ACTIVE Option to remove static aircrafts?

[kermit_70]

Hello,

this is in part a question and in part a suggestion for you guys at ORBX.

 

Disclaimer: Your products are in my opinion top-of-the-line for FSX scenery. Beautiful and effective. Please keep up with your hard work!

 

Comment: when I think at FTX airports (either freeware in Global or payware in FTX Regions), I realise that their static aircrafts lay in an overlapping/gray-zone between your business core (scenery) and AI traffic simulation (which as far as I know ORBX is not currently involved in). I mean, you can look at static aircrafts on the ramp either as objects part of the scenery, or as actual part of a living traffic system. It is clear to me that there are instances where this could create a conflict with third-party add-ons meant to manage live AI traffic on top of ORBX scenery (and in ORBX airports). The say the least, ORBX static aircrafts are occupying spots that are not available to live traffic.

In my opinion this results in a poorer experience.

 

Question: is there currently a way to remove ORBX static aircrafts from all installed ORBX airports (either freeware or pay ware), without going one-by-one in their scenery folders? For example, all default FSX static aircrafts are held in a single folder that can be "killed".

 

Suggestion1: if the answer to my question is "no", could you make an option for that in FTX Central? Or develop a removal tool?

 

Suggestion2: why don't you just get in the business of making AI aircraft models (that could be used by traffic-injecting software, like UT2), as well? 

 

Many thanks for your products, anyway.

[Ben McClintock]

Hi Kermit,

 

Most of our products have the ability to disable static aircraft in their control panel. As an example, Jarrad's KSEZ contains an option for "Detailed Static Aircraft":

 

As far as I am aware, there is no automated solution to do this for all our airports as many of the developers have their own unique way of placing the static aircraft with their scenery (which may cause undesirable side effects if FTX Central or another tool automatically tries to remove them).

 

As for creating AI models, we have our own freeware AI packs made by Graham Eccleston. You can find these on our website here: https://fullterrain.com/freeware/ai

[kermit_70]

Excellent, I see you are on top od it!

One question: I am not quite sure why the GA aircrafts in your AI pack are "region-specific"... Could they be used in Europe as well, by third-party traffic-injector (such as UT2)?

I feel I am missing something "technical", here...

 

Please fill me up.

Thanks!

[Bruce Hamilton]

Third party AI programs come with their own models, they don't use AI that may exist on your hard drive.  Also be aware that disabling statics through the control panel does not make those spaces available for AI, they've been shut off in the scenery files to prevent AI from running over the static models.

[kermit_70]

Actually, I do believe new AI models can be installed and used in UT2. Some people do just that, create beautiful and accurate AI models, to be injected by third party software.

Thank you for the clarification about ORBX making parking slots occupied by static models always unavailable in their scenarios, even if static aircrafts are not selected in the settings: very useful to know this for a fact.

I personally think it would be better if there was an option to re-activate those slots, so that active traffic could actually use them. 

This is obviously more of a problem in small airports, where static aircrafts occupying unusable spots simply make the airport less lively even if you use software for active traffic.

 

I hope this makes sense.

 

Cheers