OnCourse Software

Gents,

I recently purchased PF3 and being quite familiar with ATC and flight planning in the real world quite quickly picked up how to best use the program (and using the excellent manual) and I can fly from gate to gate with no issue with the program pertaining to instructions to me and my PNF responding.

The only issue I seem to have is AI Chatter stops on climb and I never hear another AI aircraft again all the way to destination, even with a sky full of airplanes in a busy terminal area on approach to the same aerodrome I am approaching.

Clearance Delivery, Ground, Tower and Departure - no problem with the AI talking appropriately and matching what I see outside the windshield. Hand over to Centre and I may hear one or two AI calls and then that is it for the rest of the flight.

My AI is My Traffic Professional 6a. I use FSX Legacy (Acceleration) on a Windows 10 Pro i7-6700K, 16GB RAM, GTX1080. I am running AS16 alongside PF3. I have PMDG 737, 777, 747, Aerosoft A319-21 series, iFly 737, FSLabs A320 and Majestic Q400 and the behaviour is the same with all aircraft.

I mainly fly in Australia, and to that end, I use ORBX Australia and have most of their Australian add on airports plus Fly Tampa YSSY.

I also have FSUIPC latest version 494f installed.

I have been attempting to solve this myself for a few months now but it is time to reach out, as I am at a loss.

I accept that it is an issue on my PC given no one else is reporting it (there is a post from 2010 stating the same issue which was never answered) but I don't know where else to look. Everything is perfectly normal - no crashes, freezes, stutters, etc. I also know it must be an issue on my PC and not your program because I also have a competitors product which is no longer produced or developed (but it is still sold) and it does the same thing. All fine and plenty of AI Chatter until I am on climb with Centre and then silence to destination. The only difference is that the other product occasionally starts working (AI talking) again when I am taxiing to the gate.

Something is snuffing out AI Chatter - I hope that the collective wisdom here knows what that something is and where do I find him and fix it?

Kind regards,

Mark

mwa05 wrote: *

Mon Mar 27, 2017 10:53 pm

The only issue I seem to have is AI Chatter stops on climb and I never hear another AI aircraft again all the way to destination, even with a sky full of airplanes in a busy terminal area on approach to the same aerodrome I am approaching.

I ordinarily get plenty of AI chatter at cruise, depending on the amount of AI traffic on Center frequency. There is no "canned" chatter in PF3, so the chatter is all responsive to active AI that are tuned to your frequency. When you are tuned to Center, you will not hear chatter from AI in departure or approach phases, only from en route AI tuned to your Center frequency.

When you are handed to Approach, I do believe that there is a decrease in the amount of chatter you may hear, because PF3 is concentrating on issuing vectors for your approach. However this does not apply when you are tuned to Center. You may want to try adjusting the percentage of AI to see if you are able to get more en route traffic when you are on Center frequency.

Dan77 wrote: *

Tue Mar 28, 2017 12:08 am

mwa05 wrote: *

Mon Mar 27, 2017 10:53 pm

The only issue I seem to have is AI Chatter stops on climb and I never hear another AI aircraft again all the way to destination, even with a sky full of airplanes in a busy terminal area on approach to the same aerodrome I am approaching.

I ordinarily get plenty of AI chatter at cruise, depending on the amount of AI traffic on Center frequency. There is no "canned" chatter in PF3, so the chatter is all responsive to active AI that are tuned to your frequency. When you are tuned to Center, you will not hear chatter from AI in departure or approach phases, only from en route AI tuned to your Center frequency.

When you are handed to Approach, I do believe that there is a decrease in the amount of chatter you may hear, because PF3 is concentrating on issuing vectors for your approach. However this does not apply when you are tuned to Center. You may want to try adjusting the percentage of AI to see if you are able to get more en route traffic when you are on Center frequency.

Thank you for the reply. My traffic is set at 50%, I will increase it and see if it makes a difference.

