MSFS20 Considering Resurrecting ProjectAI

[=Hollywood=]

So back in the early 2000's I was one of the team at ProjectAI and worked closely with Matt and Frank as well as others on the team who were part of the FS2004 and FSX beta teams. That work of course led to Tom's awesome work at Flight1 for Ultimate Traffic and then Ultimate Traffic X.

There was a huge community of us who developed AFCADs for airport parking, Flight Plans for Airlines and custom organizations and teams that did repaints of various airliners.

When Ultimate Traffic came out, ProjectAI ended up being closed by Frank suddenly and most of us were happy with UT and UTX.

Well Flight1 spoke with Tom recently and he rightfully has no desire to bring Ultimate Traffic in to MSFS, so we've been left with Simple Traffic, FS Traffic, Alpha India Group, FSLTL and PSXT/Live Traffic and VATSIM. Each has their benefits and drawbacks.

• Simple Traffic - Benefits: Repaints for Airlines in MSFS' Live Traffic System | Drawbacks: Terrible Generic Aircraft Models, Delayed Traffic from Real Time & Turns Off Scheduled GA Traffic, No AFCAD style system, No Historical Flight Plans.
• FS Traffic - Benefits: Great Selection of Custom 3D Models, Good Support | Drawbacks: No Real Time (although can slave models to FSLTL or PSXT/Live Traffic), No GA or Military Traffic Support, No AFCAD style system, No Historical Flight Plans.
• Alpha India Group - Benefits: Great Selection of Custom 3D Models | Drawbacks: No Real (although can slave models to FSLTL or PSXT/Live Traffic), GA or Military Integration is in development, historically mostly focused on airlines.
• FSLTL - Benefits: Good Selection of Custom 3D Models, Close to Real Time Live Traffic | Drawbacks: No GA or Military Offline AI Traffic (other than MSFS default - No Circuits), Once Live Flights End Few Aircraft Parked Unless Choosing Historical Parked, No AFCAD style system, No Historical Flight Plans.
• PSXT/Live Traffic - Benefits: Can use other 3D Models, Very Close to Real Time Live Traffic, Can do GA live? | Drawbacks: No AFCAD style system however now parked aircraft at airports where data is available and not blocked, can park in their real world lat/lon locations after their flight lands, this is done through running the learning module which is a very cool feature, No Historical Flight Plans AFAIK.
• VATSIM - Benefits: Real Time Users in MSFS | Drawbacks: No Scheduled Airlines, No GA/Military AI System, No AFCAD style system, No Historical Flight Plans.

One of the areas that others tried on were Military AI, and a few people doing GA traffic, but all of this over the years has led to a hodge podge approach to having a fully immersive and cohesive traffic system that users need to blend together.

In the days of FS98 we had dynkit to create traffic based off breadcrumb style paths, and that got replaced in FS2002? I think with the newer AI based traffic system. Lately I've been longing for the days of the community we used to have.

I'm actually thinking of resurrecting ProjectAI to address these shortcomings and see if we can once again create an integrated system that brings the best of all worlds as well as advocate to Asobo the needs to add AirlineCodes to the DevMode SDK parking data, work together on world update airports to provide accurate airline parking data to airports for all users, figure out a way to use live traffic and either via AI or some other procedural method to provide parking when live flights end until the next city pair flight takes off, and gather a range of 3d modelers or form alliances with aircraft developers to help them provide AI specific versions of their aircraft that can help advertise their flyable aircraft but also have AI and flyable use liveries interchangeably, so a paint scheme for a flyable version will transfer onto the AI versions and they will all match visually.

I can't do this myself, it would need a team of people who are interested to be involved. At this point I just want to find out what people think about ProjectAI being resurrected. The cool thing is it's entirely possible to resurrect old PAI historical airline schedules as I was able to do Ansett Airlines' last ever schedule from PAI last night and it was a super easy process.

 

[=Hollywood=]

Thanks for the response everyone. I'm starting to compile resources to re-launch PAI.

