World Traffic v3

Aircraft Update

• The aircraft builders have added lots of new aircraft and liveries.
• Lots of animation fixes for landing gear and addition of slotted flaps to many aircraft that were missing them
• Creation of parked aircraft objects with no animations which get drawn for parked aircraft. Animations are a big frame rate killer so this gives a big performance boost at busy airports.

SID/STAR/Approach Changes

• deal with mismatches between navigraph data and X-Plane runway data due to magnetic drift.  For example, say the navigraph data has STARs for runway 16L but in X-Plane, the runway is now known as 17L, WT will match the navigraph STARs for 16L to the new runway name.
• approach updates so STARs end earlier when planes require back-tracking to the airport so they don't fly 15 miles past the airport - STAR exit points are calculated automatically for generic STARs and stored in the airport ops file.  They can be overwritten by the user.
• make sure a SID is exited at cruising alt if close already to arrival airport
• handle approaches where the runway lat/lon coordinates are not defined in the navigraph data - get the info from apt.dat instead when this happens.
• end approach early if final approach leg doesn't look like it will end up having plane lined up with runway like the VDM16 approach at LGZA

Airport Operations

• added section to define bridges that aircraft taxi over for places like EDDM where aircraft taxi over a bridge that cars drive under
• added button to save/reload STARs in Airport Operations window
• move "use dynamic taxi routes only" option to airport ops window since it's specific to an airport and should be a persistent setting
• make sure correct runway operations is selected when going to a new airport which can happen like when not using WT ATC
• added runway option for runway to allow touch-and-gos in airport ops file
• add fields to airport ops file to set max GA/mil flights per day per aircraft type - up to a max of 8 per day per parking spot are allowed - also add percent out and back flights
• add field to airport ops file that lets you specifiy if that parking spot has a ground service bus. This is set on by default for gates and off otherwise. If on, aircraft that support the bus will leave their navigation lights on when parked.

Flight/Ground Modeling

• Added wind gust modeling.  Click here for vid.
• planes decelerate slower when landing if their exit is far ahead
• always set GA aircraft weights to MTOW so they don't take off so fast for short flights
• climb rate for GA planes seems optimistic... check t/o dist too - looking at vids, 17 seconds for a C-172 to takeoff
• fixed several aircraft base files which had bad values affecting takeoff performance, in-flight AOA, cruise speed, and acceleration
• if a taxi route is significantly shorter than another but has a further exit point, use it!
• have planes slow down slowly if their exit is far ahead of the normal landing distance value
• don't stop for collision avoidance if plane on same route if more than 10 seconds away from departing
• when planes require back-tracking on landing, have them turn around on runway as soon as their speed gets down to 4 kts instead of going all the way to the end of the runway
• for small props make them less likely to be selected as planes in out and back flights but more likely to be selected in one-way flights and make king airs even less likely than C-421 for out and back
• fixed bug where sometimes planes wouldn't accelerate
• allow follow-me trucks to be used to arrival too

GA Flight Creation

• new way of creating GA flights - get rid of sliders for GA/MIL flights - flights are now created on a per-gate basis so that X flights per day per parking spot are created with the same aircraft/tail number being used for each of those flights, so no more problems not being able to find parking spots for GA planes.  Flights will be either out-and-back or one-way flights with returns with adequate spacing between flights.
• This was supported before but a few changes have been made.  If routes are defined in the WorldTraffic/FlightPlans folder, planes will pick one randomly instead of using auto-routes.  These are especially useful for GA planes doing out and back flights if you want the planes to follow some typical routes or sight-seeing or training flight routes instead of having the planes just do random 3 segment out and back routes
• traffic patterns have been improved
• make touch-and-gos only a 50% chance for an out and back flight and then for the touch and gos, assign a random number between 1 and 3
• assign a higher proportion of light props to out and back flights and have the small props do more direct flights

Parking

• fixed problem with planes parking at wrong spot at arrival airport
• gaps now supported in parking spot start and end points
• don't allow GA planes ever to park in spots marked for GA planes (operator set to NONE) and don't allow any non-GA planes ever to park in GA spots
• don't use light/small props with defined operators as GA planes

User Interface

• completed ATC changes and interface so other ATC products can interface to WT
• when flights are created display how many parking spots found and how many taxi route edges and nodes were found, and how many fixed taxi routes were loaded and what file was used for the taxi network
• darker background for key command menu and ATC menu - made green brighter