I recognize that with the pandemic and lockdowns, air traffic is a lot lower than it normally is. But when the sim was released, we were in a lockdown, and Live Traffic was everywhere. Large major airports were a hive of activity with planes arriving and departing all the time despite the reduced numbers of planes in the air.
But now Live Traffic in game is near 0 at this point. I can go to a site like flightradar24.com and it shows dozens of planes in the air in any region I’m flying in. In game, the skies are barren, with just the odd plane here and there. Likely less than 10% of what real traffic is.
I do hope the Live Traffic that was in the game previously can be restored. This just doesn’t feel like the living, breathing world I used to see at first. And yes, I do have Real-Time Online selected in my Traffic tab. I do see the odd LT plane here and there, but they’re few and far between compared to what they used to be or should be.
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I live in the Chicago area, so I check out the traffic at O’Hare from time to time, and I must say that I find the Live Traffic to be quite good, especially during the typical morning and evening rush periods. It’s not unusual for me to see 30-40 flights around the Chicago area. Off-peak times have typically 10-15 planes.
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Currently on arrival at CYUL. FlightRadar24 shows 14 active planes in the air around the airport. I see 1 in game.
Earlier at CYYZ, FlightRadar24 showed 28 active planes in the area. I saw 2 in LNM, which matched what I saw on my Garmin map. It’s lonely up here.
Live traffic seems to be much like the weather. For some there seems to be little or no problem, and for others, we see nothing.
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Something I wanted to add. Sometimes you need to wait a minute or two for the skies to populate with Live Traffic around an airport, so don’t be too quick to judge the outcome.
I sat on the apron at CYYZ for almost 15 minutes monitoring traffic. The number of planes never changed.
The number of Live Traffic planes have been decreasing steadily in the last couple of patches. I’m not the only one who’s noticing this. I think it’s something to do with servers though. Similar to the weather that’s not getting pushed to clients in time (or at all in some cases), I suspect the Live Traffic data is suffering from the same issues. Some people at some locations seem to see no issues at all, whereas others are.
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Agreed. Last night flew 747 from LAX to YVR. Was a foggy night coming out of LAX. An absolute zoo in the air. Kept getting, “report traffic in sight”. Too much radio chatter to even respond before the next traffic advisory. Once enroute at FL370 encountered 5 or 6 southbound flights 1000ft up or down.
Started my descent over SEA and ended up in a rainstorm (first time I have ever encountered rain with live weather). Absolutely pouring over the sound getting lined up for ILS08R. Was #3 with 2 flights lined up behind me. Probably the busiest flight I have had since Aug.
Yet I am constantly hearing that there is no traffic and no weather. I am only guessing but it makes me think that if you are CPU bottlenecked the software must be prioritizing and dropping some threads. Thoughts?
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I would agree traffic is nearly non-existent. I fly primarily O’Hare area and there is rarely any traffic in the vicinity of Chicago. This morning I tried Atlanta for the heck of it. There was 1 other plane in the area. Something is definitely amiss.
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I did KSAN to KLAX last night, and the KLAX area was pretty busy as you describe. But again, I compared that to FlightRadar24, and despite the volume of traffic in game, it was maybe 20% at most of what actually should have been in the air around it.
I fly out of Miami-Opa Locka quite regularly as well. While KOPF itself is light-ish on traffic, it’s surrounded by tons of other airports, and air traffic around was typically quite hectic in the past. Now there’s maybe 4-5 other planes in the area at most any time I fly there.
What is your CPU saturation?
I have a Ryzen 7 2700X locked at 4.1 GHz on all cores. My main thread typically sits around 80-90% with the 15 being lower. But then again, that varies depending on my location.
That is what makes me think the software is managing the threads. There needs to be some way for the system to prioritize what is important. Managing 100 AI aircraft and calculating rain/weather effects needs to take a back seat to actually flying. I expect when it looks at the load, it just says, “Nope, 20 other planes will just have to do for now.”
Just a guess but makes sense to me.
It might be worth trying and old FSX trick - set the sim rate to 2 or 4 x for a few minutes while sitting at the gate, and see if the amount of traffic increases significantly. It’s just anecdotal, but on flights the last couple days - and it’s just anecdotal, the amount of traffic was markedly increased when I neared my destination airports (MSP and EWR). In FSX, speeding up the sim rate brought more traffic at my departure airport. I haven’t tried this myself yet. I’m also a charter member of FlightAware, but haven’t yet compared traffic in the sim vs. the app. I guess I should get around to that.
I notice that nobody here is posting what their AI/Live traffic option settings are…
It’s also likely that some of our settings are being changed. I noticed after the latest update, my Bing Maps option had been set to off.
It’s quite likely that you’re correct. But I also suspect a server side issue there, as that’s where the traffic is generated, like the weather, and then injected into our clients. If we’re not getting the data (or all of it) from the servers, it gives us the default, which is nothing.
I have 1Gb fibre, my connection is rock solid with low latency. So that shouldn’t be an issue. But since the patch, the old issue of “Live” weather has reverted to live weather (usually fairly accurate) on my first flight and then the default clear, 29.92, wind 225/5 for any subsequent flights, requiring a restart of the sim to get live weather again. I don’t think the 2 issues are directly linked, but I suspect that server side issues are playing a part in this.
On a side note, weather seems to be working for me today. I’m on my 4th flight of the day and weather seems fine. This is the first time since the patch that it’s working right.
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I did share it above. I have Real-Time Traffic selected. That locks out the other traffic options.
If I select AI Traffic, it actually works great and the sky is full of AI planes. The problem is those planes never despawn even when you’re out of range. After about 1 hour of flight, my frame rates 20-ish fps (where they’re typically closer to 40). Add another hour and frame rates are in single digit slide show territory, my full 32GB of RAM is being used, and it’s basically unusable without restarting the flight. LNM will show TONS of planes in the air, even way out of my range. AI traffic needs a serious working over to make it viable. It’s a memory and CPU hog atm because it never cleans out its garbage.
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I also fly with live only. I have the sliders for airport vehicles and road vehicles dialed back to 20% and generic off. (although I constantly have “Generic” traffic.)
These are my settings. I keep the airport vehicle density low as well to limit the number of vehicles zipping around taxiways and runways like drunken fools trying to impress their friends. Same with the idiots walking around the apron into my spinning prop or blocking my parking space.
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I think you are right, i upgraded to a rtx 3080 yesterday, and now there is a LOT more traffic.
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The amount of AI traffic has nothing to do with the GPU.
I have to wonder if limiting Ground Aircraft Density would affect the number of departures and arrivals as well. If the allowed number of aircraft on the ground has been reached, where would the aircraft arriving go? If there are supposed to be 65 departures in the next hour but you are only allowing 22 aircraft on the ground, where are the departing aircraft coming from?
Might be something worth testing.
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