An impossible question?

[davem]

Hi all,

as I have just about every MAIW pack installed, I fear that the addon scenery and sheer number of AI models that FSX now has to load is slowing my machine down to an alarming level.

As I very rarely stray outside UK airspace, I'm planning on copying all MAIW AF2 / AFX files from the individual directories to the addon scenery / scenery directory so the 2d plans remain and allow parking for the AI but thereby allowing me to delete the sceneries.

This is the easy part, however my (probably impossible to answer) question is whether or not there is a resource available which can tell me which packages and hence AI models visit the UK from time to time?

I get regular (Beale) U2s and other US stuff (B1, KC135, Hercs) at Fairford and also had some swedish Grippens the other day but would (regrettably ) like to be able to free up some system resources by removing AI models that never reach our shores. For instance given the huge number of Herc packages I can never work out which US components visit the UK etc.

Can anyone suggest a good place to start?
(It goes without saying I'm only needing info about non-UK packages!!)

Many thanks in advance!
Dave.

[BadPvtDan]

Does The Owl's Nest have that information? We sure don't.

[1st Shirt]

If You have Aircraft Analyzer 2005 (ACA2005) you can at least do a search for the arrival airports and see where all your in-bound aircraft are coming from; that would help a little bit by matching up departure bases with the MAIW packages.

you can get ACA2005 here: http://aifs.pvdveen.net/

[james84]

I have solved a similar issue (slow PC) in another way: I simply did not install all the textures provided, only one (except for the special liveries). This both helped me free a good amount of HD space and to make the sim (FS2004) more fluent.
Of course you have to waste a bit of time in editing the aicraft.cfg file in order to change the texture folders' names, but it works fine!
Second: if you are looking for an utility that allow you to know which aircraft visits what airport, get MRAI Traffic Viewer from Avsim, it gives you a departure/arrival timetable, it's small and easy to use!

[DeepSea-Two-One]

Having individual repaints for a fleet of aircraft where the only change is the registration number is a huge resource hog/ FPS killer.

FS does not know that 99.9% of the texture is identical, so it has to load each into memory before it can be displayed.

Cutting down fleets down to one or two repaints will help a lot.

You want to check the AF2/AFX/ADE files with your FSX airports without the scenery turned on. I've found several of the UK military airports were updated to WGS84 survey data in FSX - so FS9 based AFD files will be off slightly.

Eliminating AI packages, scenery and repaints, from areas of the world which do not visit the UK will have no impact on your FSX operations. Yes, it will speed up the intial start of FSX a little bit. But once FSX has stated, sceneries and AI from other parts of the world has no impact on performance.

[davem]

Thanks for all the help so far, I should make a bit clearer than in my original post that I'm using FSX so the utilities recommended cannot find the required traffic files although ACA2010 does look to be one answer

If I was to go down the route of of deleting skins and editing cfgs, would i not have to change the aircraft titles in the flight plans themselves as well? If I get bored over Christmas this seems an eminently sensible way of doing things especially as a US Herc parked at FFD is a US Herc parked at FFD, no matter what number someone's painted on it!

Dave.

[james84]

If I was to go down the route of of deleting skins and editing cfgs, would i not have to change the aircraft titles in the flight plans themselves as well?

At all! If you do change the aircraft titles, you would have to decompile the flightplans and copy/paste the new titles, otherwise you won't see the aircrafts!
The only thing you have to do is getting a single texture (open them with DTXbmp if you want to see how they look and to find the special liveries), then edit ONLY the texture=... line

For example you might have
texture=USAF_WA_64_87-213
...
texture=USAF_WA_64_89-574

it has to become (for every aircraft)
texture=USAF_WA_64

and you must have ONLY a texture folder called texture.USAF_WA_64 in your aircraft folder.
This is just an example, but in some cases it would be better to have the whole fleet because all the aircrafts are different from each other(such as the Nellis aggressor F-16s), but most of the times you can just use one texture.
Keep in mind that some aircrafts belong to different units as well!
It's a time consuming process, but it's worth the time wasted especially if you have an old PC or don't feel like having too much space occupied by your sim on the HD.

[davem]

Many thanks James for confirming that.

I also found that AIFP shows all bases visited by a traffi cfile which will make thinning them out much easier!

Thanks!

[james84]

No problem!