PilotEdge Forums

Keith (or anyone who knows the answer!) --

My question that follows is really geared towards networked setups like I have, where there multiple PCs acting as slave displays for FSX or P3D -- the slaves are running a full version of the simulator, but typically have a dummy airplane with no geometry selected to increase performance. The way FSX works, the fewer objects in the SimObject/Airplane folder, the faster the sim loads. For a standalone, non-PE sim, this means you can remove all of the A/C models except the dummy.

Flying on PE, though, external traffic is going to be visible so I presume the number of models cannot be zero. What is the minimum set of airplanes models that need to be present in the SimObjects/Airplanes folder for external depictions of traffic to work? All of the stock FSX models? Some subset of them?

On the reverse side of the coin, is there a way to take advantage of a large "hangar" of aircraft? Is there, for example, a mapping table that's user-accessible within the PE installation that would allow us to indicate that some code that's provided by the PE client as an aircraft object should be mapped to a specific aircraft model installed on the simulator?

I'm pretty sure this has been discussed several times already, but my searches were only turning up fleeting references that didn't really answer my questions in a definitive way.

Thank!

Mark,

The minimum set should be the stock FSX aircraft as well as the squawkbox and VIP model sets that are shipped with the pilot client.

If you'd like to take advantage of additional aircraft that you might have, you could create your own mappings in the 'aircraft' folder of the PE client. Peruse the pe.smx file and you'll get an idea of how it works. You're basically mapping local aircraft titles (which are found in the aircraft.cfg file for a given aircraft, replacing any spaces with plus signs) to aircraft ICAO codes.

When you encounter an aircraft on the network, the ICAO code for the aircraft is sent to your client. It's up to your client to map that ICAO code to a locally installed aircraft. The mapping is not just one to one, there's a complex series of fallback steps that take place to make a herculean effort to render the 'closest' plane for the job. All you have to do, though, is tell the system what planes you have, and which ICAO codes they map to.

Does the AI Data received from PE include livery info? As in I have a nice re-paint, that my buddy who is on PE with me also has loaded, will we see the correct paints when I pull up beside him in the Form?

The AI models don't specify an airline or livery, but you can specify one when you connect. You can map specific ICAO codes, airlines and liveries to whatever aircraft you like using the configuration files. Look through the existing VIP.SMS file, you'll get the idea.