AI Traffic shuffler makes AI traffic much more realistic.
What it does:
All behavior is totally customizable - the .cfg files may be edited to assign airlines to countries, assign aircraft to categories etc. Shuffler also behaves correctly when encountering non-airline AI flights. This is a first official release so it might still have some glitches, and you are encouraged to submit bugs/wishes. Please send your comments to AiShuffler@comcast.net
You may also visit Shuffler Web Page - it always contains the latest shuffler version, manual, registering information, FAQ and any dosumentation updates that were not available when current version was published.
NEW IN VERSION 0.7
NEW IN VERSION 0.6
You may place the Shuffler anywhere on your computer, just make sure that all files from the original zip are located in the same folder. If you are going to create a shortcut for a Shuffler from your desktop or start menu, do not forget to set a home directory.
The shuffler must be able to find directory where FS2002 was installed.
Just double-click AiShuffler.exe. The shaffler has an intuitive interface of windows wizard, that is it consists of pages each of which is dedicated to some aspect of shuffling. You are supposed to proceed page-to-page until finish. Press next when you finished with the current page to proceed further.
If you choose to upgrade to a professional version, you will have following benefits available:
To upgrade to a professional edition for only 5 dollars:
Please note that after you have upgraded to the professional edition, the embedded traffic compiler and decompiler will no longer be used due to TTools licensing policy. You will need to download Lee Swordy's TrafficTools V1.2 from one of the FS ware sites, like avsim.com for example.
This dialog window imports yout Flight Simulator aircraft. The aircraft is classified according to rules in the air_class.cfg file. You must import aircraft to proceed further.
After the aircraft is imported, you may double-click aircraft in the list vew to open its aircraft.cfg file (double-click in the list view) and edit it if you have to make changes. You will have to import the aircraft again after modifying aircraft.cfg file.
Also, a professional edition shaffler would analyze all of the aircraft.cfg files to determine if they reference aircraft models, types and callsigns that are recognized by FS2002 and produce a report which will help you to fix these errors. Future versions will ask you if an inconsistency is found, alert you, suggest a solution and act according to your choice so that you will not have to edit aircraft.cfg files manually.
This is an excerpt from an example report:
Problem with aircraft in"AIRCRAFT\_KEEPER FS2000 Dornier 328JET HT Gandalf Airlines\aircraft.cfg"atc_type "DO328JET" will not be recognized by FSThere is a problem with one or more its variations:a/c titled "DO328J Gandalf V1.2 HRT"(ui_variation="Gandalf Airlines", atc_airline="Gandalf")has atc_airline that will not be recognized by FS
The shuffler contains list of all airlines, models and types recognized by FS2002. If your aircraft contains an unrecognized entry it will still be accepted and classified correctly (you might have to edit air_class.cfg, but FS will not pronounce its airline, type or model. Note that most such issues may be corrected simply by adjusting the airline/etc. entries to the correct ones. The lists of recognized entries are located in the .dat files (atc_airline.dat, atc_model.dat, atc_type.dat).
Please also note that the airlines.cfg atc_airline entry should contain ATC callsigns, not the airline public name. Therefore if you have a British Airways aircraft it should have Speed Bird in the atc_airline entry.
You may press "Open air_class.cfg" button to view/edit this configuration file.
This text file consits of sections, each is started with class name in square brackets. Then substrings are listed. These substrings will be matched against atc_type and atc_model entries in each aircraft in aircraft.cfg files, and if matched, that aircraft will be considered belonging to this category. The substrings will be matched against either atc_type ot atc_model. See the hints section about details and advices on editing aircraft.cfg files.Below is an example how Huge Jet section looks like. You see that if an aircraft will have a atc_model equal to 'B747', entry '747' from this section will match and this aircraft will be consifered a Huge Jet, and will only participate in those AI flights where aircraft of this size is allowed.
[Huge Jet]747744742
You may edit these sections, in particular you will need to do sa when you will add aircraft whose atc_type or atc_model is not present in the air_class.cfg. You will need to locate its atc_type or atc_model and add that value to the appropriate section in the air_class.cfg.
There are also two special sections in air_class.cfg: Amphibians and Seaplanes. These are hard-coded meta-categories.