I am getting a "restarting traffic scanning due to non-reception" log message in the FSUIPC log and Pete Dawson seems to think that it is possible my simconnect may be stopping from supplying the AI data and the restarting that his program does is not enough to get AI data going again (in my case).

How on earth I solve that I have no idea given my set up is fairly clean - so I hope your suggestion (that my inflight Traffic is not high enough) solves the issue.

I will report back how I go.

Kind regards,

Mark

For debugging you might also want to reduce the load on your setup, e.g. using a simpler aircraft, only 25% traffic, disable some add-ons, maybe even stop AS16.
Just to make sure that simconnect messages are not starving due to exhausted system resources. (Edit: though your system is MUCH faster than mine)

Or maybe some "security" software thinks that the constant stream of simconnect data is a threat and blocks it?

It's very difficult to judge the amount of chatter one might receive during a flight. I have mine set to 70% and quite often I will get phases of the flight that are very quiet. Which sometimes draws one's attention. But if it is generally not a busy corridor then it's acceptable. Unless you know that your AI should be on your route at the same time as you then as long as PF3 deals with you correctly it's ok. PF3 has reduced the amount of en-route "vectoring" simply because it is somewhat unrealistic. As most aircraft in their en-route phase will be under "own navigation." We are considering en-route reporting procedures as a feature which is currently not in PF3. That may be added in a later release if it is feasable.

Thanks Gents, I usually fly between Melbourne and Sydney which is one of the 3 busiest sectors in the world.

Reading all of these contributions it maybe the case that I just don't have my Traffic slider higher enough so I will try that. Also, I have noticed that there is only the one Centre frequency in PF3 between Melbourne and Sydney where as that is not the case in the RW (there are two both directions) so given the AI reality bubble, it is perhaps feasible that AI generated at altitude have nothing to say as they don't change frequency on-route using this program (whereas in the RW ML-SY you have MEL DEP 118.9 MEL CTR 123.75, MEL CTR 133.15, SYD APP 128.3).

And you have already explained that APP is purposely quieter. Thus, maybe it is working as intended and I need to go do a Helsinki - Heathrow flight!

Regrettably I don't have time to try these things tonight (wife at work so I have twin 5 year olds to look after and early shift tomorrow for me) but I will do over the next day or so.

BTW, anti virus is disabled when flying but I might go one step further and exclude the simconnect dll's just in case.

Thank you,

Mark

mwa05 wrote: *

Tue Mar 28, 2017 9:53 am

BTW, anti virus is disabled when flying but I might go one step further and exclude the simconnect dll's just in case.

I was more thinking about some firewall-like thingy.

I have also noticed this flying in Australia, i think its because the AI don't use the generic control center frequency PF3 uses for our airspace. I have only just started evaluating PE3 so hopefully i'm wrong.

Ignore me i just heard a little chatter after having tuned to control center during a flight in QLD.

Gents,

I increased my airliner traffic slider to 70% and it did make a difference in that on Sydney Approach I got one AI aircraft transmission and controller response and then the same AI contacted the Tower when I was on short final.

It seems that because there seems to be only one Centre Frequency for the whole flight, combined with the AI reality bubble, the radio goes quiet shortly after transferring to Centre because there is no other sector to transfer the aircraft to, or from which to enter my sector.

I don't know if Australia comes with just one generic Centre Frequency (there is no Melbourne or Brisbane Centre in the Control Centre Mapping screen). If AI Chatter has purposely been toned down for approach then perhaps my experience as a person who really only flies in Australia then AI Chatter stopping on climb for the rest of flight seems to be a design outcome.

I did get a Q400 departing Sydney whilst I was on Approach pass right in front of me with my TCAS going off without a traffic advisory so I need to perhaps look at my setting there (it must be default as I have not touched that).

Every cloud has a silver lining though and I have learnt I can run AI at 70% without any performance issue in my normal area of operation!

Kind regards,

Mark