No Money Mondays: XPAIS Traffic by nestasko

Welcome back to No Money Mondays, our weekly column where we take a look at everything freeware!

This week, we are heading out to sea to take a look at XPAIS Traffic by nestasko for X-Plane 12. Ship ahoy!

As someone who has worked on boats myself, I feel the maritime world has always been a little underrepresented in flight simulators, perhaps for good reason; it’s a flight simulator after all.

Still, I feel the oceans of X-Plane have always been a bit too quiet or unrealistic.

In X-Plane, for instance, we’ve long had to put up with giant aircraft carriers spawning in every little body of ocean, whether that’s a small pond, a fjord, or the Atlantic Ocean.

XPAIS Traffic, then, attempts to fix X-Plane ships by adding real-world ship traffic using live AIS data.

AIS, or Automatic Identification System, is essentially ADS-B for the maritime world.

Ships will transmit information, including their position, course, speed, identity, status (underway, moored, etc) and vessel type, allowing other ships and authorities to track traffic around them.

By the way, you can track IRL ships using MarineTraffic, which uses this AIS data in a similar way to how FlightRadar24 works.

Photo: Commons / Pline

XPAIS uses data from the AISStream network to place nearby vessels into the simulator, which then populates X-Planes ports, rivers, canals and coasts with near-live ships that move below your aircraft.

The developer of XPAIS, nestasko, says it estimates vessel movement between AIS position updates and selects the suitable ship models based on the most plausible available information.

The recently released RC1 update also includes further improvements to movement, vessel classification, rendering, and diagnostics, according to nestasko.

The ships in the sim will not always match their real-world counterparts, and the plugin obviously depends on AISStream data being available.

It is also not intended to simulate port operations that require precise manoeuvring, and ships may collide if they encounter one another, because they don’t actively avoid other ships.

XPAIS Traffic Features

Real-Time AIS Traffic

Live AIS vessel traffic

Real-time vessel tracking

AIS-based vessel positioning

Dead reckoning and position extrapolation

Position interpolation and smoothing

Dynamic vessel lifecycle management

Dynamic model selection

Automatic vessel reclassification

Size-aware vessel assignment

Improved AIS Movement Processing

Improved AIS position…