I have had this thought for a while, when I say a while I mean a long time. I know it's been mentioned many times but my thought is, "If the Autogen can generate trees and buildings on land, why can't it generate ships and boat traffic in the water?"

I've messed about with ships a couple of times but to be honest I found it a bit award either making a flight plan for them or even just placing them, because it takes a while to do just one area where as to do the whole world would take me forever lol.
So I thought if only I knew how to program the autogen to generate ships and boats in the water.
Too many I think would look un-natural but it nice sometimes to be flying over water and see a few ships here and there, even have a wake behind a still ship gives the elution of it moving.

I have often looked to see if there was such a program but every time I look it always comes up with FS Shipyards, I'm not in least knocking what they do I just wish there was a world wide scenery version.

There is some very well received AI Ship traffic packages for FSX. I am guessing that they don't work for FS9 and I don't know if they can be converted to work for FS9. If anybody does know conclusively then please let us know.

As for autogen in FS9 it will not work for this simple reason. Autogen works according to the landclass. I don't know whether water is or isn't a landclass in FS9 but if it isn't you couldn't use autogen and if it is you would get traffic everywhere on water and would be unrealistic.

You can get AI ship traffic in some packages but unless those FSX packages can be made to work you are down to creating them yourself.

Small correction there Firebird. Autogen is actually a function off of the ground texture. Easy to confuse because most people think of the landclass as the texture file associated with it. Autgen being a function of the ground texture file is how you get these patches of autgen forest in the middle of Komatsu:



The grass texture poly used for the background does not generte autogen, but there's a one layer higher forest texture poly that does.

The trick to making boats appear as autogen would be to convert all the water texture files to be able to call autogen, then somehow add boats as an autogen option. The problem then is that you would get the same autogen objects at the same place in every texture tile and since there aren't a whole lot of different water texture tiles, you would end up with an epic pile of very similar boats.

Hi Steve, Yes I kind of guessed that mate, I was more thinking Autogen meaning auto generate any item, I didn't realise it was just land only.
As for the FSX ships I too doubt they can be converted to FS9.

Sorry clickclickdoh, you posted as I did, I just read your post, I think I understand now, shame really it would be a nice feature if it could work.

I found this old thread on Avsim, looks like someone has done it but going off the posts some ships are landlocked, but someone said removing the wake effect you don't notice them as much.

http://www.avsim.com/topic/352953-ai-sh ... ges-exist/

Again, this probably pertains to FSX and not FS9, but there is a thing called 'living world'. There are your traffic boats that follow schedules, and there are your 'wander boats' that all into this category. So the sim does allow for random 'autogen' placement of boats You just gotta add the boats.

BTW, if you like some good NAVY traffic, then I have a little something brewing.

www.hazegraystudios.com

@Ripcord, Looks good but unfortunately I'm on FS9.

clickclickdoh wrote:Small correction there Firebird. Autogen is actually a function off of the ground texture. Easy to confuse because most people think of the landclass as the texture file associated with it.

Yep, that is what I thought I was saying, but obviously not very clearly.

There is an object file named "Worldwide Shipping" done by Johan Dees and placing static ships in the whole world:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/wce3snfqqmn411v/WS.zip

Unfortunately some ships and their wakes have frankly been misplaced. I found one over the city of Geneva! With more than 45'000 ships it's almost impossible to get them placed accurately. Of course it would be possible to remove them easily with tools like Instant Scenery. But it will be more difficult to remove the corresponding wakes.

Placing static ships f.i. in the middle of the Atlantic is IMO a nonsense. At cruising level of 20'000 feet you won't see them anyway. I mainly placed static ships specifically in approach areas or at particular places like Suez and Panama Canal or ports.

Piers West 42nd Street NYC (classic era)

BTW, Circle Line boat in front does an AI trip around Manhattan.

Piraeus harbour overflown after taking off at Athens Elenikon (classic era)

Talking ships (bear with me here before you judge too much!)
I set up another PC at home, running FS9 as a ship simulator, I'm developing a panel/views to represent a naval vessel, and make it usable... Turns out FS9 makes a pretty cool ship simulator

I actually set this machine up to act as a target drone for my TA-4k sim, using IBNET multiplayer (which is a cool addon that allows really smooth multiplayer, while retaining AI.. http://www.ibirdsoft.altervista.org/)



HMNZS Canterbury, F421 approaching Sand Island (NW of Midway) at sunset.... Canterbury is now nearing Subic Bay in the Philippines....

Ok, now you can judge

SeanG

On this subject I was following a GA aircraft out of LFOH Le Havre, then I notice 3 ships in the bay, then around 40 mile out still flying fairly low I saw a passenger cruise liner.
It made all the difference to to journey seeing those ships instead of bare open water.