Idk if this is a hot take or not but I don’t understand the obsession with wanting real world traffic. It makes no difference to me if a plane is based on a real flight if it’s the only one I see for 2 hours. It seems to be hurting the overall immersion factor since only a fraction of real world data ends up manifesting as NPC planes meaning the skies and airports are dead.
1200 hours in the game and I have never once seen another aircraft taxi or take off. On RARE occasions I see planes come in to land and then take off again. I’ve never needed to wait for a plane to land before entering a runway. I’ve never had to queue for takeoff. It’s ghost city out there.
Why should I care if the one plane I see every two hours is based on real ATC when I’ve been flying in an otherwise empty world?
Please give us the option to significantly crank up the AI plane activity. 100/100 on the slider is not currently cutting it.
I think AI traffic would be fine, as long as the volume is reasonably close to real life volume and it behaves as it does IRL.
At present I’m not seeing any traffic at all for some reason, despite sliders being way up. I might try switching back to AI again to see if any traffic appears.
I recently tried flying with traffic again (AI offline traffic). I took off from Santa Barbara, which should be one of the busier areas being that close to LA.
There where a couple of aircraft on the apron but during the flight I didn’t see any traffic and there was no communication on the radio either.
All that came only for the price of 10-15 fps less. Suffice it to say I switched it off again. Even if the skies were busy, it would not be worth the unreasonable perfomance impact. Not at all.
Take a look at AIG Traffic Manager, a 2-part free addon that takes real world flightplans and accurate flight models then inserts them into the area you’re in. It can be a bit fiddly to set up properly but it is well worth the effort. It won’t show ALL traffic but generally more than enough to satisfy most. Integrates well into the sim too.
Yesterday for me it converted a deserted Sacremento into a crowded airport with most stands occupied with correct aircraft.
I also do not use ‘real traffic’. I don’t see the benefit of it under its current design. AI offline (using Simple Traffic liveries and custom traffic file) produces very respectable activity although the Asobo low-level flypast Traffic is still there. Large airports are very well populated with commercial traffic. What’s missing is regional models and GA. Hopefully someday, there will be something soon for Xbox pilots.
I must say, I don’t understand why such an immersive element is still missing after 2 years of release. We had better traffic 20 years ago in FS2002. If livery licensing was a known issue, why didn’t MS continue to use their fictional airlines? (Landmark, Orbit, etc). And build a few more GA AI models so smaller local airports have some life.
AI Offline doesnt work properly, at least AIG doesn’t. It isnt visible on the PFD in the G1000 so that’s useless when ATC are giving me traffic alerts and I cant see them. Live traffic via the sim is on ATC and on the G1000/G3000 traffic displays and there is quite a lot of it, particularly around larger airports so for me there is no contest.
I’m consistently stunned at the lack of traffic, as well.
On its best day, there is still barely anything happening at the busiest airports I’ve flown in/out of.
I’m not really understanding why this is and why it’s so horribly inconsistent. Most of time, I see just about no activity at all, at airports large or small.
The problem with live traffic as I see is isn’t that it’s ‘live’, but that it isn’t being sequenced effectively during arrival and departure. AI traffic doesn’t do much better because it’s being affected by the same issues. Personally speaking, I would love to see a real world traffic system that uses real time daily flight schedules, but with flights being transferred to ‘simulation time’ in and out of airports.
I find this reported lack of traffic strange especially the OP who never sees any.I have multiplayer on so get loads of users playing ,but I mostly always get a lot of AI traffic also in fact often there is usually more AI traffic than users appearing.I do frequent KLAX and EGLL a lot as I am continually testing at notoriously busy airfields so maybe there are more there .Obviously on the Beta I see less traffic,but plenty for me on SU9.
