MyTraffic Interactive

Version 2.1
AI traffic at Your finger tip
By Burkhard Renk

Welcome!
You have enjoyed AI traffic, the living world in FSX outside Your cockpit, admired the 5000 AI
types on the 8000 active airports in MyTraffic? Want to start and remove AI planes without
the complexity of creating and compiling schedules? You want to create them on airports or
mid air? You want the AI planes to flight plans instead of shortest routes? You even want to
modify flight plans once the aircraft are airborne, get them back to the departure airport?
You want to save all an interactive AI setup and fire it into your FSX setup using a simple file
open dialog? Or switch smoke systems on or off on AI aircraft?

Welcome! MyTraffic Interactive allows all of this with a few mouse clicks. Build around the
MyTraffic aircraft and editor infrastructure, based on 8 years of knowledge on AI user needs
and AI traffic programming.

What do you need?

FSX Service Pack 2 or Acceleration are required, as is Dot Net 3.5 and higher. Service Pack 2
and Dot Net 3.5 are free updates that bring your PC and FSX to an actual version, and
Acceleration if the second best add on to FSX after MyTraffic itself, of course.

MyTraffic Interactive installs a very few files only:

MyTrafficInteractive.exe is the application that does the work.

Four data files contain all the data describing the actual MyTraffic Installation:

MyAircraft.dat describes all the aircraft that come with MyTraffic, MyPlanes.dat provides
the association of types to airlines, MyAirportsshort.dat the airports, and MyPlanes.dat
contains aircraft registrations. If you are using a previous version of MyTraffic, or have added
aircraft or airports yourself, all these files can be created directly from MyTraffic editor.
By default, MTI reads MyAircraft.dat from the folder “MT_Plans\2010_DX9”, so the ones
used for the actual MyTraffic schedules. You can select another folder, if you select “MTI”
the file in the MTI folder will be used.

The user interface

The user screen has changes a lot since version 1.0, so also users who already used MTI 1.0
should read the following. Once you start the application, you will see a screen with many
fields, don’t be afraid.

The colors are intended to help you through the screen. The fields in the turquoise rectangle
have to do with aircraft selection, the green ones with airport selection, the deep sky blue
with enroute AI. All things in the right side display what is happening inside FSX after
creation of the aircraft.

You also see that most buttons are red – FSX isn’t up yet and so MTI cannot do anything.

Let us start FSX next. Once it is up, the display changes automatically. The buttons to create
AI aircraft that are on an airport or enroute get green. The connection to FSX could be
established, and it even found the airport nearest to you, if you start on an airport it will be
this airport. You can always select another airport from the Airport column in the green
rectangle or just by typing its ICAO identifier – but most of the time you are more interested
in the airport you currently are. The status message always tells you the message FSX sends
back to MTI, in this case the simple message that the connection could be established.
 Creating AI aircraft on the airport
If you want you can now select the airline, in the “Airlines”column, if we select FEDEX the
types list the types existing for FEDEX in MyTraffic. As a shortcut, after clicking into the field
you can press the first character “f” and are already near. To get back to get all types
displayed, we just click on “ Show all types”.
Now let decide which aircraft we want to use. The “Types” column shows us all the types, for
this example we select the Fed Ex MD11, so we click on MD11-Fed1.

Now the text boxes in the left get filled. We see the type name as defined in the MyTraffic
data base, the title it has in the aircraft.cfg file of the MD11, the airport and a registration.

In the lower field we now see the registration, one of these is already proposed, we can
easily select another one – and click on “Create AI Aircraft at airport”.

The way any AI aircraft gets requested from FSX, be it through scheduling or through MTI
now, is using the title string. You can edit this string and paste in the title of another aircraft,
this one will be used. In principle you can use this easy way to have non – MyTraffic aircraft
displayed. While this works well with the Microsoft supplied standard aircraft and repaints
of these, other user aircraft may not work. Quite a few, if used as AI aircraft, just crash FSX,
others may not display, and still others may behave very strange – that is a property of the
third party plane, just try it out if it works. Many user planes don’t work as AI planes – they
are not made for it.

It will appear in the right column, and, more important, in FSX on an appropriate parking
position. If no parking is available, we will get a message in the Status Message Box. Also
other messages may show up.

If the aircraft has been created, the status message will display the “Created message” and
show the ID as an integer.

This aircraft can remain there forever now, if we only want to create some background for
our scenes.
MTI is constantly checking if the aircraft it manages still exist in the reality bubble. Soon
after the aircraft gets removed by FSX, either because it leaves the bubble, or because of a
timeout waiting for ATC, it will disappear from the list of managed aircraft. As long as the
status message background keeps light green, we can assume they all are still there.

We create a few more Fedex Aircraft in Frankfurt, before we continue, and do not forget to
have a look at them in FSX.
 Putting the managed AI aircraft into action
Once we click onto any aircraft managed by MTI, the properties of the selected aircraft
appear in the right text boxes, the buttons on the right side get green, we can work with
them now.

The most important action to do now is to assign a flight plan to the aircraft. We can use any
flight plan for FSX for this purpose which is in the Microsoft defined PLN format, as example
created from the dialogs inside FSX. We press “Assign Flightplan”, and get a dialog to open a
plan – of course you have to created one first.

