53 minutes ago, michal said:

Makes little difference if they implemented or not, realistic ATC is so beyond what is currently possible.

I would agree partially that creating realistic AI-based ATC either from scratch or from the existing ATC in the various MSFS legacy versions (including P3d) is a daunting task. But it's not impossible. Pilot2ATC does an admirable job, but it doesn't control or communicate with the AI aircraft. VOXATC does both, in a very realistic fashion. Personally, I prefer it to online ATC, which has such spotty coverage over time and space that it resembles a restaurant that is only open when you aren't hungry and when it is open, it has no tables available. So, the question is, how did VOXATC do the "impossible"? It only took 7 major versions and more than a decade to do so. Unless MS buys the rights to VOXATC, it is completely unrealistic to expect that MSFS will have any more than slight improvements over the FSX ATC.

14 hours ago, threegreen said:

Does it though? Where did they say that?

https://youtu.be/L8_UZT8nL-U

(time:10:30)

On 6/5/2020 at 12:39 AM, jabloomf1230 said:

So, the question is, how did VOXATC do the "impossible"? It only took 7 major versions and more than a decade to do so. Unless MS buys the rights to VOXATC, it is completely unrealistic to expect that MSFS will have any more than slight improvements over the FSX ATC.

How many fulltime professionals work on VOXATC?

1 hour ago, RALF9636 said:

How many fulltime professionals work on VOXATC?

None to my knowledge. But the part time developer is a pilot with extensive knowledge of both coding and ATC. Your question could be asked about Alpha India Group also and it would have the same answer. And that's why AIG has far and away the best AI aircraft, associated software and flightplans. And AIG didn't develop its products overnight either.

I'm not disappointed at all in the MSFS ATC. It's pretty much what I expected. 

14 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

None to my knowledge. But the part time developer is a pilot with extensive knowledge of both coding and ATC. Your question could be asked about Alpha India Group also and it would have the same answer. And that's why AIG has far and away the best AI aircraft, associated software and flightplans. And AIG didn't develop its products overnight either.

I'm not disappointed at all in the MSFS ATC. It's pretty much what I expected. 

I am not disappointed either (yet).

My rhetorical question was more meant to express my confidence that Asobo will be able to come up with a decent ATC system a lot sooner than in a decade, if not at release then in the further course of development. Considering their aspiration and their professional partnerships I hope they will have a professional air traffic controller working with them on the ATC system eventually to ensure proper procedures and phraseology. I am confident that what we saw in their latest video is not the final version of the ATC system.

Edited June 6, 20205 yr by RALF9636

33 minutes ago, RALF9636 said:

 Considering their aspiration and their professional partnerships I hope they will have a professional air traffic controller working with them on the ATC system eventually to ensure proper procedures and phraseology. I am confident that what we saw in their latest video is not the final version of the ATC system.

One can hope... This has been requested for MS FS as long as I remember..  and somehow it never appeared.. 😉

7 hours ago, RALF9636 said:

My rhetorical question was more meant to express my confidence that Asobo will be able to come up with a decent ATC system a lot sooner than in a decade, if not at release then in the further course of development.

I think that it's far more likely that a 3rd parties will produce ATC add-ons. Flightsim add-ons fall into broad categories like aircraft, airports, regional scenery, weather, ATC, AI aircraft and various utilities. Of all those, the most difficult to produce seems to be ATC. IMO, this is not entirely due to writing the massive amount of code needed to create the AI that communicates with the user and communicates with and controls the AI aircraft. The real issue is that someone who is either a seasoned pilot or an air traffic controller (or maybe both) needs to create the algorithms that drive the AI. Since as part my professional career, I worked on authoring and testing detailed simulation  models (although not flightsims), I became fascinated with VOXATC and spent countless hours flowcharting how it works. As a RL pilot, it all seems so simple when flying, but when one looks at everything spread out as an flow chart, one realizes why LM, LR and even MS couldn't and still can't produce immersive ATC.

It's not for lack of effort and hence I'm on the same page as Bert Pieke is. I'll believe what you said when I see it. At the rate that the commercial airlines are declining, one wonders if it may even be necessary. I don't want to get off on too much of a tangent, but one editorial undercurrent that has appeared post-COVID-19 is that governments need to focus on building new infrastructure and that one area that would make a lot of sense is investing in high speed rail for overland travel. If this actually occurs, it would be the death knell for many airlines.

14 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

Of all those, the most difficult to produce seems to be ATC. IMO, this is not entirely due to writing the massive amount of code needed to create the AI that communicates with the user and communicates with and controls the AI aircraft.

