Ai-usable airports

[captain_luke]

Hello all, first post! I've been using flight simulator for almost a year now and have decided to try my hand at airport/scenery design. I'm designing a new airport in antarctica! It's nearly finished except I'm trying make it ai-usable so I can assign some flightplans to it.

My question is though - what are the requirements of an airport to allow ai traffic in FSX?

I remember reading somewhere, one thing it needs is parking spaces.
Any help much appreciated! Thanks

captain_luke

[ReggieF5421]

I though someone would have replied by now.

AI requires three things.

1. Aircraft
2. Flightplans
3. Airports

Aircraft - Microsoft has default AI using the default aircraft - three of which are AI only - the PA-28, Dash8 and MD83. With SP1 and SP2 for FSX, the ACES team reworked those and all the other models to greatly reduce their workload on your computer.

However, the best AI models are built specifically for AI. Unfortunately there are very few AI models designed for FSX, but the vast majority of the FS2004 models work great with a few tweaks.

Flightplans - There are two ways of doing flightplans. One uses Microsoft's TrafficDatabaseBuilder from the SDK -the other is based on TrafficTools by Lee Swordy.

TDBB has some checks and requirements about available parking, runway surface, runway length, aircraft range limits, aircraft cruise altitude limits - which most people find too restrictive when building AI flight plans. Also TDBB enforces a minimum 45 minute turnaround - which makes realistic flightplans for airlines like Southwest and Ryanair impossible.

TTools is used because it doesn't verify parking availability, runway requirements, enroute terrain issues and turnaround. People can take an airline website and input the data pretty easily into some tools and come up with pretty realistic flight plans. Now there are some issues with this approach, but most of us find those acceptable.

TTools is way more popular than TDBB.

Airports - When an AI aircraft lands at a destination airport - it transitions from the Landing mode to Rollout mode of the flight program. At that time FS checks available parking on the airport. If there is an open parking spot which is large enough to hold the aircraft - the parking preference cycle starts. If there is not an open parking spot large enough for the aircraft - it is deleted.

A couple great tutorial sources are:

http://www.flightsim.com/cgi/kds?$=main/howto/ai4beg.htm

http://www.john-goodwin.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/page4frame.html

Yes - they are written for FS2002 and FS2004 - but the basics are the same - and you must understand the basics.

Some great packages are available for free which have aircraft and flightplans - http://www.world-of-ai.com/ and http://www.projectai.com/ - If an airline is available from both - I prefer WoA.

FSX has much better parking available by default at commercial airports than FS2004 - but you may need to update/ change some airports - especially if you are interested in Military AI.

If you have FSX Deluxe with the updated SDK - I recommend the free Airport Design Editor - http://www.airportdesigneditor.co.uk/

If not - the only tool available is the payware AFX available at Flight1.

Personally, I'd recommend spending the money on FSX Deluxe rather than AFX.

[tasmanet]

FSX Planner is another option
http://www.zbluesoftware.com/fsxplanner/

FSX Planner is a full featured graphical editing tool intended to allow its users to easily modify all aspects of an airport for use within Microsoft's Flight Simulator X, both visible and invisible. The visible parts of an airport that can be modified include everything from the runways and taxiways to the taxiway signs and windsocks and scenery objects, as well as everything in between. The unseen parts of an airport that can be modified include everything from the airport services and fuel triggers to the communication frequencies and navigation information.