Real-time maritime traffic is coming to MSFS with Global AI Ship Traffic

Henrik Nielson’s Global AI Ship Traffic (GAIST) is one of the easiest ways to improve the coastal scenery in Microsoft Flight Simulator, adding thousands of ships and boats of varying types to the virtual world in the simulator. It’s one of our favorite freeware add-ons for MSFS and continues to be updated with new models and features!

The latest version of GAIST was just released (Version 3) and brought with it a vast number of new ships that will populate the maritime world around you. GAIST now includes nearly 900 unique models, but with all the different repaints, the complete collection of vessels is closer to 1800 models.

The ships in Global AI Ships Traffic move around the world according to realistic routes, and version 3 expands even further the coverage of these routes, which results in increased traffic density in certain areas. To offer simmers more flexibility, this latest version of GAIST comes with separate regional packages that users can install according to their preferred regions of operation. This should improve performance in the simulator as the system doesn’t have as much data to load.

GAIST Version 3 also paves the way for a particularly exciting upcoming feature: Real-Time Traffic! That’s right, Global AI Ship Traffic will soon populate the world in MSFS with accurately-placed ships, based on AIS data from fleetmon.com, and have them move according to their real-world routes. This will essentially make maritime AI traffic in MSFS as immersive and detailed as existing AI aircraft traffic solutions!

Henrik Nielsen and his development partners have started to prepare GAIST for that exciting future version, which has been in development for a while. All the ship models in Version 3 are already ready to work with the upcoming Real-Time feature, which will be the development focus for the team from now on.

Nielsen has counted on the close collaboration of AIG and fleetmon.com to bring this feature into reality, which shouldn’t take too long now. The great thing is that GAIST continues to be free, which is simply awesome considering how much it adds to the simulator! Just look at the image below previewing the scenery near Singapore at dusk, with real-time traffic enabled:

Global AI Ship Traffic Ultra version 3 is out now for Microsoft Flight Simulator. The free download is available at flightsim.to and Fly Away Simulation and it’s an absolute must-have if you fly near or above water in MSFS.