To make radio communication more authentic, I suggest including more of the formal acts of polite friendliness always present in real ATC communications. In MSFS there are no pleases, thanks you, hellos or good byes. Pilots & Controllers will sometimes say hello or goodbye in the native language of the other person. For example, saying ‘Aloha’ to a Hawaiian plane or ‘Ciao’ to an Alitalia flight.
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Regarding the “politeness” factor, you can actually tweak MSFS right now to make some of this happen. ATC phrases are configured in .locPack files. In the MS Store version, they are located here:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache\Packages\Official\OneStore\fs-base. In the .locPak files, there is something called AGNT_HUMAN. For example:
That AGNT_HUMAN is actually supposed to make ATC say “Good day”, as shown later in the file, here:
However, there’s a bug in the file. The .1 should be .0. Everywhere else in the file, you will notice that counting starts at “0”, not “1”. So if you go into your file and change 1 to 0, you will start hearing “good day” at the end of some ATC transmissions. I have made another change, though, because real-life controllers and pilots say “good day” very quickly. So this is how I have my .locPak file set (notice the Goodday in the .tts version):
The other thing I have done is to remove every period before the {AGNT_HUMAN} references to make it even faster. To show the example from the top again:
Old:
New (no period in the .tts version):
I hope this helps. It won’t get you the “aloha” and “ciao” that you’re looking for, but it does feel a little more real. At least for me.
[DISCLAIMER: Always back up your .locPack files before editing them!!]
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