MetaReview - FS2004 Payware AI Traffic Addons
By Andrew Herd (23 July 2006)
lightSim.Com presents a unique opportunity to read reviews of all four major payware AI traffic addons for FS2004, because I have tried 'em all out over the couple of months, but before you follow the links to the individual reviews at the end of this page, a little time spent reading the paragraphs that follow might help focus your thoughts.
I guess the first point worth making is that AI packages have not - so far - attempted to improve on the FS2004 AI 'engine'. All the packages I have seen, freeware and payware, have steered well clear of meddling with Microsoft's code, the only improvement any developer has dared to make being Traffic 2005's taxi speed editor, an enhancement that has to be applauded, given the lackadaisical approach AI planes have to clearing themselves off the pavement. The many weeks I have spent staring at AI traffic in operation have left a great unanswered question about why the planes are so slow on the ground - do their pilots have no homes to go to? Do they complete their paperwork while they are still on the runway? Can they not taxi and chew gum? Slow taxiing is the bête noire of AI traffic packages and the only reason it isn't the curse of standard FS2004 installations is that there isn't enough AI traffic to highlight the problem - which may be why none of our enterprising freeware authors have released a freeware taxi speed editor, desperately though one is needed.
Which brings us to the most obvious feature of AI traffic packages - the planes. Quite likely the reason you are reading this is that you have gotten tired of seeing endless Landmark 737s, 747s and 777s and yearn to see something as exotic as a 757, let alone an Airbus or an Antonov. It is true that there is very little wrong with the default AI, but the restricted number of liveries means that you see the same fictitious carriers flying the same planes the world over - and since the default airports look pretty samey wherever you go, it isn't surprising that the average simmers' most urgent wish is to get airside as soon as possible. By the by, one of the things that intrigues me is that Microsoft haven't done some kind of advertising deal with the airlines over the use of liveries, because millions of simmers are condemned to stare at the danged things for hours on end and prolonged exposure would surely have an effect on real-world ticket purchases. On the other hand, thinking about it, maybe it is a good idea the guys in the team haven't had that particular idea, because I can imagine the accountants fighting a battle to get taxi speeds turned down even further so that users have to look at the liveries for the maximum possible time (-:
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Where were we? Oh, yeah, AI planes. All the packages reviewed increase the total several fold, ranging from Flight1's Ultimate Traffic with 40, to Burkhard Renk's MyTraffic 2006, which tops the bill with more than four times the number. More is certainly merrier, but in my experience it doesn't make that much difference and 40 is enough to keep me happy. I used Ultimate Traffic for many years and seldom suffered from déjà vu, probably because Ultimate Traffic's total doesn't include as many minor variants as some of the other packages use to inflate the total and because common airliners are, well... common, so Flight1's product gives Western airports the kind of planes you expect to find at them. On the other hand, Ultimate Traffic's relatively restricted choice of types doesn't work so well at airports outside North America and Western Europe, so if your simming is based in the rest of the world, it would be worth choosing a product with a wider range. MyTraffic 2006 also offers the interesting possibility of operating historical timetables, set in any period from the 60's onward, so that you can have 707s, Comets, Concordes, TriStars and Caravelles at the stands if you want. There aren't that many 'historical' AI planes at the moment, but there are more than any of the other packages have to offer, which is zilch.
As far as most developers are concerned, AI traffic means planes, not choppers and definitely not military aircraft. On the face of it, this is a surprising decision, given that a very high proportion of air traffic worldwide is military and helicopters are ubiquitous. There is a good explanation for the lack of chopper AI which is the complete and utter lack of support for it in FS2004, but two packages do provide rotary wing traffic using kludges: Traffic 2005 has civilian helicopter AI by default and the MyTraffic Naval AI pack can be used to add military chopper traffic to MyTraffic 2006 - just don't expect to see helicopters doing vertical takeoffs, because as far as Flight Simulator is concerned, they are conventional airplanes and have to do a takeoff run like everything else. MyTraffic 2006 is the only package to provide military AI, so I am pleased to be able to report that it does its job well and provides a reasonable selection of different types - if you need military AI MyTraffic is the only game in town, unless you don't want any extra civilian AI at all, in which case Burkhard Renk also sells a stand-alone military AI addon called FS Military AI Traffic.
