Looks like Just Flight has finally moved their Traffic Global product out of development and into the hands of consumers. I’ve been paying attention to this for a little while and it holds promise. How long until I can not resist replacing the default behaviour of X-Plane throwing traffic up in front of me?
I picked a random screenshot. Not sure if it is representative
Traffic Global for X-Plane 11 (Windows) provides high quality animated AI aircraft models in authentic airline liveries and with full 3D sound and lighting and effects. Installation is simple and the software is ready to run ‘out the box’.
Traffic Global comes with 65 aircraft types and over 860 liveries covering most of the world’s airlines. Over 600,000 flights are included by default and these cover more than 3,000 global airports with complex, multi-point, multi-day flight schedules. New or altered aircraft liveries can be easily added and do not require any additional configuration.
Traffic Global loads everything in the background and is usually ready to go as soon as your flight starts. Even with hundreds of AI aircraft on screen and more being simulated nearby, simulator performance is barely affected.
The AI aircraft respond to the movements of your aircraft as you move around an airport and the software is compatible with all third-party airports. Seven new controllable external views allow you to follow individual AI aircraft and three new control windows are also included: a radar display centred on your aircraft, a flight board which is switchable between all nearby airports and a flight plan display showing nearby airports, taxiways and flying aircraft.
I want to believe that so much!
The stock X-plane AI aircraft are horrible in that regard. 20 is too much, and that’s not even in the same order of magnitude than something that feels believable.
Yes! Especially when all 20 show up at your departure airport and try to leave all at once! …which has happened enough time already.
I am a little reluctant to get this for one specific reason. XP’s lousy ATC. Let’s face is. Except when on the ground at an airport, you really don’t see a lot of planes…sure the occasional TCAS excitement but besides that??? So while you don’t see that many aircraft while flying, you do hear them on the radio.
And my point is, XP’s ATC is gawd awful when it comes to call signs. I have yet to hear an airline (despite my having tried to edit it in the XP Planemaker (its under author). So airlines check I with a standard GA callsign except, they mess tat up too! “Boeing seven hundred thirty-seven to eight hundred Sierra Whisky…” for a Southwest B737-800
Yeah. X-Plane is using a tex-to-speach converted that always makes some interesting choices. And I am fairly sure that Traffic Global avoids the ATC … so you would just have to turn it off. At $50 US I am hesitant, although I really want to add life to the world, to test it out
I am curious if the new Microsoft Flight Simulator has any ATC.
Looks interesting, but with no ATC then initial reports are that it does stuff like have flights arrive in-front of you taking off when on finals etc.
I think they’ve tried to balance ease of use with good performance, but as someone that buys all of these things, on a quick look it seems like World Traffic 3 is probably still king on X-Plane at least. The trouble with WT3 is just that the ATC commands don’t appear in VR, plus the hooks for other stuff with voice output/recognition like Pilot2ATC don’t exist. WT3 also takes a bit of setting up, as you need to register the flight plan, but if you do use its ATC then you do get good and more realistic AI separation.
I hate using these traffic things and then seeing aircraft fly in-front of me…
…a opposed to now where I just ignore the wonky ATC and take off in front of an AI bird on final LOL
I didn’t realize that XP was using a text-to-speach program…a bad design choice since you can get by with a few hundred COMAIR and MILAIR call signs. From a programing standpoint, a simple look up table is much more efficient in terms of CPU usage that any test-to-speech algorithm.
That said…when I developed Pilate’s Ghost (s simNovel) I used a text to speech program for the voice acting (all ATC). The story takes place in Switzerland (and Liechtenstein) so needed voices speaking English with French and German accents…also a an American - I used French and German voices that were supposed to be speaking in their own language. So I tricked the app into speaking English by phonetically spelling out just about everything. For example, if I had just used the numeral 8, the German voice would say “acht”. So I would spell is as “Ay-tate” (or something like that).
I wonder if one could do the same with XP? Enter phonetic words for an AI COMAIR call sign. It will be a lot of work and likely just not worth it…but still…
Anyway, based on this thread, I will not be trying this out today as I planned…will wait until I hear more.
What to do instead…Mudspike Christmas Flight? I think I shall.
I just picked this one up. I have WT3, but it was a hassle setting it up, and I ended up rarely using it.
So far Traffic Global seems much better IMHO, just because you can forget about it. I also like the fact that the airlines seem to be appropriate to whatever region you are flying, which is not the case for WT3…
For example, this is the ramp at Luton (EGGW)…
At $50 it seems a bit pricey but I am only just starting to dig into it. The flight schedule page is nice, as is the radar screen. I would say that it is a promising start. The major thing missing is GA traffic, which leaves the FBO ramps looking decidedly empty.
If you don’t care about planes doing odd things but things looking busy, then X-life has a free version worth a look (I wouldn’t bother with the deluxe version, but free is a good price) - https://jardesign.org/x-life/www/
None of these add-ins use XP ATC. It’s terrible in-built feature and a waste of time, usually happily directing you into a mountain. Even using AI traffic/planes on X-Plane is fairly unusable, as they take a huge amount of processing power with little gain.
Just Flight Traffic Global looks good if you don’t want to enter a flight plan, or even a departure / arrival location - it just puts some traffic around you doing stuff. On the ground it can avoid your aircraft ok, but in the air, as it has no idea what you are doing without a plan, then it seems stuff will struggle to have any real separation, leading to stuff like a few aircraft all landing on the same runway or approach. As it’s just out I’m sure they’ll improve that. World Traffic 3 requires more setting up (you have to fill your destination and do ATC prompts, invisible in VR) but it’s not perfect either. X-Life is ok, but is fairly un-maintained now and needs airports to be configured for it, and also mysteriously lags in VR, so in summary, they are all pretty bad.
So I finally decided to pick this up since I’m building a new install of X-Plane. It is really pretty nice. What I like most about it - no muss/no fuss install process. No management of it, just fire it up and it does its thing. Not perfect, but looks good enough. I’ll be happy when they expand it to have GA aircraft. More on it later (as in…I gotta go to bed…)
Yeah. It’s on my short list to make AH2XP a little more lively. Just waiting for the X-Plane betas to stabilize and get my Reverb controllers working again.
Is there any interaction between XP11’s ATC and these flights? Doesn’t look sound like it. Seems like a large omission. TG seems to manage the traffic but it’s not exposed to you via ATC interaction as far as I can tell.
See, I’m talking myself out of it
I never thought FSX/P3D’s ATC would be the “gold standard” for single-player ops, but it is, I guess.
…which has happened enough time already.