The entries in Amphibians category are not atc_type and atc_model; instead it is whole Aircraft Title. The reason is unfortunately both amphibian and not amphibian Cessnas have same atc-type and model in MS FS (and probably in real world); airplanes from this category will be used if at least one of visited airports has a water runway. Even if you mention the title in this section, its type or model must be mentioned in any of the above categories anyway. This entry is only working for the professional edition users.
Commnents about Amphibian apply to Seaplanes as well, except for airplanes from this meta-category (again, use titles!) will only be used if all visited airports have a water runway! Again, this is available in Pro edition only.
Using cheboxes you may specify that you do not want a particular aircraft or class to be used for AI. If you have professional edition, this selection will be remembered next time you run shuffler.
The Generate airlines.cfg button becomes enabled once aircraft is imported and it re-generates fs2002\aircraft\airlines.cfg with airlines actually found in your aircraft folder. Please note that FS seem to be case-sensitive in regard to airlines, and so is this utility. It is advisable to open the airlines.cfg after generation and check for occurenses like LUFTHANSA and Lufthansa, and then correct your aircraft.cfg files so that you will have the correct spelling. Always refer to atc_airline.dat for a list of recognized airlines.
This dialog window imports the Airport and Facillity Directory from the Flight simulator directory upon pressing the Import button. You must import the scenery before proceeding further. This process is a little slow. After AFD is imported, it is cached (in sccache.txt file) so that during subsequent runs you do not have to wait that long - you may "Load Cached" instead. Load from the cahed file is much faster. During import Shuffler also matches airlines to countries, based on information from air_nat.cfg.
You may press "Open air_class.cfg" button to view/edit this configuration file.
This file also contains sections, each section starts with area name in angle brackets. It is either counntry, region, state, city or airport.
Then there is a list of airlines of that country (or city etc.), one on each line. The airline callsign may contain brackets. The text inside the brackets is for information only, it is ignored during shuffle process. The reason to have this text here is because quite few airlines have callsign and name very different, so this is just for you to see.
Finally, most sections for countries have one or more entries for tailnumber masks. These are used by Pro edition shuffler to generate country-correct tailnumbers. '!' will be replaced with a number, '.' with a letter and '?' with either letter ir number. If a country has several available formats, they will be selected randomly.
There is also one special country called GLOBAL. You may see all the default airlines here. These will be used if shuffler will not be able to match a correct airline - for example if you do not have any Small Jet planes that belong to either German or Swiss airline, and there was a flight between Switzerland and Germany, the ailrines from the GLOBAL section will be chosen then.
Here is an excerpt from air_nat.cfg:
[Country:Europe/Switzerland]
Balair(BalairCTA)
Crossair(Crossair)
Swissair(Swissair)
Topswiss(TEA Switzerland)
#HB-...
You may add or edit these entries to have a desired effect. For example if you want some airline to be preferred for particular airport, you may create a section for it and put some callsigns there. As a start, tale a look at some airport-dedicated sections in the end of air_nat.cfg. Note that standard edition uses country-based preference only.
You may assign some airlines to airports, cities, states or whole regions, for example you might not have any polynesian airlines installed but having assigned Qantas to oceania will still make whole picture more realistic, and assigning Aloha to Hawaii state section and deleting it from default United States country section will ban this airline from flights not passing through Hawaii.
Do not be afraid to play with cfg files, just do not forget to back them up!
You may righ-click any item in the scenery page and a pop-up menu will show up; if you choose its only item that the this item's path (as needed by the air_nat.cfg) will be copied into clipboard.
If you have a non-english version of FS2002 then the default air_nat.cfg will not work for you because country names are language-dependent. You will need to generate new airline list and edit the air_nat.cfg - replace the countries and add airlines. Unfortunately I had to change format for the air_nat.cfg to accomodate tailnumbers and to start working on state/city/airport-dependednt routing, so great german air_nat.cfg is available from flightsim.com (By Torsten Baumbach) will no longer work, so you will have some cut-and-paste work to do. At least you may press Generate new air_nat.cfg and Shuffler will extract list of country name you have in your FS2002. Do not forget to add the GLOBAL section if you will edit it yourself.
This dialog imports the contents of traffic.bgl file that contains FS AI traffic.
You need to press import to proceed.
