My Traffic and Ultimate Traffic for FS2002

By Andrew Herd (1 August 2003)

The problem with freeware tools is that installing them isn't necessarily an easy thing if you don't understand Flight Simulator that well. Judging from my email, the vast majority of flight simmers find auto-installing packages a huge adventure, let alone stuff that requires them to understand the workings of three different utilities and have the ability to recover an FS2002 installation if it goes wrong. So hacking AI traffic, desirable though it might be, remains a minority sport.

One of the first signs that Landmark Airliners weren't going to be able to flaunt themselves unchallenged on taxiways around the world was the release of a freeware utility called TrafficTools, which allows you to examine and modify the traffic file in FS2002. The file in question contains flight plans that control the movement of every single piece of AI aircraft traffic in FS2002 and TrafficTools made it possible to modify existing flight plans, create new ones and alter the behavior of AI traffic. TrafficTools is great, but the only problem is that doing edits with it makes watching paint dry look seem interesting - it isn't that TrafficTools could be improved, it is just the way the traffic file happens to work. TrafficTools opened people's eyes to what could be done: for example, it is possible to have flights that only occur at a set time once a week; you can make flights fly by instrument rules (IFR), or visually (VFR); and assign flight numbers and cruising altitudes. One of the things TrafficTools can't do was to alter gate assignments and one of the problems with FS2002 was that even major airports like London Heathrow were assigned relatively few gates, providing an effective limit on the amount of AI traffic that appeared. Another issue is that TrafficTools can't change the AI traffic's habit of flying great circle routes, rather than flying along airways like real airliners do.

So something else was needed and it duly turned up in the form of another freeware utility called AFCAD. Incidentally, here I am going to pause and say thanks to Lee Swordy from all of us for these two, truly great pieces of software. Anyway, AFCAD is a CAD-type program that allows you to modify the Airport and Facilities Data (AFD) in FS2002. Facility data is part of the scenery database for Flight Simulator but as it happens it does not control any of the visual elements of scenery, like airport buildings or ground textures. What facility data does is to fix the invisible 'map' of airports and act as a source of other data that ATC uses to give directions and which AI aircraft rely on in order to move around and park in the right places. Facility data also controls the information that you see on the Flight Simulator's map view, the GPS screen, the flight planner, and even the start position set-up window. Armed with a copy of AFCAD all of this was fair game and, as you will have noticed if you frequent the files pages, pretty soon most airports had a new AFCAD file and some had several competing ones.

The next problem is that it is all very well creating all these new flight plans, but aircraft have to be found to fly them, unless you really enjoy watching endless Landmark planes trundling past. People tried assigning flyable add-on planes, but quickly discovered that they ate frames and so a whole new FS specialty of AI traffic development was born, with designers cranking out visual models which were custom designed to fly as AI traffic planes. So far no tool has appeared to fix those great circle routes and a problem remains with non-towered airports, because the default traffic file only provides AI traffic at 1842 airports world wide. You can create flight plans for non-towered airports, but it causes problems, because FS2002's AI traffic engine was designed to works at fields that have a control tower and assigned parking spaces.

Some brave souls put this whole lot together and spent entire weekends editing files in order to get realistic AI traffic schedules running, but most users quickly discovered that it was exhausting doing this for more than one airport and gave up on it. The more determined kept the faith and signs of that can be found in the huge outpouring of freeware associated with AI traffic, none more so, perhaps than Project AI, who have worked up entire airline schedules and provided them as self installing files that come complete with flight plans and planes. But even though Project AI pretty much serves it up to you on a plate, it still requires some background knowledge to get their stuff working, though admittedly not much. Step forward My Traffic and Ultimate Traffic.

My Traffic

Keen followers of this column (OK, I have both your names, don't hide at the back there) will remember FSLandClass, a useful utility that modifies FS2002 terrain files so that features like towns and forests have the correct outlines and the right sort of AutoGen. Anyone who has been wondering where Burkhard Renk has been since coming up with FSLandClass need not fret any longer, because he has been developing My Traffic. What My Traffic does is to take all the things I have been talking about above, stick 'em on a CD and let you install it using the autorun feature. Even the most technophobic simmer should be able to get this add-on up and running and when FS2002 is rebooted, the default AI is gone, replaced by real world airline liveries. The default planes all get new repaints, 17 additional AI planes are added, with 250 different liveries, so that if you get a calculator out, allowing for the fact that each aircraft has a unique registration number, an AI spotter could log over 10,000 different planes, which make about 180,000 flights a day between them. Not bad for 39.95 Euros ($34.79). A 55 Mb upgrade to My Traffic 2004 is available, which not only makes the add-on (mostly) compatible with the newest version of FS, but increases the potential number of AI flights to over half a million a day from 5500 airports and quadruples the number of liveries to over a thousand.

According to the manual, the recommended hardware requirements are a Pentium 1 GHz or better, 256 Mb RAM, 400 Mb hard disk space and 32 MB graphic card. I tested the software on a 1.7 Ghz Pentium running Windows XP and the installation was no problem. When the CD had finished loading, I started FS2002, loaded the Rapide at Heathrow, did a couple of touch and goes while it was quiet and then watched planes come and go... not a single American Pacific, Landmark or Orbit among them. Instead I saw shed loads of British Airways flights, intermingled with various other European airlines, which is exactly as it is in real life, though somewhat less frenetic than the real EGLL where there is a flight every minute. I saw quite a few A321 variants, some 757s, MD-11s and I think an F27; but the list of planes includes everything from an An-12 to a C-5 Galaxy.

