AFCAD Question

Lvpunnk · Post by **Lvpunnk** » 24 May 2007, 21:06

Hello, I'm hoping someone could help me, I've installed both Tinker packages, and while I have a few E-3's in the "birdcage" I want the "birdcage" to be exclusively for E-3's as in real life, instead I have Tankers and E6s in there? Is this possible?

Thanks,
Jeff

jetmax · Post by **jetmax** » 25 May 2007, 00:54

Birdcage? I am not sure what you are talking about.

Lvpunnk · Post by **Lvpunnk** » 25 May 2007, 18:03

The birdcage is where we park our E-3's, and only E-3's park there, that's what I'm trying to accomplish is making sure that when I go to Tinker, I only see E-3's in there, right now all the parking assignments are for E-3's yet somehow some E-6s and KC135s are in there and that's what I'm trying to get rid of.

Jeff

flyerkg · Post by **flyerkg** » 26 May 2007, 00:13

I would check several aspects of parking assignments that have to be in agreement in order to see the the specific aircraft you want to see where you expect to see them.

In the aircraft.cfg file, I check to make sure the atc_parking_types =

and the atc_parking_codes= lines both match the parking properties set to the specific parking spot within AFCAD2 e.g.

atc_parking_types=MIL_CARGO
atc_parking_codes=E3

Also, I look at the parking codes block in AFCAD2 for anything that might allow other aircraft types to park where you would expect just another type to park there. For instance, you might have all of your E3 spots with parking codes as E3, M000, M003. I might be wrong, but it seems that other aircraft with one of the other codes such as M003 runs out of spots, then it will look to these E3 spots which also allow for M003 to park there if it is empty and the radius of the spot is large enough for the other aircraft.

One of my techniques is to segregate the parking assignments by squadron, group or wing as opposed to just the aircraft type model series (TMS) If I am at an F-16 base, I don't want F-16s parking just anywhere there is a spot labeled F16. I will group parking assignments by a label that will be identified with the real unit and provide for uniformity across the parking area. Such parking might be for

61st FS, 56th FW, Luke AFB, Arizona. Use 61FS or 56FW to distinguish these assigned areas from parking for 309th FS, 56th FW, Luke AFB, Arizona.

I hope not to mis-lead you on this concept. So far it works pretty well for me.

btaylo24 · Post by **btaylo24** » 26 May 2007, 00:27

Hi Jeff

Can you post a screen shot of where the "Birdcage" is in relation to KTIK parking. This is how the current parking assignments are assigned.

Note the AFCAD should be called MAIW_AF2_KTIK_DEFAULT_CP

Barry

Lvpunnk · Post by **Lvpunnk** » 26 May 2007, 23:57

Hi guys, thank you so much for your responses, I hope I'm able to fix this. Barry, the birdcage is the norhern red box you made on the AFCAD, the southern red box is for E-3's as well, but KC-135's will park there as well. The AFCAD is mostly correct in being that in the birdcage there are 8 spots in two ramp designations where up to 16 aircraft can park and correctly they face nose to nose just as in your afcad. So anyway, I'm going to check out my parking assignments. I infact removed all the other KTIK afcads that came with the package except for one, because I was confused on which AFCAD I would need to modify to edit parking assignments. Barry, I'm going to take the poster above you advice and double check the parking assignments, if you however know how to make that area E3 exclusive parking, please let me know.

Thanks,

Jeff

Lvpunnk · Post by **Lvpunnk** » 27 May 2007, 00:13

Update, I just modified the AFCAD for all of those spots parking codes to read E3A only. I then went into my the WOAI E3 Aircraft folder and changed all variation's parking codesin the aircraft.cfg to E3A. This did not work however. Part of the issue is that there are not enough E3 flights in the traffic.bgl to give me enough E3's in the birdcage, but that's not the problem, because I can live with only a few E3s in the birdcage, just as long as nothing else is in there. What I think maybe a possible solution is to somehow edit a parking spot to use a custom parking type, instead of MIL_CARGO or whatever, instead I'd like to creat my own and call it E3, then change the E3 Aircraft.cfg for parking type to E3. If that's possible I'm sure that would work. Still wondering why F16's and F15s are in there though, they should be MIL_COMBAT or something.

Jeff

flyerkg · Post by **flyerkg** » 27 May 2007, 01:45

One thing I noticed when looking at the MAIW KTIK AFCAD is that some of the E3 parking assignments in the southern box are the first 6 or 7 parking spots in sequence on this AFCAD. It is possible that you have enough flights, they are just filling in the parking assignments from 1 to 75 or however total spots there are in this file first. The AFCAD that I am using appears to label most of the parking spots by Squadron as I thought might bring better distinction to where you will expect to find tenant organizations as opposed to fly-ins or transient.