The first time when Shufller runs import, it backs up the original traffic.bgl (the file where all AI plans are stored) as <FS2002 Home>\SceneDB\ATC\Backup_Traffic.BGL. If at any point down the road you will want to restore original traffic, you should rename this file back to traffic.bgl and move it into <FS2002 Home>\SceneDB\ATC\Scenery\Traffic.BGL (overwrite existing file if it prompts you to)
Consequently, on each subsequental "Shuffling" you have a choice (in Pro edition) to either shuffle the original traffic, or re-shuffle the traffic you have now (Pro edition only) using the Traffic To Use drop-down box.
The Shuffler uses Lee Swordy traffic tools to compile/decompile the traffic. You may uncheck "Hide Compiler" to visualize decompilation process. After decomilation three txt files (aircraft.txt, airports.txt and flightplans.txt) will be created in the shuffler's folder. You may edit these files if you want to.
This dialog allows you to keep some original flighs from being reassigned to another aircraft. This is particularily useful of you added flights to the AI traffic and you already have correct aircraft assigned to it. Use cjeckboxes to select the aircraft you do not want probably replaced. This selection will be remembered next time you run shuffler.
This step allows you to fine-tune the generation. Most of the options are available in Pro edition only.
This option is not enabled yet. In the next version, if you check this checkbox, Shuffler will try to match the airlines on the level of region/state/city/airport as well as on country level. It will be possible to get a much closer match to the real traffic by assigning Continental to Newark, Hawaiian to Hawaii, Alaska to Alsaka and Washington, United to O'Hare, Condor to Germany-Canary islands flights, etc. Next available feature would be to throttle flight number by airline, i.e. Lufthansa will be much more frequent in Germany than Hapag Lloyd.
If you check this, Shuffller will also modify the N-numbers for flights from generic N-numbers to match by country as well. For details, see the details on air_nat.cfg(above) and and excerpts from report.txt (below). Pro edition only.
This switch governs how Shuffler will behave if after all other considerations applied, there will be more than one suitable aircraft for a particular flight. Random means that the "winner" aircraft will be selected randomly. Even means that the aircraft assigned to the least number of flights as of now will be selected.
This selection describes how the Shuffler will treat seaplanes/amphibians. There are three choices:
Playing with these sliders (Pro edition only) gives you even greater control over the AI traffic. You may put flights performed by few categories into one "bowl" and then re-didtrubute it based on your preferences - if you want to have more heavy/small airctaft.
This option is not yet enabled.
This is the step where everything actually happens. When you press "Generate", shuffler will apply its algoruthm to all collected data and generate new traffic.
After new AI plans are generated, double-click any aircraft to view the flights it will now perform:
In Professional edition you may also click on the airport and see all the aircraft visiting it:
If you are not satisfied with the results, go back to whatever step is need and play with parameters, cfg files, etc. As soon as you are satidfied, press Next. Note that if you press cancel at any time (except for if you have pressed "Save and Compile" or "Compile Only" on the last page) no changes are made and AI traffic remains intact
You may also view report, that will show detailed information about shuffler decision process. Here is an excerpt from report.txt:
For fl. "EDDP,URWW(Germany,Russia)"
was used "McDonnell-Douglas/Boeing MD-83 Paint2"
(27 a/c in the same cat. [Small Jet]).
Valid callsigns are Aero Lloyd,Aeroflot,Condor,Hapag Lloyd,LTU,Lufthansa,
Lufthansa Cargo,Speedway,Volga
"Lufthansa A321" was selected for this flight.
Reg# D-JAWE
When this page is first loaded after generation, all the new plans are still in memory, so it is neccessary to write them to the disk. To do this press the Save Only button. After the traffic is saved, the files FlightPlans.txt, Aircraft.txt and Airports.txt are updated and "Edit Aircraft" and "Edit Flight Plans" and "Compile Only" buttons become enabled. At this point you may edit those files if you want to make some manual changes/additions to the plans you may do so. After that, press Compile only and the new traffic will be applied to FS2002.
Alternatively, if you do not intend to manually edit plans, you may press Save and Compile to make both these steps at once - new traffic will be saved and applied to the FS2002.
If you want to return to the original AI traffic, see the description of "Scenery Import" page for instructions.
Press Finish to exit the Shuffler.
