Taxiways and ramp design question

Question

It appears that with X-Plane 11 when looking at the taxiways and ramps, they are no longer connected to one another (KSEA demo area). My understanding is that in previous versions of X-Plane that ramps were always connected to the taxiways.  This was to prevent AI aircraft from finding their own way to the runway.  

What is the official LR stance on this subject, should the ramps be connected to the taxiway or not?

Comments

Hi,

I have the same question. according to the tutorials :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDsEWLmZZXc (at 20.10)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC0R2oe6scc&index=5&list=PLMlRNmHeyivDExXiX09nq9toVVplBVxtD (at 2.30)

Taxiroutes and ramp starts should not be connected.

Also, I submitted LFRS to the gateway and decided to connect the taxiroutes to the ramp starts, because I found the result slightly better. The submission was approved, But none of the 2 solutions was perfect (whether connecting or not).

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Take a look at this Youtube video https://youtu.be/SMslHitMEYc for how to create taxiways in X-Plane 11.  It is designed for the purposes of the X-Life traffic plugin but following the taxiway and ramp design steps should cause the X-Plane AI planes to work correctly as well.

In the first video you mention, Jan Vogel is allowing the X-Plane code to make decisions as to where an AI plane taxis because there is no ramp to taxiway connection. Now granted, if the distance is small between the ramp and the nearest taxiway then X-Plane may get it right but it may not always be the case. A direct ramp to taxiway connection eliminates this guess work. As long as your ramp size and taxiway width are compatible then things should work like a charm.

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Thank you for your comment.
I have seen the videos about X-life too, but i have found that even when connecting the taxiroutes to the ramp starts, AI traffic still happens to take shortcuts and end up with a strange heading on a ramp start, in the middle of nowhere. Seen at the last gateway submission of LFRS for instance.

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If you are using X-Plane 11, while the AI works way better than X-Plane 10 did, it still needs work. That's why I went to the X-Life plugin for traffic.  It works pretty good and you can get the basic version for free. The problem with it is that ramps have to be connected to the taxiways or the planes just sit at the gate like static planes.

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Yes, i should give it another try. I wasn't especially convinced 6 month ago but maybe it's been improved now.
Anyway, it is good to have a similar method to build taxiroutes for native AI traffic and for X-life. It looks like it is now written down :)

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While I don't know how the AI aircraft work, they do seem pretty reasonable when things are connected.  I did take a quick look at your LFRS airport and noticed a lot of ramps with a way in from the taxiway but no way out. You may want to try creating some one-way taxi routes going to and from the ramp (per the X-Life video with the 3m gap between them) and see if that causes the AI to work better.

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Ok, i will check it out in a couple of weeks. Thank you for your help. It is a very complex ramp, in terms of AI traffic, and I think the main problem is that there are many "parking lots" with crossing directions and at the moment, we have to create nods at taxi routes intersections. This necessarily creates shortcuts. An other solution would be to remove some of the gates (or select misc for them) and their taxiroutes. I'll try to find the best compromise.
Thank you one more time.

Answer 1

Our official documentation does recommend 

• Gates must be connected to the taxi route or AI planes will go off the grid and “go direct” to the gate. In general, if you have drawn yellow lines going to the gates you should link the taxi routes directly to the gates. For a tie down you can also put taxi routes along the exit routes.

I suspect that in practice as long as the taxi route goes fairly close to the appropriate ramp, the AI will behave fairly sensibly. I am not a scenery artist and have not tested this theory though.

Comments

I have updated our ATC doc to say connecting the ramps to the grid is recommended. It is not required but may yield more predictable results.

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Thanks for updating the docs. I hope you included the fact that in may yield more predictable results for those folks who may not think it matters and if you did, thanks again..  Just as a sidenote, the X-Life traffic plugin depends on the ramps being connected to the taxiways, so this does have an impact on 3rd party tools also.

Do you have a link to the ATC doc that we could reference?  Is it the one at http://developer.x-plane.com/?article=atc-taxi-route-authoring?  Just wondering since I didn't see the update.  Thanks again for the clarification!

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Yes, the doc on the Developer site (ATC Taxi Route Authoring) is the most current document at this time.