This might help to force aircraft to go where their primary parking code is. For instance, the primary codes on the AF2 that I am using for KTIK for the Birdcage are 964A, E3A, and 966A, E3A. The parking assignments to the south along Taxiway G, are first label 960A, and 970A. To designate each of the Airborne Air Control Squadrons.

There seems to be another version of this AF2 that I had which did not have the "A" after each of these. My Aircraft.cfg did have the "A" so the planes were parking in whatever E3A spot that was available and in numerical sequence. I had to go back to Aircraft.cfg and modify each of the atc_parking_codes= 964, E3A to atc_parking_codes= 964A, E3A in this regards for the other squadrons as well. Now with my AF2 and perhaps the same one you are using, if any of the other non-Tinker AWACS come in from 961st AACS, 18th Wing, they are going to find any available MIL_CARGO spot and park there since they do not have any matching parking codes. I hope this helps.

btaylo24 · Post by **btaylo24** » 27 May 2007, 02:58

If I remember correctly the AFCAD for KTIK was first in the E6 package. It was then replaced in the E3 package, to include correct parking assignments. So the E3 KTIK AFCAD is the latest one
Parking is done at a squadron level.
Barry

Lvpunnk · Post by **Lvpunnk** » 27 May 2007, 19:50

Hi, thanks again for your help guys, I'm going to keep tweaking the AFCAD and the aircraft.cfg's until I get it right, right now, I've changed all parking codes in the birdcage to gate_heavy, and did the same to the E3 aircraft.cfgs I now have more E-3s in there, but still I get these fighters and tankers thinking they can park there, lol.

Jeff

flyerkg · Post by **flyerkg** » 27 May 2007, 21:01

Jeff,

I'm sorry this is not working for you just the way you want. I did notice the original AF2 has a few undesignated MIL_CARGO and MIL_COMBAT spots in the vicinity of the Birdcage. I have left them alone. However, I do get the right E-3s parking in the 964A and 966A spots. There are about 16 spots nose to nose and so far nothing else seems to park in these spots. Those other aircraft types must be running out of parking elsewhere and using these undesignated spots in the Birdcage since these spots are large enough in radius and are MIL_CARGO by type.

So far I have never seen all these spots completely filled up. Maybe I am lacking flightplans or a bunch of these guys have already left prior to my entry into the scenery? But I have left these spots as MIL_CARGO and matched the atc_parking_codes= line with the value in the AF2 parking code box. I know if you change the area from "parking" to "gate", Ground will clear you to the "stand" as opposed to "General Aviation Parking" This sounds a bit more appropriate for this type of facility I guess. Good Luck!

Keith

MIKE JG · Post by **MIKE JG** » 27 May 2007, 22:06

Jeff,

Hope you are enjoying the Tinker package. I did most of the updates to that afcad for the E-3 release. If you installed the package per the instuctions you should not be having problems. It sounds to me like you have more than one KTIK afcad running at a time. That will cause some of the problems that you are experiencing. But now that you've started tweaking on it, there's no way I can tell you what's going on. I can tell you that with the proper MAIW afcad installed, that afcad will park the aircraft in the area you are talking about and should not allow any other types to park in that area.

You probably are getting it just the way you want it to be finally and that's the beauty of it, that you can modify the file to your own tastes. If all else fails I would delete all parts of the E-3 package and re-install the whole thing.

Again if at any time you had more than one KTIK afcad running, this will cause problems for the AI aircraft parking. In addition, if you have more than the MAIW E-3 traffic running, in other words if you have more E-3's running than were in the MAIW package, you may very well run out of spots for them to park. The uncoded spots to the West of the "birdcage" are meant to contain any transient aircraft thet need a spot to park in.

Lvpunnk · Post by **Lvpunnk** » 28 May 2007, 00:12

Mike and Keith, yes it's definitely disappointing to hear that both of you are getting good results with this package while I can't and since I work there, I pretty much need it to be perfect. The only thing I can say is that I use MyTraffic2006. And Mike, yes I was very suprised when I opened up your AFCAD after installing it to see that it is very accurate, with the exception of a few nit picky things, but all in all it looks as it should, but when i go into the sim, the AI just don't want to obey and I've got helicopters and fighters in the birdcage and it's just demoralizing after trying everything and put in about 12 hours of work on this stuff so far. When I use the AFCAD editor, I go to open, and it lists two KTIK AFCADS, yours and the stock one, should I delete the stock one? And if so where is it located. I have already deleted the MyTraffic AFCAD, that was the first thing I did. I am convinced that if this was the only AI package I had installed, then I feel that I would only get the E3's in the birdcage. Back when I was using Ultimate Traffic, since there was no military traffic, I did not have an issue, I simply made about 16 flightplans used Captains Sim's E3 and traffic tools, and an AFCAD someone mailed to me and it worked great, I have a feeling MyTraffic is doing something here and I can't figure it out. Keith thanks for the tip on how to change gate to stand that's a good one.