• Airline ICAO Codes for Parking - The first tab "ICAO Airline Codes" is just the values as of 2024/07/19, the second tab "Wikipedia Live" is the live list from Wikipedia

To Do:

• ICAO Aircraft Code List
• Develop Military Parking Code List - Does MAIW have a standard already?
• Develop Civilian Type Code List - i.e. single engine prop, etc

More to come...

 

[Marc L]

Yayyyy, Can't wait to see more <3

 

[thetford569]

Thanks for the response everyone. I'm starting to compile resources to re-launch PAI.

• Airline ICAO Codes for Parking - The first tab "ICAO Airline Codes" is just the values as of 2024/07/19, the second tab "Wikipedia Live" is the live list from Wikipedia

To Do:

• ICAO Aircraft Code List
• Develop Military Parking Code List - Does MAIW have a standard already?
• Develop Civilian Type Code List - i.e. single engine prop, etc

More to come...

RE: Military AI

MAIW did/does have a standard for parking codes for Military AI but I believe you'd probably have to look into the aircraft.cfg files in their packages to see them or the older airport AFCADs would also have them. They were by squadron and also type so for example a squadron parking area for the 457th FS had code 457F I believe or for the Navy it would be V204. I honestly don't remember them and I think they were limited to 4 characters? They might have a document to share but I have a vested interest in this because I have been waiting and hoping for Military AI in the sim and MAIW I just don't think had enought people willing to tackle this project for MSFS as the conversion process was so difficult. I think they've pretty much decided to wait and see what happens with FS2024 now. Which honestly by this point is probably not a bad idea because they could have redone alot of the AI system. My gut is they didn't do much to it but with the performance improvements they claim to have made and models/liveries that they said are coming with it leads me to believe they've done some work for sure.

The type codes for Military were like F16, F15, C130, C30J, they were all based on the ICAO codes for each type I believe.

I am still slowly working on my payware military base scenery project which will likely now not come out until 2024 is released. I'm a single developer with a real full time job and designing for this sim as we all know is loads more work than it used to be. Anyway, I had hoped to add the parking codes to my project and that MAIW would be alive by then but I doubt it. Looking forward to see what you come up with. I've already done a freeware KHRT and could go back and add the parking codes eventually into the xml but I too would love for the parking codes to be entered directly in to the SDK. I can't believe they still have not made that possible.

 

[=Hollywood=]

RE: Military AI

MAIW did/does have a standard for parking codes for Military AI but I believe you'd probably have to look into the aircraft.cfg files in their packages to see them or the older airport AFCADs would also have them. They were by squadron and also type so for example a squadron parking area for the 457th FS had code 457F I believe or for the Navy it would be V204. I honestly don't remember them and I think they were limited to 4 characters? They might have a document to share but I have a vested interest in this because I have been waiting and hoping for Military AI in the sim and MAIW I just don't think had enought people willing to tackle this project for MSFS as the conversion process was so difficult. I think they've pretty much decided to wait and see what happens with FS2024 now. Which honestly by this point is probably not a bad idea because they could have redone alot of the AI system. My gut is they didn't do much to it but with the performance improvements they claim to have made and models/liveries that they said are coming with it leads me to believe they've done some work for sure.

The type codes for Military were like F16, F15, C130, C30J, they were all based on the ICAO codes for each type I believe.

I am still slowly working on my payware military base scenery project which will likely now not come out until 2024 is released. I'm a single developer with a real full time job and designing for this sim as we all know is loads more work than it used to be. Anyway, I had hoped to add the parking codes to my project and that MAIW would be alive by then but I doubt it. Looking forward to see what you come up with. I've already done a freeware KHRT and could go back and add the parking codes eventually into the xml but I too would love for the parking codes to be entered directly in to the SDK. I can't believe they still have not made that possible.

I can probably reach out to MAIW as I looked at their site and they seemed overwhelmed. The models should all convert pretty easily with some of the tools available. Albeit sans PBR textures initially.

