Custom AI Ground Vehicles

[CAFedm]

So I've decided to try adding some moving cars/buses to a custom airport project, hope to get it working for both FS9 and FSX. The airport's visible "roads" were created in the original Afcad file, and ported over to FSX using ADE. A duplicate Afcad/ADE was created with a unique name, and keeping only the roads along with taxi links and parking spots that have unique parking codes. Flightplans would then have to be created to have the AI vehicles functioning. Now the question - there is one default vehicle I would like to use as "AI" on these roads, namely the Aviator SUV. It appears the .mdl file has to be used and employed in aircraft format, e.g., with an airfile, aircraft.cfg, model and texture folders. After having added these files/folders, the vehicle cannot be loaded in FS to test it out. Maybe I'm going about it wrong and thus thought to post here, once again ideally this will be effective for both versions of FS. Many thanks.

[MIKE JG]

Brian you are on the right track.  The vehicles you use are essentially aircraft in disguise.  I don't know about FSX, don't own it, what I do know about is FS9.

You can use any vehicle in FS9 as ground based AI.  Now for all practical purposes, you want a custom designed vehicle that was meant to be used as a vehicle in FS9, not an aircraft.  The reason being you want an vehicle type FDE so the model behaves like a vehicle, not an aircraft as it "taxis" around on your AI routing. 

So to start, find yourself a custom designed user vehicle for FSX or FS9 and try to use that as your AI vehicle for starters.  Get that working so you can iron out all the kinks in the system.  Then you can try different vehicle models and go from there.  Just know that in order to get the vehicle to "taxi" like a vehicle should, you may have to make changes to the FDE setup, which if you don't know what you are doing, will only make things worse.

[CAFedm]

Thanks for the info, at least it's all going the right way (not the wrong-way road). I suppose it's not possible to use vehicles compiled originally as .bgl format, e.g., if decompiled and then using the resultant .mdl file. Might just go ahead and create some unique items, that way they will have moving wheels & such.

Regards

[MIKE JG]

No, that would be nice though if we could do that, but those are two different animals, bgl and mdl files.  If you have the source files then yes, you could recompile it as a mdl, but that's the only way I know of.

[CAFedm]

Back again,

Seems there is still something I am doing wrong as it doesn't work as planned. I took the original airport Afcad, which contains taxiways that represent the visual roads, deleted everything except for those taxiways, created a small runway along the longest taxi link, and added parking nodes at either end. This was saved as another airport with a unique name. Test flightplans employ an aircraft (with speed reduced to 15 kts) as the vehicle models are still being worked on. The aircraft shows up at one parking node, then disappears, only to reappear at the exact same spot later. Wondering how to get the aircraft/vehicle to follow the taxi links to the airport, then across to the other side - any ideas appreciated.

Original airport Afcad & ground vehicle Afcad pics below:

[MIKE JG]

Without being able to analyze the afcad first hand, it's hard to say what might be occurring.

[dave3cu]

These comments are from experimenting with Afcad and traffic files for FS9. I placed them in FSX also and behavior was similar. For the test veh I used FS9 and FSX versions of the hama's Mitsubishi PAJERO available at SimV downloads.

For the ai not moving, just disappearing from the parking spot....run the Afcad Fault Finder. Check that the taxi link on the runway is set to 'Link type=Runway' or look for open links.

[CAFedm]

Thanks to everyone for the info. Will give it a go tomorrow, after a good night's sleep, some Saturday chores, followed by a cold one with the computer ready to go. Once everything gets up & running, I'll post an update. Appreciate the help.