Thanks,

Jeff

BadPvtDan · Post by **BadPvtDan** » 28 May 2007, 01:02

No need to delete the default afcad.

MIKE JG · Post by **MIKE JG** » 28 May 2007, 02:16

Yup, Danny's right, no need to delete the default KTIK afcad. I guess I should have been more clear. You can't have more than one modified afcad running at the same time without having problems. I wonder if you just have too much AI traffic running in and out of there. Certainly if you've got more traffic than parking spots, you will have problems with where the aircraft park.

I'm a big believer in running an accurate amount of AI traffic in and out of any one base. Some folks like a lot of traffic and because of that they have to heavily modify the afcads to make enough parking spots. If you are getting fighters and helos parking in the bird cage, then you might try adding some more uncoded mil_combat spots with a generic radius that is large enough to attract the fighters and helos, but small enough to exclude the larger E-3's.

That might help. Certainly no matter how much traffic you run you will need enough parking spots to accomodate the AI traffic you are running.

delta b · Post by **delta b** » 28 May 2007, 04:38

Mike's right--if you've got a ton of helos and fighters parking in those spots, then you've probably got a ton too many helos and fighters at Tinker. I'm guessing the MyTraffic is doing this.

You would know as the guy who works there, but I'm guessing Tinker should only have a handful transient fighters or helos (like 2-8 ) at a time plus a few extra heavies. The MAIW AFCAD should be able to support that. If you've got more, I'd suggest adding a lot of extra MIL_COMBAT slots like Mike said.

Incidentally, traffic files generally load alphabetically into FS, so if your MyTraffic loads first and runs out of correctly coded or uncoded slots, the traffic will go to the slots created first in AFCAD with a sufficient radius. The birdcage slots were probably created first, so this is why they're parking there. When the WoA/MAIW traffic loads, it has to squeeze into whatever's left over. You may not even be seeing all the E-3s in the package if there aren't enough slots.

Dan

delta b · Post by **delta b** » 28 May 2007, 04:42

For what it's worth, here's a tip when building AFCADs: create a "parking slot farm" on the AFCAD and pull them into the correct positions from the farm. This will allow you to have more control over which slots are created first. Creating the smallest slots first will minimize the impact of coding problems and insufficient slots. I usually create my slots in the following order: GA small, GA med, GA large, gate small, gate med, gate large, cargo, mil combat, mil cargo. You could move the mil combat up after the GA and be even safer.

I always keep them in neat rows so I know which I created first and can pick slots as primaries (created first) and extras (created last). This allows you to randomize parking without it being too random. It also allows you to pull groups at a time for things like transient fighter parking (I like my transient fighters parking together). I always create about twice as many slots as I think I'll need and just delete the extras at the end.

Dan

flyerkg · Post by **flyerkg** » 28 May 2007, 04:55

I certainly don't mind helping out. Some of these little tricks and fixes are not that obvious and sometimes takes a lot of Tinkering (PUN intended)
to get things they way you see it in real life. I agree with the idea of trying to be exact but I have to watch how too many parking assignments affect my PC performance. Especially when you consider the number of sorties generated at the training facilities. This place sees a combination of training, operations, and maintenance. It would be great if we could get an AI bird to fly-in to KTIK, stay on the ground in MXSG then perform a functional check flight prior to going back to the home station. Now that would be too perfect.

Keith

Lvpunnk · Post by **Lvpunnk** » 28 May 2007, 17:25

First off, I can't thank everyone enough for all the help, this topic sure is getting a lot of attention.

Second, Dan, from what it sounds like you're saying, if I just went in and renumbered all the spots, making the birdcage with the highest parking number then it would be the same as creating them in that order? This issue by the way is definitely a MyTraffic problem and they've just got way too many different types of aircraft flying into Tinker, very inaccurate. We do get quite a bit of B1, B2 (occasionally), and B52 activity, but I have yet to see any of those around. Yesterday I went in the scenery and there was some Argentinian DC-8 or something in there. I posted this question over at the MyTraffic forum as well, and I got this response, not sure what he means.

"Hi Jeff,

Have you tried 'airlines' by using their squadron designations besides using their radi and parking types? Should function the same way as airline gate assignments.

Good luck and kind regards

Jaap"

Thanks,

Jeff

VulcanDriver · Post by **VulcanDriver** » 28 May 2007, 19:41

Hi

That's what we at MAIW do. We have squadron numbers, then the a/c type. For example an Israeli F-16 from 101 Sqn would read 101, F16, M001 with the parking space coded the same. When it lands it will first look for its 'home' space (101), if it can't find it goes to the spot for F-16s.

HTH

John

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