Adjusting AI settings in FS2004

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Donovan
Posts: 90
Joined: Wed Apr 24, 2013 12:08 pm
Location: KCMA

Adjusting AI settings in FS2004

Post by Donovan »

Occasionally (thankfully not too often) if the traffic is heavy, or with heavy overcast, I will lose radio communications and the comm system seems to freeze for a variable length of time. I generally will be able to receive ATC, but cannot transmit. On rarer occasions, I will lose the ability to control the aircraft. This happened tonight just before setting up for the approach. OUCH!

The sequence of events seems to go
1 -- lose the other traffic, both my fellow pilots, and the drones.
2 -- lose the ability to transmit for an indeterminate amount of time, sometimes requiring closing the PE window and reconnecting and squawking
3 -- lose the controls (and virtual lives and property)

I have minimized this by only flying on a fresh reboot and temporarily disabling the antivirus while flying. I also cut down the range of planes added to the multiplayer session to 10.0 miles, and decreased the frequency of plane position updates to 3 per second. Should I cut down these values further? Other suggestions?

My system is a dual core 2.66 Dell -- am slowly purchasing parts for a new build. In the meantime, any help is appreciated!
Don
Keith Smith
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Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2010 8:38 pm
Location: Pompton Plains, NJ
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Re: Adjusting AI settings in FS2004

Post by Keith Smith »

Hi there,

Unfortunately, the inner workings of the sim are hidden from us, we simply interact with it through an programmable interface. It makes it very hard to debug issues like this. It doesn't help that the sim software is nearly 10 years old and wasn't really built with this level of AI traffic in mind. Either that, or something is happening at the hardware or OS level which is bringing that machine to its knees.

You might want to try running the task manager and see if anything else is coming to life which might be diverting resources away from PE and the sim, that's about the only suggestion I have.

Unless you're particularly wedded to FS2004, perhaps Xplane 9 would be a good option. Up until not that long ago, I was running xp9 very happily on an Intel Core Duo 2.8GHz machine.

Last suggestion would be to cut the multiplayer vis down even further to just a few miles. Some of the places you're flying have a really high density of drone aircraft that can tax the system pretty hard.
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