If shuffler hangs during generation or if you suspect that the traffic was distributed incorrectly, please send me first 1000 records of flightplans.txt, aircraft.txt, air_nat.cfg and air_class.cfg, and ALL your aircraft.cfg (you may zip *.cfg files recursively). I will be also glad to hear if you beleive that distribution could be done better and any other suggestions for algorithm, as well as updated air_nat/air_class files
Some AI aircraft do not have landing gear lowered while on the ground. This is a problem with the older aircraft. Use the aircraft that was created specifically for FS2002, especially GMAX.
If shufler cannot determine location of FS2002 or if it asks for oleacc.dll, please e-mail to AiShuffler@comcast.net for further instructions.
The model (air file) of this aircraft is not compatible with AI. Either remove this aircraft or substitute its air file with one from a similar aircraft.
This is caused not by a number of planes - the reason is some planes are very hard to draw. The only remedy is to emprirically determine which one(s) of your installed planes cause this by excluding them from AI. Lee Swrdy has good guidelines of how to fix this in his TTools' readme file.
There might be two reasons for this:
There migt be few reasons
The most likely reasons are
The number of callsigns/models/typed that FS can spell is limited. The complete list is provided in air_airline.dat, atc_type.dat and atc_model.dat.
This happens on some computers. To fix this, do the following:
Please note that after you have upgraded to the professional edition, the embedded traffic compiler and decompiler will no longer be used due to TTools licensing policy. You will need to download Lee Swordy's TrafficTools V1.2 from one of the FS ware sites, like avsim.com for example.
Please e-mail questions, comments, wishes, other problems, etc. to AiShuffler@comcast.net. Please note that 16 business hours reply or fix pledge is only available to Pro edition users.
You may also visit Shuffler Web Page - it always contains the latest shuffler version, manual, registering information, FAQ and any dosumentation updates that were not available when current version was published.
There is also a message board dedicated to Shuffliing at Yahoo! groups. Everybody's welcome.
To have maximum effect from the add-on aircraft you will most likely have to edit aircraft.cfg files, because quite a few good addon aircraft lack neccessary information in aircraft.cfg files. This is not hard to edit them, you may use notepad. There is aircraft.cfg in subfolder in the aircraft directory.
Here is an example of the two most important sections in the aircraft.cfg (section begins with an entry in square brakets and ends when the next one begins).
-------------------------------------------------------
[fltsim.0] - this is a section for each aircraft. If you have more than one aircraft in this cfg file you will have flightsim.0, flightsim.1 etc.
title=Lufthansa A321 - this entry must be unique between all installed aircraft, not only in this aircraft.cfg but in ALL of them. I recommend adding airline to this title so that it will be easier for you to locate the aircraft. You should also refrain from using double quotation marks (") in here.
sim=A321
model=
panel=
sound=
texture=
checklists=
ui_manufacturer=Airbus - these three entries are the ones shown in the "Select Aircraft" dialog in FS. It will pay off if you furnish all your aircraft with these - you will no longer have "Unspecified" in the select aircraft dialog in FS.
ui_type=A321-211
ui_variation=Lufthansa (D-AIRW Heilbronn)
description=The Airbus A320 is a highly sophisticated, all electric medium jet. The state-of-the-art flight deck features multiple color displays and a highly advanced flight contol system. The pilot flys the plane with a "sidestick", a joystick mounted to the side, rather than the conventional yoke. With advanced aerodynamics and electronic engine control systems, it can cruise at mach 0.8 with excellent fuel efficiency.\n
atc_heavy=1 - This governs if ATC will call the plane "heavy" or not. Set the value to 1 or 0.
atc_id=D-AIRW
atc_airline=Lufthansa - this one is very important. Your aircraft must have such entry for the Shuffler to determine which country this aircraft belongs to. Also please make sure that this callsign is present in air_nat.cfg under the country it has to be; otherwise added. Also, FS2002 will not pronouce all callsigns, number of those it will is limited. The list is contained in atc_airline.dat file that comes with the shuffler. If your callsign is not in the atc_airline.dat that does not prevent this a/c from participating in AI traffic, it is just that FS will not spell it. You are advised to look in this dat file to check for your callsign, because it might happen that it was just misspelled in the aircraft.cfg file. Of cause this applies to airliners only, GA aircraft should not have atc_airline and atc_flight_number entries.
atc_flight_number=776 - this is the flight number that ATC will use to reference this aircraft. Please make sure that you have this entry for an airliner.
