Some traffic not appearing - but not consistently!

[TimC340]

I’m a fairly experienced flight sim user, and I’ve been using AI of all kinds since FS8. I know my way around AIFP, ADE, Lorby’s excellent Installer, and a fair few other tools. But this issue is doing my head in!

The sim is P3Dv4.4. For AI, I have UTLive, Matrix, FTX, Uk2000, and a veritable host of individually installed aircraft, flight plans and airports. Some of the AI aircraft are native FS9 (or earlier), and I accept they’ll quite often not work as desired, or even in some cases not appear at all. But this problem isn’t (or isn’t entirely) down to that.

I noticed that at EGVN, the only AI appearing were the locally-based A400s and visiting foreign aircraft, basically those contained in the Matrix-hosted MAIW P3D flight plans. In earlier versions of P3D and FSX I’d had RAF C17s, A330s and C130s all operating, either on MAIW flight plans or my own creations. I’ve checked that the models are P3Dv4 compatible (PAI, TFS and HTAI respectively), and that no FS9 plans exist on my system - and that the appropriate plans are actually installed! All appears to be correct.

To see if was an airfield issue (EGVN on mine is the UK2000 version), I modified EGEC, which is out of the way and has little other traffic, to have sufficient large parking to accommodate some of these aircraft, and created a flight plan to have one of each type that was missing at Brize, plus the A400 and a couple of others that I know work in P3D, to see if I could work out what was going wrong. Well, NONE of the aircraft in that flight plan turned up! UK2000 and UTL-generated GA traffic comes and goes, but none of the military heavy metal that I want to see!

Before I try a complete reinstall of P3D, or throw the computer out of the window, has anyone any suggestions that I could try?

[John Young]

Are both your "Airline" and "GA" sliders set to 100%? Is it possible that the traffic is spread between the two, ie aircraft with call signs (Airline) and those without (GA).

John

[TimC340]

Hi John, thanks for your answer. No, they’re not at 100%, they’re at about 50%. A hangover from FSX, I think. I also understood that the P3D AI ‘bubble’ is a lot larger than the FSX one, and was concerned that setting them higher would slow everything down too much. I’ll give it a go; would it explain why none of 13 different aircraft types refuse to appear?

[John Young]

Only if the 13 absent aircraft had no call signs allocated in the aircraft.cfg file and your GS slider was set to zero.

John

[Firebird]

What John says is the only useful starting place to work out why some traffic doesn't appear.
For FSX and P3D you must have 100% on both sliders. It is the only way that you will ensure that all traffic that can be displayed will be displayed.

What John also says is correct in that any aircraft that does not have a non-blank 'atc_airline=' parm will appear as a GA aircraft in those systems.

So unless you start your diagnosis with both at 100% you really hampering your own ability to diagnose an issue. After all all you need is a flightplan programmer to set all his traffic percentage at 60% and you would see nothing. Quite a few I have seen set theirs to 100%.

[TimC340]

Thanks both. I have set both to 100%, but there's no difference.

However, a thought occurs: it would appear that P3D may be only displaying traffic generated by Matrix, UTLive, UK2000 and Orbx FTX. Other than ships, it would seem that few of the plans in scenery\world\scenery are producing traffic unless the aircraft associated with the plans (and the plans themselves?) are in the parent directories of those apps. It will take me some considerable time to prove or disprove this, but is this a possibility?

[Firebird]

Traffic does not have to be in the scenery\world\scenery folder. That is traditional and is the most usual place but it can be placed in any ACTIVE scenery folder.

If it has not made any difference then what do you see when you load that traffic bgl up into AIFP? What colour are the aircraft in the list?

[TimC340]

All the aircraft are present and correct in AIFP. And I've confirmed in AI-Aircraft Editor that all aircraft (in this plan at least) are using P3Dv4-compatible textures and .mdl files.

I have confirmed that P3D is not generating traffic from scenery\world\scenery, but the apps (including Matrix) are generating traffic. I've done nothing in the .cfg files myself. I think I'll remove all the traffic files from s\w\s and replace them one by one to see if one of them is causing the issue. There are only a couple of hundred; it shouldn't take long...!

[TimC340]

So, placing the test flightplan file in MAIW\MAIW_EUROPE\MAIW_EUROPE_WORLD\scenery makes it work (and reveals that one or two textures I thought were P3Dv4 compatible are actually not!). I wonder why P3D is not activating the traffic in s\w\s? P3D has started displaying one or two odd little quirks - it never goes to the selected airfield, but one nearby, and it won't load scenarios - it's just crashing. So I think a reinstall may be sensible!

[Firebird]

Well the next step that I was going to mention is to check the default folder is indeed active.

It should be one of the first, if it is like FSX, where it is called Default Terrain and the local folder is Scenery\World. It sounds like it has become deactivated.

[TimC340]

According to Lorby's Addon Organiser, the Default Airplanes folder is active. I'm not sure which .cfg file looks at traffic files, though.

[Firebird]

I didn't think that any cfg file looks specifically at traffic files, however there are people with infinitely more experience of P3D than myself.

As i understand it there are potentially numerous cfg and xml files that can contain active scenery folders.
The Default Airplanes folder you mention is not where I would expect to find the traffic files. The Scenery\World folder I would expect to find in the scenery.cfg file, as it is a default scenery folder. I would search your system for a scenery.cfg file and look at that.

[TimC340]

Yes, of course you're right Steve. And the Default Scenery is layer 1 in scenery.cfg, active and required. So why it's not loading, I have no idea! But I've found a workaround that'll do for now, and when P3Dv4.5 is released fairly soon I'll do a clean reinstall and get it all in the right places.

Thanks for the help! Got my ancient brain working for a change!