The next question to ask is: how good does an AI plane need to be to work OK in FS2004? The answer, curiously, is 'not very'. The reason for this somewhat surprising response is that when the first Project OpenSky planes came out, we all downloaded them, installed multimegabyte skins, loaded them as AI and then wondered why Flight Simulator slowed to a crawl every time more than one of the little darlings graced an airport. The explanation was that when the sim was trying to cope with your operation of a complex addon plane at a complex addon airport, the additional load of all the polygons and textures packed into a couple of complex addon AI planes was too much for it. So there is a balance to be struck in an AI package between making planes and liveries as convincing as possible and making them simple enough that you can load six dozen at an airport without the end result resembling a slideshow. So far, I have not encountered a PC which is capable of running complex AI planes without significant frame rate penalties and neither do I anticipate coming across such an article any time soon. The message is that basic is good, unless still life is your thing - the reviews take account of this and so I have not criticised the models using the same standards as I would use for flyable addon planes. In case you are scratching your head about how you are going to live with low polygon count AI, do bear in mind that under normal circumstances you rarely get close enough to AI models to appreciate the difference, whereas you have to live with the frame rate hit they make all of the time. AI takes up such a big slice of processor time that it is the first thing I turn off if my system is struggling to run an addon plane.
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Next, liveries. The lowest number offered by any of the packages reviewed is Traffic 2005's 500 - but in theory, given that Traffic 2005 has 60 different planes, if any plane could wear any livery, this multiplies out to 30,000 possible combinations. Allowing for the fact that each airline only operates so many different types, the working figure is probably about 20% of that, which is still something like 6000 different plane/livery sets; more than enough to please me. The greatest variety possible is got with MyTraffic 2006, which has 161 planes coupled with an astonishing 2500 different liveries, the product of which, using the same reasoning, works out at over 80,000 working combinations. Logically, the more liveries, the better, and although Traffic 2005 and Ultimate Traffic offer plenty of variety in normal Western airport situations, they don't fare as well as MyTraffic does in the rest of the world (FS Live Traffic effectively only covers North American operations, but seems to have a livery for every airline operating there).
The number of airports where the airport facilities data (AFD) has been modified by the developer is important. Good AFD files are crucial to the operation of FS2004 AI, because they specify not only which runways are operational, via which taxiways, but also how many parking spaces there are on the pan and which airlines can use them. The bad news is that because there are nearly 24,000 airports in FS2004, Microsoft didn't get around to modifying all of them, so many airports have no designated parking at all and some of the majors have only a fraction of the spaces they have in reality - London Gatwick being a good example, I count only 49 spaces in the default FS2004 EGKK AFD file, whereas the real airport more like 150. Since the number of parking spaces governs how many aircraft can use the airport at any given moment, it is worth taking an interest in how many AFD files an AI package modifies, but developers don't exactly give away this information. As far as I can tell, Traffic 2005 modifies 1500 AFD files, but provides airline specific gates at only 50; FS Live Traffic and MyTraffic about 1600; and Ultimate Traffic modifies 3000 AFD files. Given the 24,000 total, these figures sound low, but since the number of airports worldwide that are capable of operating 737s and larger is in the region of a thousand, as long as this figure is exceeded, all the major airports should be covered. But - there always is a but - just because an AFD file has been modified, doesn't mean to say it has been well modified and here Gatwick again serves as a good example, because although FS2004 gives it two runways, only one of them is operational in reality, and neither Ultimate Traffic nor MyTraffic 2004 modify the AFD file to reflect this. To be fair, a problem such as this can be fixed by downloading and installing one of the numerous freeware AFD files available on FlightSim.Com, or dealt with by a couple of mouse clicks using AFCAD (AFCAD221.ZIP), but be aware that just because your favorite airport AFD file has been modified, it may not have been realistically modified.
Another figure to look at is the number of airports which will feature AI traffic - MyTraffic 2006 quotes 6500, Ultimate Traffic 3000 and MyTraffic 3000, while FS Live Traffic has every IFR flight in the current FAA database. Simple arithmetic tells us that even with MyTraffic installed, the vast majority of airfields in FS won't have any traffic at all, but since many dirt strips are lucky to see a flight a week, this isn't totally unrealistic. If you want to see AI traffic at your local dirt strip, Traffic 2005 is a good choice, because it features a neat little app which can generate flights automatically with a few mouse clicks - none of the other packages offered anything like this at the time of the review.
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All the packages make a big noise about the total number of flight plans they create. MyTraffic has 120,000 flights per day; Ultimate Traffic has '400,000+' scheduled flights, which I presume is the total in the week's worth of flights in its database, so division by 7 gives 57,143 a day; the Traffic 2005 blurb speaks of 280,000 flights - again, I would assume spread over a week, so that works out to 40,000 a day; and FS Live Traffic has as many North American IFR flights as happen to be scheduled at the time you download the data. Dividing the number of flights by the number of airports which have AI traffic in each package gives MyTraffic 2006 an average of 18.5 flights per featured airport per day; Ultimate Traffic 19.05 and Traffic 2005 13.33.
