World Traffic 3 for X-Plane

In case you haven’t heard, a new and much improved version of World Traffic has been released, v3.07 as of this post. There are a number of new features, but from what I gather, the most important of these is the plugin’s ability to auto generate ground routes associated with either generated or actual flight schedules, from the WED ground routes and traffic flows built in to X-Plane and some well designed custom scenery. ← That was a mouthful, but what does it mean?

Most of the default scenery in X-plane have WED (World Editor) designed ground routes built in. Also, some, but not all custom scenery have these WED ground routes added. If the scenery that you are using has WED ground routes in the design, then WT3 will be able to create flights, including SIDs/STARs and pushback/taxi routes to bring your scenery to life. There is also a simulated radar to track current flights near your departure and arrival airports. One can select an aircraft on radar and view the flight, which is quite addictive. The AI aircraft use flaps. spoilers, and reverse thrusters/beta. They also use a tug at pushback.

If your chosen custom scenery does not have WED ground routes added, WT3 will start generated flights on the runway.

Optionally, you could open up World Editor and add them. I haven’t actually done this, but it is said to not be difficult. YMMV

BTW, once you’ve got WT3 installed and configured, it takes a lot less time to generate air and ground traffic near your departure and destination airports than it did to write the preceding paragraphs.

The arrivals and depatutes information screen is quite handy. Green: scheduled flight, Amber: pushback within 10 mins, Blue: active flight

I am only a few days into Wt3 and by no means an expert. But here are a few things that I would recommend to make the installation and configuration process as painless as possible.

  1. Watch this tutorial video. Well worth the time investment.
  1. Download the latest build, AI aircraft, and Real Routes from this page:

http://www.classicjetsims.com/WorldTraffic/updates.html

  1. Read the very thorough “review” here:

Support forum:

Cool python script that analyzes your Custom Scenery folder for WT3 compatibility:

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This looks really interesting - thanks. I enjoyed playing around with X-life here and much prefer traffic in my sims:

…although never did get around to writing up anything about it (part XIV of MCMLXX, Mudspike article dreams go to die pile). Does the traffic use SID/STARs? (I will look, just if you know off hand).

The hardest bit to swallow, as per a lot of the commercial sim products, is the price at $30 USD. That’s over 1.3 complete DCS F5E Tigers! :slight_smile:

Top level link to store here:

http://www.classicjetsims.com/WorldTraffic/

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Affirmative. And to top that off, the developer has a Pilot2ATC interface under construction.

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Sorry for the bump here - but after seeing you mention it once again elsewhere, I was wondering how you are still liking WT3? Has it matured any more and once you have it all installed is it pretty hands off?

I’ve got to have AI traffic in a civilian flight simulator. Currently running FSXSE. How intuitive is WT3?

Not having jumped on board since version 3, it’s hard to compare what came before. But once 3 is setup, and it’s not difficult, you can basically run with it. The steps are 1) install the plugin 2) download and install the AI aircraft 3) downloads real routes if you care 4) configure and fly. One caveat is that for it to work, there must be taxi routes at your departure and arrival airports. Since WT was somewhat under the radar prior to v3, there are a bunch of freeware airports that either do not have taxi routes added, or have incorrect ones. However, most of those by known developers, like MisterX, have good traffic routes as part of the airport scenery. Furthermore, people are adding taxi routes for popular airports for download on X-Plane.org, so chances are pretty good that you won’t have to build them. Or maybe I’ve just been lucky.

In summary, maybe an hour or two of work to install, read the important parts of the manual, and configure your first flight. Then you are off and running.

It’s about as a must-have as ortho photo scenery is, IMO. Really brings XP alive.

See the links above for more info. Disclaimer: when I say that you can run with it, there are updates fairly often. But I’ve been on the same version for a while, and try to keep any OCD updating in check. Not been a problem.

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Great info - I think I will grab it soon (hoping for a holiday sale…)…

I have to hand it to Shade Tree Micro Aviation and JAR (and X-Aviation I think)…they have some great auto-updaters that phone home each time you load a module and let you know if something needs updating. It’d be nice if that was the standard.

Yeah, well the actual program updater is really simple, but you do have to check once in a while at the dev site. LOL, I just found this review, which is informative, but what I’m chuckling at is this guys home pit (more like a freaking C152 fuselage). He must not be married or have kids :slight_smile:

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Whatever density settings I used on WT3, on busy airports the aircraft tend to bunch up too close (or rather, ATC wouldn’t let that happen in real life). It looks like the upcoming 3.2 release aims to tackle that:

Glad to see WT3 still under active development.

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