Traffic

[manlyman]

I was working the pattern at KSBP last evening. On my down wind leg I heard an aircraft call ground for clearance, he received taxi instructions. I looked over at the field to see if I could see him, I couldn't. He called tower, tower told him to hold short because I was on short final. As I came over the threshold I looked to see if I could see him, I couldn't. MY question is, why? Have I not done something right not being able to see him? Is there something I need to do for model matching?

Thanks,
David

[rtataryn]

Sometimes scenery elevations are different between simulators, so when an aircraft is on the ground it may be below the surface elevation of your simulator, making it invisible to you. When it takes off, you should see it rise up out of the runway. In the air the elevation difference is inconsequential. If you were both on the ground, he would see your aircraft as floating or hovering several feet off the ground.

[gavink42]

We often talk about the immersion breaking in the sim. For me, this is a biggie.

I'm in the middle of swaping from P3D to XP11, and would like to stay as "standard" as possible.

So...
1) What are people doing that causes the elevation difference (is it custom scenery, ortho, etc?)
And 2) What can I do to keep my elevations as "standard" as possible?

I've seen streams of people all on XP, but with multiple elevations.

There's nothing more beautiful than logging on and seeing live aircraft around your plane. And (for me), nothing kills the immersion more than a shark fin or levitating plane.

Thanks!

Gavin

[Ryan B]

I'm not really sure but I will say when using XP11 I notice far more targets corresponding to users than when I fly in P3D. I think P3D doesn't have the right models or something, even compared to FSX. For instance there is no default C172 in P3D etc. In P3D I'd bet over 50% of the time I don't see other user aircraft. But I also have a lot of payware socal airports... with different elevations.

[Keith Smith]

I understand your frustration, but this is an extremely complex topic. Each sim has its own idea of the terrain elevations that make up the world. Within each sim there are different custom scenery packages, as well as options to flatten or not flatten the runways (in the case of Xp10 and Xp11). Lastly, there are different models of the same aircraft (ie, C172), each with different reference points that represent the height of the aircraft above the ground.

The ultimate solution is to know whether a given aircraft is on the ground or not, and then to know the exact geometry of the models which are used to draw the aircraft. Only then can you happily ignore the specific altitude being reported by a given aircraft and instead tell the sim, "draw that plane at this exact spot, and place it at 0 AGL, plus whatever the known offset is between 0 AGL and reference point for the aircraft (maybe it's 2ft for 172, but it's 5ft for a CRJ), otherwise you STILL have planes running around on their belly.

Doing this requires knowing the elevation of the terrain wherever a plane is currently located. That requires the use of 'terrain probes', the technique for which varies from sim to sim. I'm not sure how CPU intensive that is, but I can imagine that doing it via SimConnect for P3D/FSX won't be pretty from a lag standpoint since it's all asynchronous.

I don't mean to paint a gloomy picture, but having a multiplatform solution to this is not on the cards any time soon. This was a known issue from day 1, and we're no closer to having a solution right now than we were 6 years ago.

Ryan, the aircraft matching files for P3D are different than FSX. We were aware that P3D didn't ship with a 172, so we adjusted the mapping file accordingly. You can review the list of planes that we expect to be in place for FSX and P3D by looking at the pe.smx file vs the pe.smd file in the PilotEdge\aircraft folder.

One last issue is that if P3D thinks a plane is underground, it will actually 'crash' the plane and remove it from the session. So, you won't see planes emerge from the ground in P3D/FSX....they just won't be there at all. That's more likely the issue behind the non-appearing planes issue rather than an aircraft mapping issue.

[gavink42]

Thanks Keith! I knew there was no easy way out of the elevation issue. It truly is something I can live with though.

Maybe someone could develop a "best practices" recommendation, to try and minimize the differences (at least on the same sim platform).

And your explanation of how P3D "crashes" and removes underground planes made me say "Ohhhh... that's why that happened when I ran P3D!"

Thanks!

Gavin

[Shinjo B]

The fix for me was updating the pe.smx file, as Keith mentioned.

[manlyman]

The fix for me was updating the pe.smx file, as Keith mentioned.

How is that accomplished?

[Keith Smith]

Go into the C:\program files (x86)\PilotEdge\aircraft folder, open the pe.smx or pe.smd file (for FSX or P3D respectively), then verify that you actually have all of the stock aircraft included in that file.