If there is a reason for going into all these statistics, it is to highlight the lesson that you can make the numbers say almost anything you want them to and headline figures quoted for total flight plans are meaningless until you work out what kind of traffic density you are going to see. Even then, flights aren't evenly spread across all the fields, the majors inevitably taking the lion's share, which is where we get back to that critical thousand airports and why I ended up sat at the end of the runway at half a dozen internationals during the reviews, trying to work out how each package's flight plans worked out in practice. In practice, all the packages provide significant numbers of AI planes at all the West's major airports.
When it comes to organising flights, addon AI packages split cleanly into two groups: the ones which are based on real-world timetables; and the ones which are not. Although the developers would have you believe otherwise, each method turned out to have its pros and cons in testing. The proponents of timetable-based packages (TBP) claim that their way of doing things brings you the most realistic possible airport operation, with the correct airlines operating the correct planes from each airport at the correct times. This is true up to a point, but when you couple the minor weirdnesses of the FS2004 AI engine with incompletely optimized AFD files, the result may not mirror the operations of some airports that closely - particularly when you consider that of the two TBP available, only FS Live Traffic offers up-to-date flight plans and then only for flights originating from or with destinations lying within North America. Flight1's Ultimate Traffic relies on schedules created from a week of timetables which are many months old and are based on Fall/Winter schedules; to get representative Spring/Summer schedules for 2005, you must buy an upgrade pack, which is admittedly very cheap at $5.95. Effectively, there is no way you can purchase a package that gives you accurate to the hour flights outside the US and FS Live Traffic's real-time US IFR timetables come at a premium - but the big advantage of TBP in my experience is that in testing they are not as subject to 'batched arrivals' as non-timetable-based packages (NTBP). Batching is my own term for the phenomenon where you get no arrivals for ages, then four come in at once, resulting in queues on the taxiways and go-arounds.
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The NTBP crowd, aka MyTraffic 2006 and Traffic 2005, say, 'Well, if you can't have accurate timetables in FS2004, why bother with them at all - let's simulate the timetables instead'. Well, there is a nugget of truth behind the rationale of this way of doing things, but the problem is that faking timetables at several thousand airports is an epic undertaking and difficult to do well, especially when your aim is to sell the end product for $30.00. Getting the airlines right at a particular airport is hard enough, given the way the smaller operators chop and change, but simulating real-world scheduling is a far tougher nut to crack, the major problem being load balancing. NTBP are not as good at reflecting changes in activity across the day as TBP are, with the result that departure and arrival schedules are less likely vary from one hour to the next in NTBP; and then there is the dread phenomenon of batching. Just Flight have clearly spent a lot of time thinking about this problem, given that Traffic 2005 provides more AI activity than many FS2004 airports can cope with if the traffic slider is set to 100%, and the developers have considerately provided an app called AISmooth, which reduces go-arounds by putting excess incoming on hold, albeit at the expense of the occasional plane flying final inverted (I have to say that I find this amusing, as it is a relatively rare occurrence, but it does drive some people crazy).
Does any of this timetable stuff matter? To tell the truth, I am as happy running TBP AI as NTBP AI and all the packages reviewed worked well for me. I don't carry airline schedules in my head, so seeing what looks to be the correct level of activity is enough for me and I suspect that most readers feel the same way. If you are very critical about flights arriving and departing as near to real world schedules as possible, then you can cross Traffic 2005 and MyTraffic 2004 off your list.
All we have left to discuss are the bolt-on goodies. MyTraffic 2006 and FS Live Traffic take the minimalist approach and although MyTraffic boasts a powerful editor, it is aimed at expert users. Ultimate Traffic has a packed toolbox of supporting apps linked by a common interface, plus a TCAS gauge that can be retrofitted to all your planes and a airport style 'status board' for viewing flights and printing schedules; Traffic 2005 has a comprehensive toolbox, virtual aircraft spotter, movable control tower, drivable follow-me vehicle and three additional pilot voices with European accents. FS Live Traffic and Ultimate Traffic offer automated updaters which can be used to download and install new liveries and AFD files and all the products have support forums.
So which package is for you? My advice is to read the reviews, because all four have their virtues. FS Live Traffic is the only game in town if your simming is based in North America and you want the most up-to-date schedules possible; Ultimate Traffic is the best buy if you want a TBP with the best world-wide coverage; Traffic 2005 is the natural choice if you want a NTBP with lots of goodies; and MyTraffic 2006 is the ideal NTBP package for simmers who want the maximum number of AI planes and liveries as well as military traffic - and if you want Naval AI, then you need the MyTraffic Naval AI addon.
The full reviews can be found here:
Just Flight Traffic 2005
Flight1 Ultimate Traffic
AirNav Systems FS Live Traffic
Burkhard Renk's MyTraffic 2006
Andrew Herdandy@flightsim.com
