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No (well, almost no) Ships or Boats


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I've long been bothered by the near absence of vessel traffic in MSFS. I've seen a few, but very few, over the past year, and today I bought Vessels Enhanced AI from Orbx, hoping I'd see some improvement. I've also been told on this forum that you need to look carefully near major ports and sealanes, etc. So I just loaded at Istanbul, and flew the length of the Bosporus, then over the Golden Horn and out into the Sea of Marmara. Nary a ship or boat! I know from personal observation this area is teeming with vessel traffic of all sorts.

 

My vessel traffic slider is at 100 percent.

 

Is this a lost cause? Or am I missing something?

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I don't know about the OrbX shipping traffic, but I use the free Global AI Ship Traffic mod and it's great. It adds global ship traffic on realistic routes (except mid ocean, I think) with appropriate vessel models (so no ferries in around the Cape of Storms).

 

The developer is currently porting his FSX models into native MSFS format, but even so a huge variety of vessels are included. As a plus, I haven't noticed much of a performance impact. See here:

 

https://www.flightsim.to/file/9529/global-ai-ship-traffic-msfs-v1

 

I'd put this mod squarely in the "must have" category.

Ryzen 5 3600X, 16 GB 3733 MTs RAM, Radeon RX5700 OC, 2560 x 1080 Ultrawide

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I just loaded at Istanbul, and flew the length of the Bosporus, then over the Golden Horn and out into the Sea of Marmara. Nary a ship or boat!

 

Try Rotterdam (the port entrance and offshore), Gibraltar, and St. Maarten.

Tim Wright "The older I get, the better I was..."

Xbox Series X, Asus Prime H510M-K, Intel Core i5-11400F 4.40GHz, 16Gb DDR4 3200, 2TB WD Black NVME SSD, 1TB Samsung SATA SSD

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See here:

 

https://www.flightsim.to/file/9529/global-ai-ship-traffic-msfs-v1

 

I'd put this mod squarely in the "must have" category.

 

Thank you KW. I have this add-on in P3D, and have been waiting for its announced conversion to MSFS. But I could never find whether it existed yet; and, if so, where it could be found. I just installed it and flew around Gibraltar. Much better!

 

(I even saw a yacht with a wake! I understand wakes will be generally be added next month. And smoke? Oh, be still, my heart.)

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Thanks, Tiger. But they are just too few and far between.

 

There probably won't be any ship traffic mid-ocean, who's going to see it anyway, so ports and harbours are the best places. Somewhere on the Orbx Vessels Enhanced web pages are a series of world maps showing the shipping routes. If you also turn leisure craft up to 100% you should also see yachts offshore and even on inland lakes. All these ships and boats will pop in to view as you approach them and pop out again as you leave, that's a sim level of detail (LOD) issue and nothing to do with the Vessels Enhanced package itself.

Tim Wright "The older I get, the better I was..."

Xbox Series X, Asus Prime H510M-K, Intel Core i5-11400F 4.40GHz, 16Gb DDR4 3200, 2TB WD Black NVME SSD, 1TB Samsung SATA SSD

NVidia RTX3060 Ti 8Gb, Logitech Flight Yoke System, CH Pro Pedals, Acer K272HL 27", Windows 11 Home x64

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Thank you KW. I have this add-on in P3D, and have been waiting for its announced conversion to MSFS. But I could never find whether it existed yet; and, if so, where it could be found. I just installed it and flew around Gibraltar. Much better!

 

(I even saw a yacht with a wake! I understand wakes will be generally be added next month. And smoke? Oh, be still, my heart.)

 

You're very welcome. I haven't seen wakes yet, so not sure how you managed to do that! But I know it is/was in the pipeline, as is landable ship decks.

 

And to think it's for free! Surely, the creator should be knighted...

Ryzen 5 3600X, 16 GB 3733 MTs RAM, Radeon RX5700 OC, 2560 x 1080 Ultrawide

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There probably won't be any ship traffic mid-ocean, who's going to see it anyway, so ports and harbours are the best places. Somewhere on the Orbx Vessels Enhanced web pages are a series of world maps showing the shipping routes. If you also turn leisure craft up to 100% you should also see yachts offshore and even on inland lakes. All these ships and boats will pop in to view as you approach them and pop out again as you leave, that's a sim level of detail (LOD) issue and nothing to do with the Vessels Enhanced package itself.

 

Yeah, but I wasn't complaining about the lack of ships mid-ocean. My example of the area around Istanbul is typical.

Edited by Mac6737
wrong city named!
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The add-on discussed in this thread, Global AI Ship Traffic MSFS v. 2 comes with instructions to turn your vessel traffic sliders down to 5-10% to avoid conflicts with the default ship traffic.

 

I did that, and my first stop, the heavily-trafficked Dardanelles, displayed NO vessels whatsoever. So, casting the instructions aside, I turned my sliders up to 50-75% and had vessel traffic again. Can anyone explain this? Is the developer wrong?

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I also saw the 5-10% recommendation and just stuck with that. I've no idea why the traffic in the Dardanelles was inaccurate. I've only looked at two ports which I'm familiar with (Halifax and Cape Town) and what I saw seemed about right using 10% density.

 

I guess you could contact the developer if you this if you want; but personally, if you found a setting that works, I'd say just stick with that and let it be.

Ryzen 5 3600X, 16 GB 3733 MTs RAM, Radeon RX5700 OC, 2560 x 1080 Ultrawide

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