That’s probably not even necessary so much as we can make flyable aircraft AI in MSFS without too much tax on performance unless done on a massive scale. I do think what would be great is if we could get flyable aircraft devs to release their LOD01 or LOD02 models as AI versions as well (Leave the LOD00 high res models for their flyables) and then it’s a great ad for their flyable aircraft. I have many planes now I bought not to fly but put fly solely as AI.

I could try and scrape the files from MAIW and generate a program to scrape and compile all the parking codes in their system to hand back to them as a master list.

As it is I’m working on a massive scale GA AI project that should help the GA side of things.

If we can build a community where we can collate datasets, such as which squadrons are based where, the fleet aircraft numbers and more then instead of stuff being hand coded like before it can all be done programmatically.

The biggest step is collating the data and coming up with a standard format.

I’ve been working on YAMB yesterday to change all the parking from GA RAMP to MIL_COMBAT and MIL_CARGO. I think I need to change the radius sizes.

I can go ahead and work on possibly programmatically generating placeholder boxes to represent each aircraft type based off the radius of each aircraft type. Build the actual AI scheduling system and flight plans.

When we have enough of a community for models swap out the ball placeholders with actual aircraft.

 

[FSMuseum]

I for one am very excited by this prospect. I am a big fan of Retro AI (retroai.proboards.com) and its one of the few things that is still keeping me in FS2004 besides my own love and nostalgia for it. I have a fully customized set of 1998 flightplans that members of our community have collaborated to create, featuring most of the worlds airlines by this point plus some extra bonuses (for example, you can find plans for Boeing test flights for 1995 that you can swap for any aircraft from any era).

There simply isn't a system for FS2020 AI that I am happy with, and I really don't want to commit to flying online all the time or being stuck with live AI. I love my Retro AI, and having a cohesive system for our AI would be a great step forward to getting retro AI (and AI in general) into MSFS.

Not to mention, I would love to chat with you sometime about the history of Project AI some more as I have been working on some videos for my Flight Sim Museum YouTube channel covering the history of AI development in MSFS over the years. Having ProjectAI resurrected would be such an interesting way to end that story

 

[=Hollywood=]

I for one am very excited by this prospect. I am a big fan of Retro AI (retroai.proboards.com) and its one of the few things that is still keeping me in FS2004 besides my own love and nostalgia for it. I have a fully customized set of 1998 flightplans that members of our community have collaborated to create, featuring most of the worlds airlines by this point plus some extra bonuses (for example, you can find plans for Boeing test flights for 1995 that you can swap for any aircraft from any era).

There simply isn't a system for FS2020 AI that I am happy with, and I really don't want to commit to flying online all the time or being stuck with live AI. I love my Retro AI, and having a cohesive system for our AI would be a great step forward to getting retro AI (and AI in general) into MSFS.

Not to mention, I would love to chat with you sometime about the history of Project AI some more as I have been working on some videos for my Flight Sim Museum YouTube channel covering the history of AI development in MSFS over the years. Having ProjectAI resurrected would be such an interesting way to end that story

If you want to convert old flightplans to MSFS, definitely can do and would be happy to assist. I did that for Ansett, found the old FS9 schedule from PAI on the Wayback Machine and brought it in to AIFP3 and ported stuff over. I've been thinking of doing up Sir Charles Kingsford Smith's Trans Pacific Flight, Amelia Earhart's RTW Flight Plan (albeit with AI it has to be the planned completed flights) and a few others, so you definitely have piqued my interest. I did up and old Ansett schedule from back in the early days with the Lockheed for FS2004 I think it was...

