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This tutorial will guide you through the stages of adding your own custom AI traffic, using the many freeware items and utilities available. It will help those who may be having trouble installing a pre-made traffic addon such as ProjectAI or World of AI and also for those who wish to take AI traffic one step further and add airlines that may not be included in such addons. It will also help you get the best out of your Flight Simulator AI by adding the highest quality and up-to-date traffic available.
In this tutorial, we will be adding Virgin Atlantic to the Traffic Database.
Part A: Downloading and Sorting the Flightplans
1. The first thing I would recommend all users to do is to make a folder called "My Traffic" (or whatever you wish) to place all the files related to the airline you are planning to install. I would also recommend making a seperate folder for each airline:
2. Now we need to find the flightplans for our AI airline. We are going to use avsim (http://www.avsim.com) to find all the needed freeware items for this tutorial, although when you continue after this tutorial, you may wish to use other sources. So, let's do a search for 'Virgin Atlantic' under 'Flight Simulator 2004 AI Flight plans":
3. Look through the results and find the one which you think is the most suitable (and reliable) looking download (preferably a relative up-to-date one too!) For this tutorial, let's use the EvAi ones:
4. After the download, notice the Airport, Aircraft and Flightplans files. They are highlighted in the below image:
5. These files are the heart of the Virgin Atlantic AI airline. Copy them into your "My Traffic/Virgin Atlantic" Folder:
6. If you open the Aircraft and Flightplan text files, you will notice that each aircraft has a number (AC#). This is how the system recognises the different aircraft types.
Part B: Downloading and Sorting the Aircraft
1. Now that we have the flightplans sorted, we need to assign some aircraft to them. So, let's start with the first one (AC#1) The Virgin A343. We now need to do another search on avsim for this aircraft. Search for 'Virgin Atlantic' again but this time under the 'Flight Simulator 2004 - AI Aircraft' option:
2. After looking through the results, we come across this:
3. Now, some of you may have noticed that this is only the Virgin Atlantic Textures for 'The Fruit-Stand A340-300'. So we also need to download the base package:
4. Now you will have the two zip files. One for textures and one for the base package. Extract the Base package (TFS_A340-300) to your main Flight Simulator 2004/Aircraft folder:
5. Then copy the texture file from the other zip file into the TFS_A340-300 folder:
6. Now that we've added a texture folder, we also need to add the 'fltsim' entry to go with it. So, open the [fltsim.X]_VIR and copy the contence into the aircraft.CFG of the TFS_A340-300. Make sure that you open the .cfg file with notepad!
7. IMPORTANT: Now that you have copied the fltsim entry into the aircraft.cfg, you also need to add the appropriate ending (the .X bit.) This MUST go in the correct order, i.e adding 1 each time. So the first is .0 then .1 then .2 and so on:
8. Now that you have the aircraft.cfg sorted, copy the 'title=' entry from the Virgin A340 into the original Aircraft text document back in My Traffic/Virgin Atlantic folder. Make sure that you overwrite the bit between the two "".
And that's it for AC#1. I know it seems like a long process here, but once you get used to it and have done it a couple of times, each aircraft will be done in a matter of seconds. Now for this next bit, you will have to use a bit of initiative to fill in the remaining four aircraft. So once you are finished, you should have a complete list of title entries, for the appropriate aircraft.
Part C: Compiling the Traffic
1. Now that you have your completed list of title entries for the aircraft...
2. ...Save the aircraft text file. Now for this next bit I recommend that you download the World of AI installer from http://www.world-of-ai.com. Once you have downloaded it, extract all the files to a folder of your choice. Then copy the three files from the My Traffic/Virgin Atlantic folder into the World of AI folder:
3. Then open up the 'TTools' application and click on the three files on the left hand side (which are your Virgin Atlantic files). They should appear highlighted. Then click on the compile button and Job done!
This will then create a .bgl file in the World/Scenery folder of Flight Simulator:
List of Useful Websites:
http://www.avsim.com
http://www.world-of-ai.com
http://www.ai-aardvark.com
http://www.projectai.com
I hope that this tutorial is clear and precise, and helps you along the way to having the most realistic and high quality AI traffic possible.
Thank you for taking the time to read through,
George
