Yes, briefly.
Well for me anyway I found the learning curve much higher with aisort. I was presented with this big gui and excel-type listing. Plus I have to name my files these arcane names like AirportList.txt. I prefer to name my airports file, aal_airports.dat (for American Airlines), and nwa_airlines.dat (for Northwest)...
The "Airportslist.txt" is the file created by the Traffic Toolbox
"dump airports" command. This is put in your main FSX folder as "airport_list_1" with no extension. I rename it
and put it in the aisort "FSX_Traffic" directory.
You only need to do this once, or when you make changes
to airports in FSX. It serves as the "master" list for info
when aisort runs. Its the same as the "airports.dat" file
for the TDBB.
I still name my input files, as you do, with self-explanatory names. ( Filghtplans_LOT.txt, Aircraft_LOT.txt, etc )
Paul, you don't need to do that. All that you need to do, is edit your airports.dat file to reflect phantom parking so that TDBB will compile the route.
Example:
KDFW
{
PARKING,19.0,GATE
PARKING,19.0,GATE
PARKING,33.0,GATE
PARKING,33.0,GATE
}
I put these "fake" vals in the airports.dat file, and the compiler is fooled. I use the values 19.0 (for smaller parking spots) and 33.0 (for larger spots) because those are non-standard values...that way, I can tell where I've made mods if I ever want to remove them. Note I do not modify the fs10airports.dat file that comes with the SDK. I make MY OWN airports.dat file for the airline I'm converting, and modify that file.
Does this affect the sim at all? Do my routes disappear for lack of parking? Absolutely NOT. TDBB is overly restrictive. In the sim, there will be space at most airports, despite what TDBB says...so the trick is fooling it to make it compile.
Hummm...I had thought about trying that but didn't get
around to trying it. That was before I made the determination
that there was something seriously wrong with the way
TDBB deals with parking allocation. I'll definately give
it a shot.
So, you don't need to make afcads for these in most cases.
In a few instances, yes, you will need to actually make more parking (such as at MPTO in my case of Copa Airlines...) but in general, no. The worst thing that happens, is that aircraft land, and then disappear when they start their taxi. A little observing finds this problem.
I have a bunch of Eastern European airports, mostly old
military fields, that I "re-activated" in FS9, added alot of
custom hard shelters, etc, and then scheduled dozens of
Mig-15, 17 and 19 aircraft with repainted markings for
Poaland, Hungary, USSR and Czechoslovakia to fly from
airport to airport, along with some TU-95 Bears and IL-18 Coots.
I have to add sufficient parking to the fields and make sure
there was enough large spaces to handle the TU-95's.
The default FSX airports just didn't cut it so I imported my
FS9 AFCAD and scenery files and made the necessary changes
to overcome the terrain bleed-through on the runways and
some "re-location" issues.
In the case of EPWA ( Okecie, Warsaw ), I have some of the
military traffic visiting but mostly commercial, and TDBB just
would not compile my flightplans without errors. I finally
reached 118 spaces of varying sizes when I gave up!
Hopefully lc0227's utility will allow me to use my FS9
traffic BGL's and have them co-exist, actively, with
FSX BGL's.
I'll try it again since you mentioned it. One thing about it, I have a well-established method/system for converting FS9 ai traffic files, and it works really well.
Having to manually fix the day of the week, though, is REALLY annoying. I am glad Frank knew about that and coded his tool appropriately. Maybe for that, it would be worth it to learn how to use it.
As I mentioned above, once you put the airportlist file
in it's place then the input files are only the schedules and
aircraft files that can have any name.
And of course, as you are aware I'm sure, the TDBB allows you
to specify the source files ( of any name ) that are to be used.
At my last attempt to satisfy TDBB, I was using the initial
output from aisort, before compilation, making whatever
tweaks I thought were needed, then submitting them to
TDBB. So, in this case, aisort is doing for me the same
thing that the program you are using is doing for you.
Our procedures merge at the "bottleneck"...TDBB!
Paul
My system handles up to 40 without too much fps loss. 90 ai starts to kill fps. One thing I do in my traffic BGL's is normalize them to the FSX traffic slider, so that 50% yields exactly 50% of the aircraft. Works like a charm.
