS is working with AIG to build a library of low res planes to be streamed in 2024 (along the lines of AIG/FSTL/Just Flight AI Products). These won’t, currently, be linked to 3P aircraft, other than the hope they properly model match to the right plane, even if it looks “different” for the other users, but, it’s something. And, as you noted, livery support I imagine will be a huge issue. I just hope they’ve at least finally fixed the white reg number square problem that’s been with us for 4 years.
And it’s possible the option could be extended to 3P vendors to have them send MS low res models of their planes, maybe as part of the Marketplace submittal process, and they could be used as well, and maybe at least the standard liveries that are delivered with those planes could be supported. And 3P liveries could be supported, too, assuming there’s a way to create them that works, and if you know you’re going to be flying with a friend, you could download their livery and it might work (the current generic planes have issues using the standard liveries, as I imagine their mapping is different). But, those low res models are not an insignificant amount of work.
All this discussion is the stuff of “Wishlist”
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A lot of us have the V35. Just use a Carenado livery and pretty good chance they’ll see you. The custom registration is always just a blank panel though to prevent unsavory things written on aircraft.
It doesn’t make sense at first with non custom permanent registrations that don’t match your personal one, but in group/formation/MP photo flights those with the same livery won’t see giant rectangles on your aircraft.
The c414, c310, and BS baron mod kind of stole the Seneca’s thunder, but it was popular for a little while .
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