I've been simming since Sublogic FS 1.0 on the Apple IIe, but most of my early sim time was initially on Sublogic FS 2 on the C64, then a little of MS FS 3.0, a lot of time in FS 4.0 on the PC (and Mac), Microsoft's FS 4 Airport and Scenery Designer, a litle of FS 5.0, 5.0a, 5.1, FSFW95, FS98, FS2000 Professional, FS2002 Professional, FS2004 Professional, ProjectAI, Beta Tester with Ultimate Traffic FS9 and FSX, beta team for FSX, design advisory board for FS11 before Ballmer killed ACES, was involved with a major developer looking at building a new simulator post FSX and we investigated VWorld and vieWTerra as an engine, then on board with FSNextGen which had the same goal and looking at various engines, then Microsoft Flight, was contracted to work on Dovetail Games Flight Simulator World and Flight Simulator Flight School and wrote up a ton of game design documents for both, saw the process of how FSX was converted to 64 bit, how we hooked in new water and weather vis systems, then Microsoft took it all back and brought on Asobo who have run with virtually every game design document I wrote. It's really exciting times.

I've been on the 3rd party dev side both freeware and payware since FS 4.0 lol. From aircraft and scenery design to USA wide photoscenery, dem, autogen, water maps and much more. I'm honestly thankful that so much has been poured into MSFS, I'm finally able to enjoy actually flying now rather than developing, although now I have plans and ideas on the AI side which will be fun.

Feel free to send me a Private Message. I'm sure I have a lot of info I can provide you.

 

[=Hollywood=]

UPDATE:

I've been having far too much fun with this stuff. gathering databases etc.

This morning I was trying to rework the Just Flight Piper Tomahawk's taxi behavior for personal use as it often goes off the rails along with the default Asobo C152, so I started tweaking the ai.cfg's but then also saw the "landingFlare =" data and pretty much no aircraft in MSFS either Community or Official has a proper flare angle. Most are missing or non existent.

So I generated a PowerShell Script that can be run from the base "Packages" folder and can extract all the names of the main aircraft folders and whether they are in the community or official folders and the "landingFlare" values.

There's a ton of other things I've done today on the back end, getting more up to speed with creating windows programs.

With what I've done today and been thinking about I have ideas on making a ton of tools to help developers across the board.

 

[Tim Collins]

I do quite a lot of work for MAIW. The parking codes can be gathered from Martin Gossmann's AI Aircraft Editor.NET (https://www.owlsnest.eu/phpatm/index.php?action=view&filename=AIAE.NET-Setup.zip&directory=Tools). The codes themselves are whatever the author of the aircraft or paintset wants them to be, and they don't follow any particular convention.

John Young, probably the most prolific author of military AI for FS9/FSX/P3D, did try and develop MAIW AI for MSFS but was defeated by SU12 and walked away from it. I'm in regular contact with John and am happy to put you in touch with him if you'd like to learn from his experiences. One thing he did succeed at was the conversion of AI aircraft from FSX format to MSFS (P3D to MSFS was often not possible as P3D gradually moved away from the FSX conventions which MSFS adopted).

I'd be very interested in helping out, though I've studiously avoided doing any development work for MSFS whatsoever up to now! I have authored many, many AFCADs for FSX/P3D and am currently engaged in producing most of the Brazilian military aviation estate for FSX and P3D.

 

[=Hollywood=]

Thanks so much Tim.

I'd love to talk with John for sure. After my forays into extracting data in ai.cfg and aircraft.cfg yesterday we could easily build the database/spreadsheet of what's been done before in terms of parking code etc, with permission of the MAIW team of course.

Are the MSFS models available and do you know what the SU12 broke? I might be able to help solve it and would love to assist getting MAIW over to MSFS.

As of today I have built the ICAO Aircraft Codes spreadsheet ready for the backend of a Project AI traffic builder.

I have one concept for how to ensure all aircraft #'s for traffic follow a certain format and are unique across the board.

Basically for a PA38 registration VH-TLA = PA38VHTLA

P = 16
A = 1
3 = 3 (already a number)
8 = 8 (already a number)
V = 22
H = 8
T = 20
L = 12
A = 1

So the numeric version of "PA38VHTLA" is: 1613822820121 and we'd put that into the AIFP aircraft.txt as ac#1613822820121

This ensures that each variant of an aircraft across the board has a unique number.

