My BA AI at Heathrow

[Rick Piper]

Yes mate

I remember the poster on the entrance to the Tunnel at Heathrow

Huge Concode pic with slogan "Breakfast in London - Dinner in New York"
then aerosol'd underneath was "Baggage in Bermuda!"

was like that for well over a year too

[speedbird591]

It's a pity World of AI don't do retro They know how to populate an airport without sapping your graphics power

But if you're hanging around T5 you'd better like wavy lines!



Ian

[TSR2]

Agreed mate, the WOAI stuff is superb. Great screenie

[speedbird591]

I've just popped up to Manchester to have a look. I know it's not a lot of Vanguard/Viscounts but I usually have a mixture of 3 or 4 on the ground at any one time. In this case, one Vanguard and two Viscounts. They've only taken 4 or 5 fps between them.



Silly question. Have you stripped out the panel and sound folders from them?

Sillier question. Does it make a difference if you do?

For what it's worth - I have. But I don't know if it gives any benefit other than saving disk space

Ian

[TSR2]

Its more to do with them being older models mate and not particularly efficent for the Dark side to process. Where do all of those classic AI at manchester go if Heathrow is full of modern stuff?

[speedbird591]

Where do all of those classic AI at manchester go if Heathrow is full of modern stuff?

And where does the modern stuff go if Manchester is full of classics? Now there's a question!

I'll leave you to think about it and I'll tell you later on.

Ian

[speedbird591]

Sorry about the interruption. It wasn't to inject suspense into the story The memsahib waved a crisp £20 note under my nose and asked me to pop down the Chinky for a takeway!

So - how do I keep my retro and modern traffic apart, you ask? It's something to which I gave a good deal of thought and my solution is only practicable if you have a very small number of retro airports. In my case three - Kai Tak, DM's '75 Manchester and Bermuda. All the other airports - stock or add-on are modern and populated by the marvellous World of AI traffic. My solution was to make each of the three into self-contained time bubbles which didn't interact with the modern world.

Kai Tak was easy because as it no longer exists WoAI doesn't fly there anyway. I found an island off Taiwan about an hour's flight away with an AFB so using AFCAD I smothered it in concrete and parking places and my AI simply flies there and sits around for a couple of hours and flies back. The effect at Kai Tak is excellent as you have traffic arriving and departing all the time and the only time it seems unrealistic is if you listen too hard to ATC.

I've used the same philosophy at Manchester but it was much, much harder to create. Not only did I need a remote airfield where I could send the classic traffic, I also had to divert all the modern WoAI traffic somewhere. And they had to be airfields that I was never likely to use. First job was to empty EGCC so I decided to send all the modern stuff to Woodford. Lots of concrete and parking spaces and then the hard work of going through all the WoAI flight plans that call at MAN and changing all EGCC entries to EGCD.

With an empty airport I was able to set up all my classics with plenty of advice from everbody here. I then decided that the jets would go to and from Shannon and the props to Prestwick as I don't fly much within the UK and won't ever use them. They both needed extra parking added to the stock airports and I just had to write straightforward round-trip flight plans for the aircraft. Again, the effect at Manchester is excellent but you can't see all the chaos going on everywhere else

And there you have it. A long answer to say that the classics go from MAN to Shannon or Prestwick and the inbound WoAI goes to Woodford instead of MAN.

The only other options are to have a mix of modern and classic or use the CalClassics traffic/airports. I didn't want to mix and I didn't want to have classic aircraft at a modern airport. CalClassics is too early for my period so I couldn't think of any other way to do it. At least all my airports are authentic to the traffic and vice versa.

I hope you stayed awake long enough to get this far

Ian