GAIST v7 Verschenen

Lange tijd hebben we niets gehoord van Hendrik Nielsen. De maker van GAIST een mod om schepen met vaarroutes mogelijk te maken in MSFS. In een post vanmiddag geeft hij aan dat er zware omstandigheden waren met helaas overlijden in de familie. Hij heeft echter een nieuwe versie gereed voor 2020 die ook in 2024 werkt (maar alleen met de live ship traffic van de sim zelf). In 2024 verschijnen de schepen dan ook nog steeds soms wat verkeerd (half in het land etc.) dat ligt echter niet aan hem, maar aan Asobo en het door hun gebruikte DATA model. En ja het schip wat van de week ten westen van Trondheim in Noorwegen het land op voer is ook aanwezig (zie titelafbeelding). De mod is tijdelijk hier   te downloaden maar binnenkort ook op flightsim.to.

Zie zijn post op het forum onvertaald hieronder.

It has been a long time since last post, a long time even since I looked at this site or any other flightsim sites. Unfortunately there has been serious illness and loss in my close family so focus has been elsewhere than on simulation games.

But now V7 is ready and let me start by saying: GAIST V7 is done for MSFS 2020 and stable in MSFS 2020; it will however also work in MSFS 2024 within the limits of MSFS 2024 and you will have some kind of live traffic – no where close to what Kai and I conceived previously together with Fleetmon – but still you will see loads of ships on an approach to Singapore Changi or Panama Tocumen and some mishaps live… look at the bottom of this post. But depending on dataflow ships are mostly static in MSFS 2024. More about 2024 later in the post…

So what are the changes in MSFS 2020…

• More traffic… approx 80.000 ship movements
• Increased density of shipping in many areas from Alaska, Gulf of Mexico, across Asia, the Persian Gulf, the North Sea, the Biscay,
• Traffic in North Sea was cleaned up to avoid wind mill farms
• More diversity has been added through activation of a lot of models previously not activated on preprogrammed routes as they were meant to be part of the GAIST Real Time project
• New models making the total of unique models exceed 1000 and the total number of liveries exceed 2400.
• New models include eg. a US Coast Guard cutter, fishing boats from Spain, Ireland, UK, France, Brazil, Greenland, .
• Complete update of some of the older models; a few has also been retired as they do not live up to the sim anylonger – they were done for FS2004 originally…
• Introduction of LODs on the majority of models for improved performance

And for MSFS 2024

• Coding of around 2000 ships to be used by the live traffic

The live traffic in MSFS is still deficient, but it has improved since the launch and on days with good data flow it is getting decent. Both Kai and I have given inputs, but ultimately MSFS and Asobo have developed their solution and updates to how shipping works technically will come when prioritized by MSFS and I guess they have enough to do on other fronts. So sorry, whatever complaint please send it directly to MSFS in the support channels. I can do nothing to change this and we have given the necessary inputs so MSFS can correct, when they get to shipping on their list of priorities.

If you choose to run with live shipping with GAIST installed you will get a very varied shipping and a lot of ships in harbours and moored at anchorage points. You will see more ships moving than just after the launch of MSFS 2024 or with just default, but still nothing near real levels.

One issue is that the categorization of ship types from the data provider is more limited than what Kai and I worked with previously. Around 30 compared with more than 140. That already makes for a huge difference in precision of model matching.

Second, IMO numbers are still not implemented in the sim.cfg which means that it is still not – with a few exceptions – possible to make a one hundred percent match between model and real ship. You will see the wrong ferries on different ferry lines especially in Europe, where there are a lot of ferries of similar sizes. Also some of the data provided gives wrong type or size of ship, so you might see a very big container ship instead of a sail boat or a fishing boat instead of a tug. And a visually anoying thing, sometimes the ships when moored in harbors will be perpendicular to the quai or well, just desorganized – but at other times they line up perfectly. This again comes down to the data quality and filtering as well as reliability of data from the AIS systems on the ships – this might improve over time, but it is beyond something MSFS can really do.