I wonder how they are doing theses roads.....

[Daube]

[quote]I don't see why the cars can't be AI.

[kipman725]

Sure sounds weird...said like this
Have you ever tried this old helicopter sim named "Search and Rescue" (the vey first one).
It was consisting only in missions, and I would actually really LOVE to see such missions in FSX, because they were for the major part very realistic and very challenging on a piloting point of view:
- going to an accident on the higway, land in front of the police and firemens then bring the injured persons back to the hospital
- chasing a "bad guy" on the highway for cinematographic purposes (you were supposed to carry a cameraman and the challenge was to keep close enough to the car for long enough)
- and some other stuff I forgot....
This was fun, challenging and realistic. Sure that was not flying from VOR to VOR, i understand one can be deluded about that  ::)  ;)  ;D

I had s+r ! very tricky I could only do a few of the missions.

[n_richardson05]

in grand theft auto san andreas the cars and pedestrians scream run and speed away when you get too close with an aircraft or helicoptor its sometimes funny when they ram into each other or drive off a clif . but to do so in fsx would take time and money that could have been better spent on much more inportant things like wings or wheels  

[Ashton Lawson]

i think that there are small segments of road that MS has created with traffic and they just copy the same segment over all of the roads. Ive seen other games like this, and when a car hits the end of that copied segment, itll move back to the starting point...

Once Upon a Time...
I had this idea for hong kong scenery, but it would be too complicated to do it for roads with intersections and alleys.

If this is what MS hav dun, it would generally mean that the roads would be very linear, and boring

But like the other guy said, if you wanted realistic traffic, buy sumthing like GTA or NFS (need for speed).  In fact, you can fly in GTA so you might as well buy that for your flight sim needs if you really want realistic road traffic.
The only issue here is that once you pass a certain distance away from the traffic, they fade away...

[Katahu]

I was thinking that maybe it's a good to use AFCAD to create road system in the FS series. However, I dropped that idea when several factors kicked in.

1. Taxiways don't elevate independently so you got the issue with hills and such.
2. You still need a runway for the AFCAD to work
3. I can imagine how the annoying the ATC would get

[Ashton Lawson]

Yah, thats clever, but I don't really mean using afcad.  If youve seen the gmax sdk about animated scenery, the animation can go for a maximum of about 59 seconds.

So, you have a group of cars at starting point A.  And another group of cars at starting point B.  They start moving in the same direction.  At around 59 seconds, group A are just a tiny bit short of Starting point B, and so when the animation jumps back, it doesn't look like its jumping at all...

Youve probably thought of this or sumthin, but I inherit my 'explain something anyways' thing from my dad.

[Katahu]

So when I am driving a car down the road that is based on your concept, I might notice a slight twitch from the car in front of me as I reach point B?

[Ashton Lawson]

No.  When animating things, the last frame of something should never be like the very first frame.

In this case, if it were, then you would see a slight 1 frame pause.

If the last frame is close to the first frame, but just off, then the animation would be more smooth.