That may be a good part of what will make a 3rd party developer take it on especially if MSFS20 takes off, pardon the pun.  To have a truly first class ATC, w/o the concotentated vocals but instead as seamless as FSX/P3D's voice quality is, the market could be quite large I would think.  It could be ported to both P3D and MSFS20 perhaps and become critically necessary to a large cohort so become the go-to ATC for both platforms.  And XP too perhaps.  The cool thing also, as difficult as it must be to pull off, is it's just one product, not an array of products that needs updated improve to stay relevant.  So once done, it could be sold for a long period of time.  After all I'm sure quite a few people still use the very old default ATC we first got in FSX or before I forget now, and still use in P3D today.  So long service life, one product, important to many.

Edited June 6, 20205 yr by Noel

1 hour ago, jabloomf1230 said:

one area that would make a lot of sense is investing in high speed rail for overland travel. If this actually occurs, it would be the death knell for many airlines.

In the US? Ummm...no.

I can live with it, if its has the same ATC quality as in FSX!
But i hope they include more real airline atc callsigns in their default repertoire! Especialy from airlines, which are not active anymore!

Edited June 7, 20205 yr by Andiroto

This is a sample of ATC comm. from ProATC-X, an ATC add-on for FSX/P3D.

It's made the 'old fashioned' way with sound sampled real voices.

https://mavecreations.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/7/6/10762233/aussie_atc.wav

Don't pay too much attention to the controllers voice, it wasn't optimized jet, but the laid back Ozzie is priceless in my opinion.

The problem with this method is that it's a hell of a job to add in new voices.

 

 

Edited June 7, 20205 yr by MaVe64

28 minutes ago, MaVe64 said:

This is a sample of ATC comm. from ProATC-X, an ATC add-on for FSX/P3D.

It's made the 'old fashioned' way with sound sampled real voices.

https://mavecreations.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/7/6/10762233/aussie_atc.wav

Don't pay too much attention to the controllers voice, it wasn't optimized jet, but the laid back Ozzie is priceless in my opinion.

The problem with this method is that it's a hell of a job to add in new voices.

 

 

I guess its based on what one is accustomed to, and what one expects. I had looked up this product previously, and also listened to your linked clip, and honestly found I preferred the MSFS clarity. The ProATC-X was just as robotic to me, as I listened to the various voice files being stitched together, with the added issue that the voices felt muffled and borderline unintelligible.

I would imagine that a lot of people would end up like me, leaning forward with intense frowns, turning the volume waaaaaay up and still going "What?" "What the heck are they saying!?"

 

Edited June 7, 20205 yr by HiFlyer

5 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

I guess its based on what one is accustomed to, and what one expects. I had looked up this product previously, and also listened to your linked clip, and honestly found I preferred the MSFS clarity. The ProATC-X was just as robotic to me, as I listened to the various voice files being stitched together, with the added issue that the voices felt muffled and borderline unintelligible.

I would imagine that a lot of people would end up like me, leaning forward with intense frowns, turning the volume waaaaaay up and still going "What?" "What the heck are they saying!?"

 

Spend some time listening to KJFK controllers on LiveATC.net during the local evening when inbound and outbound traffic is at its maximum. They tend to speak at a very rapid pace, and many have strong “New Yawk” accents. The problem is compounded by the multitude of arriving and departing international flights, whose pilots’ English skills can range from excellent to very poor. 

13 hours ago, jabloomf1230 said:

I think that it's far more likely that a 3rd parties will produce ATC add-ons. 

I would be fine with that as well as long as these are high quality professional products. Not what we have now. What we have now for P3D are several one-man-shows with limited ressources.  I tested resp. used all of them within the last decade. All these addons have their significant deficiencies. The development is slow at best if not temporarily or totally abandoned. I don't want to belittle the efforts of these developers at all, but they can only do so much.

What they all have in common is that they all work completely outside of the default ATC-system. So they all had to start from scratch, and interacting with the sim-driven AI traffic seems impossible. Which possibly is the reason why none of the large professional addon developer studios have stepped in so far.

I hope that will change with MSFS. I hope MSFS will provide a basic ATC-system which can be built upon by third parties (or ASOBO themselves in due course).

It should be possible to add to the existing default ATC-system:

- further and more complex procedures (complying with local practices)

- more adequate and elaborated phraseologies (complying with regional and local characteristics)

- new voices (with regional accents).

These should then be handled by the existing default ATC-system without the need of building their own ATC-engine outside the default ATC-system.

So not every third party would have to start from scratch and work around the default ATC-system. That way ATC might get more interesting for the professional big players. Looking at the number of threads about ATC that come up here an Avsim consistently I can't believe that the market for a professional ATC-addon would be too small.

 

Edited June 7, 20205 yr by RALF9636

29 minutes ago, JRBarrett said:

Spend some time listening to KJFK controllers on LiveATC.net during the local evening when inbound and outbound traffic is at its maximum. They tend to speak at a very rapid pace, and many have strong “New Yawk” accents. The problem is compounded by the multitude of arriving and departing international flights, whose pilots’ English skills can range from excellent to very poor. 

Audio frustration is not necessarily something I want recreated in an entertainment product. Realism only goes so far.

Edited June 7, 20205 yr by HiFlyer