"Please correct the number of aircraft in X-Plane" Confusion

[Alan McDonley]

(Newbie to VATSIM this week.)

 

I have been flying with settings Objects:Low and with the Fly_with_Lua script 3jFPS-Wizard11, to keep my frame rate up. Additionally, I was flying with all "AI Aircraft" entries deleted.

 

(I only fly GA and VFR - a canard pusher Long-Ez.)

 

I was initially confused by both the XSquawkBox install instructions:

1. In the rendering settings dialog box, set the number of planes appropriately for your system (we recommend at least 8 ).

 

and the XSquawkBox initialization error message:

You have set your other aircraft settings to only one aircraft - this may prevent TCAS from operating. Please correct the number of aircraft in X-Plane's Aircraft->Aircraft & Situations dialog and restart X-Plane

 

I don't use TCAS, so is it ok to ignore this error message?

 

To not see the error, I had to add back an AI Aircraft so for X-Plane 11.32r2:

 

1. Start X-Plane ( -> Main Menu)

2. New Flight (-> Flight Configuration)

3. AI Aircraft (Button top-middle -> AI AIRCRAFT)

4. Add Aircraft (I added a Cessna Skyhawk)

 

In the Plugins->XSquawkBox->Preferences dialog, I set Max number of full planes: 8 and the Default Aircraft ICAO: C172.

[Diana Tkachenko 1389951]

The default X-Plane 11 TCAS rendition uses the X-Plane AI planes (actually not them but unmodeled uncontrolled “shadows”) as “dummies” for the TCAS responces. If you fly a plane without a TCAS, it’s safe for you to just remove all the entries and ignore the message. Also for example Aerobask aircraft get the data for their own TCAS directly from XSB and other clients, so they don’t need those entries either.

Like I said, if you start X-Plane with XSB and added AI model entries, the actual visual/sound/flight models aren’t loaded so they shouldn’t affect your performance. But sometimes they spawn closeby without any input from XSB, triggering false positives on TCAS.