[General] - This section must be present for both airliners and GA planes. Create it if it is not there. You must have one General section even of you have few fltsim sections. This implies that only aircraft of same type and model (only different airlines/liveries) must reside in the same folder.
atc_type=Airbus This is the type of the aircraft. It is used by ATC to reference the plane. It is preferable that the value would be from the list of those recognized by ATC. The list is in atc_type.dat file in the shuffler directory.
atc_model=A321 - This is the aircraft model. It is highly preferable that the value would be from the list of those recognized by ATC. The list is in atc_type.dat file in the shuffler directory. If you will have type or model not recognized by ATC, ATC will refer to this plane as to Experimental.
editable=1
performance=Cruise Speed\t.82 Mach\nMaximum Range\t3,500 miles\nService Ceiling\t36,000\nMax Takeoff Weigh 141,000 lb\nSeating\t\t124\nCargo Capacity\t976 CU ft\n\n\n
A hint to Pro edition users: to achieve even higher degree if "separation" you may choose to delete (or comment out using ';' symbol) some of the airlines from the country section if you have them as default for some city or airport. For example, if Continental is assigned to Newark an if you delete ot from United States section, it will fly ONLY to/from Newark. You may copy this altered section and replace the original US section to have all airlines that have hubs fly ONLY from their hubs. Please be ready however that as a consequense that airlines that do not have hubs (in air_nat) will share the traffic which does not start or finish in any of hub airports - and that is majority of traffic.
[Country:North America/United States]
US Air Shuttle
Ab ex(Airborne Express)
Air Mike(Continental Micronesia)
;Alaska(Alaska Airlines)
;Aloha(Aloha Airlines)
;American(American Airlines)
Amtran(American Trans Air)
CAIR CHALLENGE AIR CARGO
;Cactus(America West Airlines)
Carnival Air(Carnival Airlines)
Comair Connie(American International Airways)
;Continental(Continental Airlines)
Dahl(DHL Airlines)
;Delta(Delta Airlines)
Emery(EMERY WORLD-WIDE)
Evergreen(Evergreen International Airlines)
Fed Ex(Federal Express)
Fine Air
Frontier Flight(Frontier)
Gemini(GEMINI AIR CARGO)
Giant(Atlas Air)
;Hawaiian(Hawaiian Airlines)
JETBLUE AIRWAYS
KITTY HAWK
Komstar(Wester Pacific Airlines)
Mahalo(Mahalo Air)
Midway(MIDWAY AIRLINES CORP)
;Northwest(Northwest Airlines)
Pan Am
Polar Tiger(Polar Air Cargo)
Reno Air(Reno Air)
Ryan(RYAN INTERNATIONAL AIRLINES USA)
SKYWEST(SKYWEST AIRLINES)
SUN COUNTRY(SUN COUNTRY AIRLINES)
Southern Air(Southern Air Transport)
;Southwest(Southwest Airlines)
;TWA(Trans World Airlines)
Talon Air(Eagle Canyon Airlines)
Tee Air(Tower Air)
UPS(United Parcel Service)
;US Air(US Airways)
;United(United Airlines)
World(World Airways)
#N!????
#N!!!..
#N!??..
One change I can recommend very much to the Pro edition users is to comment
the Aloha and Hawaiian from United States country section because they are
listed in Hawaii state section. By doing so you will effectively ban these
airlines from flights not visisting Hawaii. You are welcome to play with all the
other airlines and geographic areas to achieve optimum result.
7. Copyright
AI Traffic Shuffler Version 1.0
Freeware/Shareware for Microsoft FS2002
Copyright (C) 2002 Elijahu Litvak (elijahu5@hotmail.com).
Portions of this software are based in part on the work of Takuya Murakami (tmurakam@freesc.org) and Lee Swordy (Swordy@rogers.com). This software package can be freely redistributed provided that it is not charged for and the package remains intact. This is not public domain software, it is copyrighted. Neither this package nor any part of or may be distributed for a fee, nor may it be redistributed if modified in any way.
Welcome splash (c) 1998 Kerozen.
