Aircraft Tags How do they work, what do they mean?

I have been intrigued by these large, distracting banners that seem meaningless, floating around the sky. They supposedly show other simmers and real world aircraft in MSFS2020.

First thing is thank you, to whoever wrote a piece of freeware that I found on GitHub. This addition to the Community folder make them less obtrusive and allows you to choose one of 4 colors.

Observing others in the sim I noticed some things, trying to sort out what these Tags are telling us.

I saw a friends tag over 150 miles away with A/C and Alt info. I really did not need to know this at that distance.

This morning I sat at KSRQ watching for 2 hours and watched for tags. Some tags just seem to sit in the air never moving with just a name and no other info. Others are obviously Simmers flying around and their tags have a NAME and below it the type of A/C and Alt, but no indication distance.

Then there are those that just have Name moving along with no other info.

Also there are real aircraft. These usually have an N numbers. I knew they were actual flights because I could follow them on Flight Aware though delayed 15-20 min.

Any thoughts on how they work?

Tom

The skies are full of planes now aren’t they? I didn’t know about the freeware addon, I might check that out. Others will be seeing your tag too of course. I’m not sure myself why sometimes it gives you the distance or altitude etc and other times it doesn’t.

When you see the stopped in mid air, it probably means they have paused their sim.

I presume you’ll know that the tags are basically the user names, often made up of random words & issued by Microsoft when you sign up. You can change it for free..but just the once. After that they charge you apparently. My original name was something_rabbit (I can’t remember the first word) & I changed it to G7RTA

You can of course go into the settings & uncheck the box “show gamer tags” (or something like that)

I tend to have them on unless I’m trying to capture a video or screenshot.

Regards

Steve

Here is a github link

If you want smaller labels for multiplayer in whatever color you want without a background banner, unzip and put whatever color and size folder into your community folder and that's it. restart the sim. I used small red

https://github.com/clompsy/msfs_nameplates

Tom

Cheers Tom :)

Regards

Steve