P3D v2 AI helicopter traffic... what would it take?

[spatialpro]

Just here to shoot the breeze about something on my mind...

I now fly exclusively in P3D2. I miss HeliTraffic 2009 (published by Flight1), which I can't get to work in the new sim. What would it take, and where would one start, to develop an addon for realistic helicopter AI (to be released FREE by the way)? Ideally it'd be even better than HeliTraffic, i.e. smoother, more realistic helicopter flight, the ability to arrive and depart from other moving objects (e.g. AI ships) and hopefully a bit more future-proof. I suspect SimConnect is the way to go, but as an airfield developer I have no idea where to start... or even if it worth setting off down the road at all (which could be veeeeery long)?!

Andy

 

[tomasz2013]

I have been working on a similar problem for a few days. My intent is creating an original ap with ai traffic for both ac and ai. the ac ai is fine, but i could not get the helos to take off from a separate runway. in order to get ai helos to work this is what i did. granted the helos take off and land like an ac they do not hover. and this is for FSX but since Prepar3d is pretty much the same it should work. i havnt installed it yet so i dont know for sure.

my entire ap is the primary, i had to create a separate ap, secondary ap with ADEX within the primary coordinates. i will skip some steps that were a learning curve.

create an area on the primary to set aside for the secondary (i have a flatten class mask exclude poly for my primary ap perimeter and an apron for the entire perimeter, i made the apron smaller in order to set aside space for the secondary).
i then created the secondary ap within the ap perimeter using lat/long( in the space i set aside same alt. after playing around with secondary ap area within the primary ap (placed generic bldgs and moved them around to mark my secondary ap perimeter) to make sure they did not overlap too much.
i created an apron at the secondary, added my 1000ft runway (i read 500 should work), added runway link, runway start, gates, taxi's, parking, hold short and ils hold short no comms for secondary ap. my primary ap is PACI and secondary is PACC. i then created my ai traffic, main ac for the primary PACI and helos for the secondary PACC. i also made a third fake ap as a destination 2hrs away by helo 1 by conventional ac. even tho my secondary has no comms the helo's transmit on another frequency and if you are too close to the secondary you will have to manually tune into your primary freq. the helo's need to be spaced out properly 3 min sep eta works great and even though my secondary ap has no comms if the helos are to close they will go around. they seem to need more space than reg ac.
i tried to make my helos take off and cross my main runway and my ap. unfortunatley i could not make the helos come in from the oposite direction. i had to only have 1 runway start otherwise they wouldnt take off in the direction i wanted and changing the pattern didnt help. i dont know if it is a hard landing but when the helos land there is a lot of smoke. also the helos i was using are chinooks from MAIW. i tried using Agusta Westland from FSX but couldnt get em to work. will try again another time.
hope this helps someone, a lot of work but i am happy.

tomasz