Thankfully the aircraft numbers in the aircraft.txt don't have to be sequential for building the AI flight plans.

One thing I need to test is if it has a bit limit on the numbers, 8bit, 16bit etc.

For a military aircraft say an F-14 Tomcat with VF-1 and aircraft number 103 = F14VF1103

F = 6
1 = 1 (already a number)
4 = 4 (already a number)
V = 22
F = 6
1 = 1 (already a number)
1 = 1 (already a number)
0 = 0 (already a number)
3 = 3 (already a number)

So the numeric version of "F14VF1103" is: 61422611103 and we'd put that into the AIFP aircraft.txt as ac#61422611103

UPDATE: I found the limit is 999,999,999 AC#'s so I've had to revise the system to be index based and for each country to fit in with MSFS constraints.

The new system will be:

• ICAO Aircraft Code index number (this year's index is 1 to 2716) = All aircraft that do not have a custom paint job (i.e. generic white textures)
• ICAO Aircraft Code index number + Aircraft Registration index number = All aircraft that exist in the Aircraft Database

So for example:

Generic B788 (Boeing 787-8) is: 344 = AC#344
Generic C152 (Cessna 152) is: 470 = AC#470
Generic PA38 (Piper Tomahawk) is: 1853 = AC#1853
Generic ZA6 (AK1-3 Sanka) is: 2710 = AC#2710

Registered B788 (Boeing 787-8) VH-VKA is: 344+4461 = AC#3444461
Registered PA38 (Piper Tomahawk) VH-TLA is: 1853+12139 = AC#185312139
Registered C152 (Cessna 152) VH- RUM is: 470+375 = AC#470375
Registered ZA6 (AK1-3 Sanka) is: 2710+5426 = AC#27105426

This will work specific to each county and in a particular year/refresh/update cycle. It's the only way to fit real world data into AIFP3 flight plans and have unique aircraft numbers.

There will need to be a companion application for being able to hook in new liveries, i.e. if a custom repaint exists use the registered paint texture, if not use generic white aircraft model, if no model exists don't use that aircraft's flight plan.

 

[=Hollywood=]

I've moved disscusion over to the development showcase now that I'm working on the traffic back end.

All input and discussion on tools or requirements or wishes can be added over there...

MSFS - ProjectAI Toolkit

So I started work today on both a PC and Mac program to process data that I will be using to build a new ProjectAI back end for aircraft scheduling for AI systems. I need to work on game design documents behind the scenes to map out functionality, but the back end will be able to feed an entire...

fsdeveloper.com

 

[=Hollywood=]

New Logo

 

[=Hollywood=]

Possible theme song...

High Fly Zone by @technicalmajorkey463 | Suno

driving rock electric song. Listen and make your own with Suno.

suno.com

 

[Kaiii3]

AIG[...]

GA or Military Integration Status?, Mostly Focused on Airlines, No AFCAD style system.

not fully correct
GA is added and expending fast. Military is comming slowly as well.
Airports: For P3D this is added in OCI, but not muched used. And for MSFS it is disabled because of SDK issues with the AFD design - we work with ASOBO to resolve those and porvide the option to install airports via OCI.

 

[=Hollywood=]

not fully correct
GA is added and expending fast. Military is comming slowly as well.
Airports: For P3D this is added in OCI, but not muched used. And for MSFS it is disabled because of SDK issues with the AFD design - we work with ASOBO to resolve those and porvide the option to install airports via OCI.

Thanks for the corrections Kai.

Airports for MSFS probably needs to wait until World Hub is sorted out. Seems it’s all on hold until MSFS 2024?

Would love to talk with you more as I have stuff I designed when working on Flight Simulator World and drew up game design documents which ended up with Asobo.

I’ll send you a private message later today when the sun is up over here.

I have a couple of tools that I am working on that could be useful for AIG and the FS community at large.

 

[crushnik]

As a fan of MAIW scenery/flight plans I am very excited to see where this goes!

 

[Fugazi70]

any progress on this?