Given that FS2002 has about 20,000 airports in it, I am sure there will be grumbles that the FS2002 version of My Traffic only upgrades 10% of the places it is possible to visit, but don't forget that Booneysville Regional is lucky to get one flight a day and many dirt strips lie idle from one month to the next. Burkhard has added in an extra 100 airports over the default towered set, so if you install the package, you will have AI traffic in places it never went before and facilities data has been modified for over a thousand airports all told. Yes, many airlines aren't included, but then again the package so completely transforms FS2002 that it seems churlish to complain.

One problem with all these programs is what to do when you install a new airport add-on, as these frequently add taxiways and reorientate the runways. There is a long section in the handbook about how to deal with third party AFD files and an exellent FAQ, so if you want to modify AI traffic at your favorite airport while keeping My Traffic installed, there is no reason why you shouldn't do so - the package makes a good base for learning to tinker around with AI, as it happens. To my mind, one of My Traffic's strengths is the ease with which it is possible to delete flights for an entire airport should you need to do so. One of the questions in the FAQ deals with the obvious similarity between the My Traffic planes and the Project AI ones and guess what? My Traffic's developers licensed the planes in order to develop the product, which is a win-win situation if I ever saw one, since it appears that the royalties are fed back into Project AI development. One downside of My Traffic 2004 is that you won't get any AI traffic at third party or military airports, although many of these come with their own traffic and it seems that the issue will be addressed in a future upgrade.

The sticking point for some users will be that although My Traffic's flight plans are said to be based on a 'realistic model', the majority aren't real world flight plans. The product uses a smart AI traffic engine to generate flights so you won't catch a Peruvian charter operating out of Charles de Gaulle, but nonetheless, most of the activity you are looking at is completely fictional, though you wouldn't know unless you sat at the threshold with an airline timetable and followed every flight to its destination. The FS2004 upgrade comes complete with an AI traffic editor which allows you to generate even more flights should you so wish, but the upgrade requires a great deal of manual intervention and isn't a job for a novice.

So, if you are bored with the default AI traffic and don't have the time or the expertise to download and install some of the excellent freeware that is available these days, My Traffic is for you - but take a look at Ultimate Traffic before you decide.

Inevitable comparisons are going to be made between My Traffic and Flight1's Ultimate Traffic, which has real world flight plans, more repaints and a somewhat richer feature set for a few dollars less - so I decided to take a look at that product too. Just one look at the screen shot above left should be enough to whet your appetite.

Ultimate Traffic

At first glance there appears to be little to choose between the two packages beyond some glitzy graphics, but beyond the fact that they both use Project AI planes to provide AI traffic in Flight Simulator, but they take quite different approaches to the same problem. Although both utilities work extremely well, Ultimate Traffic is a more complex product, creating its own program group under the Start menu and installing various applets to help view and manage schedules.

Ultimate Traffic is a big download, over 190 Mb, so at the moment it is only likely to appeal if you have a broadband connection, or an entire day to spare on dial up. I would assume that a boxed version will become available in due course, or the size of the download will limit sales of an excellent product. Ultimate Traffic costs $29.95, so depending on the exchange rate it is a little cheaper than My Traffic, and at the time of writing only an FS2002 version was available, though an FS2004 upgrade is in the works and the package can be made to work with FS2004 if you are prepared to indulge in some unsupported hacking.

The installation presented no problems, so I fired up the program using the desktop icon and checked out what it could do. As you can see, options range from compiling traffic (sometimes necessary after updates); through viewing timetables as in the screen shot above; a utilities screen, of which more later; a snazzy route map display system; and an update button. All my FS gray-beard instincts boiled to the surface and I clicked 'update' following which Ultimate Traffic sprang into action, went online, updated the main program, offered me a choice of new aircraft, liveries, AFCAD files and repaints and then went ahead and downloaded them all. It is as well to pay attention when you are doing this, because if you download everything you will end up with AFCAD files installed that don't necessarily match up to your airports - because the Ultimate Traffic support site offers user customised files for add-ons like the SimFlyer's airports as well as the defaults.

I have to admit that I was seriously impressed with the way the updater worked and it has to be the most painless AI aircraft and repaint installation I have ever done. This feature alone puts Ultimate Traffic ahead of the competition, because even a complete novice could install new aircraft. New planes and repaints seem to appear very regularly and the updater allows the possibility of updating schedules as their real world equivalents change.

The screen shot here shows an update in progress, with a Crossair Saab 340 livery being installed. If you look behind the 'downloading package' screen there is a drop down list that lets you see what is available and choose what you want to install - the program being smart enough to spot duplicates and to ask if you really intend to overwrite existing files. My Traffic doesn't offer anything like this - yet. Knowing Burkhard Renk, its creator, it may only be a matter of time before this issue is addressed.

Ulimate Traffic's help files are hidden behind the query sign at top right of the apps main interface page - clicking here will load a pdf with the relevant information, the files also being accessible in the program's folder. Make sure you read it, because Ultimate Traffic allows you to compile the AI traffic in a number of different ways, depending on what sort of simming you like to do.

An FS2004 upgrade will appear as soon as Microsoft release the relevant software development kits, according to Flight1. As I remarked earlier, it is possible to make the program work with A Century of Flight, but the AI traffic parameters in FS2004 have been sufficiently enhanced that some problems will occur - all FS2002 AI traffic will be affected by this, so it isn't purely down to the way Flight1's product works.

In the final analysis, Ultimate Traffic offers more value than My Traffic, with the exception of GA and military AI. Ultimate Traffic barely extends the default GA AI traffic and does nothing at all for the military, so if these are your main interest, My Traffic is the better choice. With FS running, there is little to choose between the two programs, because one AI aircraft looks much like another, but Ultimate Traffic offers real world timetables and a fantastic automatic updating system for a few dollars less - a superb product which I can unhesitatingly recommend.

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