Once we open it, the flight plan will be applied – you can watch the aircraft going from
clearance to takeoff. Once it is airborne, we can terminate the flight plan and assign another
one, in the above example we have provide a flight plan back to origin – you may see the
aircraft fly a few curves and to land at the departure airport after 15 minutes typically. If the
flight plans were made too rough, I’ve seen aircraft to go lost at the borders of the reality
bubble, so this is for you to experiment now.

If you create a flight plan from your airport to the same airport, the aircraft will fly just one
loop – an easy way to keep the tarmac and air around you busy.

If the selected aircraft contains a smoke system, you can switch this on and off.

Assign a flight without flight plan creation

While the above method to send an aircraft offers the biggest flexibility, for some purposes
this just it too much work. MyTraffic Interactive 2.1 therefore offers an easier way to make a
parked aircraft active.

In the above example we have created a Ryanair B737-800 at Hahn airport, which we want
to send to EGSS – London Stansted. We hace selected the aircraft in the list of managed
aircraft, then we press the button “Send to destination” in the rightmost yellow-green
frame.
 We get a small new dialog box that just asks us where the
aircraft that we have selected is supposed to fly to. We
just type in EGSS and press send to!
Now a lot is going to happen in the background. MTI looks
into the MyTraffic\MTI\PLN folder if there is a flight plan
for these two airports, named IFR_DEPA_DEST.PLN, where
DEPA is the departure airport and DEST the destination
airport. If there is no such file, MTI will create a simple
airport to airport flight plan.
Now the flight plan will be assigned to the aircraft – after a few seconds you will see it to
push back.

Creating enroute ATC controlled AI

Let us now go to the second method to create AI aircraft – we can initiate ATC controlled
enroute aircraft directly using MTI 2.0.

Besides selecting an aircraft, we now have to fill the fields in the deep sky blue rectangles.
The first thing we need is the flight plan. We can easily get this by pressing the gray button
and selecting a flight plan, often it will be one that generates landing traffic at our airport.

The other thing we have to consider is which fraction of the flight plan has already been
done, so where on the plan the aircraft currently is. The number before the point contains
the waypoint index, and the number afterwards how far along the route to the next
waypoint the aircraft is to be positioned. The first waypoint index is 0. For example, 0.0
indicates that the aircraft has not started on the flight plan, 2.5 would indicate the aircraft is
to be initialized halfway between the third and fourth waypoints (which would have indexes
2 and 3). The waypoints are those recorded in the flight plan, which may just be two
airports, and do not include any taxiway points on the ground. Also there is a threshold that
will ignore requests to have an aircraft taxiing or taking off, or landing. So set the value after
the point to ensure the aircraft will be in level flight. The above example only has two
waypoints, the two airports, so the aircraft will be initialized a bit more than half way.

This quantity needs to be treated with care. If it is too small, the aircraft may still be outside
the reality bubble, the creation will fail, but you get a message, if it is too big the aircraft may
be put to a level too high that it cannot land properly, all this is for the users experiments.

How to keep the setup of managed aircraft

Once you have created a set of parked and active aircraft, you may want to store the result
of your work. We simply press “Store this list”, get asked for a file name and the list will be
written in ASCI format. Here a small example how it may look:
48 | A319-SBI1 | VP-BTX | A319 MyPaint78 | EDDF | 0.0 |
49 | A319-TAP1 | CS-TTK | A319 MyPaint46 | EDDF | 0.0 | C:\Users\Admin\Documents\Flight Simulator X Files\IFR_EDDF_EDFH.PLN
4A | A319-UEA1 | B-6155 | A319 MyPaint89 | EDDF | 0.0 |
4B | A320-GOW1 | VT-WAO | A320 MyPaint157 | EDDF | 0.4 | C:\Users\Admin\Documents\Flight Simulator X Files\IFR_EDFH_EDDF.PLN
4C | A320-Ind1 | VT-EVR | A320 MyPaint134 | EDDF | 0.5 | C:\Users\Admin\Documents\Flight Simulator X Files\IFR_EDFH_EDDF.PLN
4D | A320-Ind1 | VT-EVR | A320 MyPaint134 | EDDF | 0.6 | C:\Users\Admin\Documents\Flight Simulator X Files\IFR_EDFH_EDDF.PLN

This list contains as well aircraft created on the airport as aircraft created enroute. Now we
can end MTI as example – all the managed aircraft will disappear. We start MTI again, press
“load list of managed aircraft”, and the aircraft will start to drop in again in FSX, either on the
airport, sleeping or starting with clearance, or midair as we placed them.

In order to keep the load on FSX minimal and to ensure FSX has time to respond properly,
MTI will request one aircraft per second to be created – if you watch MTI or FSX or traffic
explorer you can see them to be created one after another.

To get more life, you can read the same file several times. Currently the total number of
managed aircraft controlled by MTI is limited to 100. If you try to create more aircraft, MTI
will display a connection error, but continue to operate.

MyTraffic Interactive and the MyTraffic Time Machine

Sometimes users might want to mix an aircraft into their scenes that no longer flies, but is a
part of the MyTraffic time machine. My bet is the most prominent candidate for this to be
the Concorde, or you want to revive an airline that no longer exists, Trans World Airlines
and Pan AM as example. Also this can be done easily with MTI.
Just select the year you want to be used to present the types and paint schemes in the lower
left corner, and the types of that era will be displayed, like for Lufthansa in 1970 in the above
example. Note that by default MyTraffic does not unpack all historical models, you should
unpack them from MyTraffic Communicator.

Now more ideas are welcome!