20 minutes ago, jetlag said:

This looks very promising but one thing is not clear to me.  Will this control only real-time traffic (à la FSLTL) or also canned traffic (à la AIG).  The latter is very important to me as live traffic is sparse where and when I like to fly.

so far we as AIG have not been contacted by the developer. We offer a public documentation regarding our fileformat, so it could be that the Devs only need that to get AIG working, but this might result in some AIGTC specific features getting lost.

Interesting to hear that the lead developer of FSLTL joined BeyondATC.

Excited to see how this turns out.

9 hours ago, WestAir said:

To be fair, before now traffic control was to be included in version 2 of the product, which was planned to release after MSFS 2024; Now it's part of version 1.

Exactly.

It was promised for v2 because the devs wanted to prioritise the ATC speech and regional variances logic.

Too many whingers with no patience have forced this move, IMO.

A lot of people have built BeyondATC into the Second Coming. My concern is that there will be a lot of undeserved backlash for v1 not being perfect in every way, despite this expansion of the scope of the product's first iteration.

4 minutes ago, F737MAX said:

Exactly.

It was promised for v2 because the devs wanted to prioritise the ATC speech and regional variances logic.

Too many whingers with no patience have forced this move, IMO.

A lot of people have built BeyondATC into the Second Coming. My concern is that there will be a lot of undeserved backlash for v1 not being perfect in every way, despite this expansion of the scope of the product's first iteration.

In my opinion I feel like this might be an example of feature creep.

Direct control was always on the cards. It's great that Captain has gone this route, but personally I'd still have preferred a two tiered release: Voices then AI Control, as the former will be ready for release far before the later.

5 hours ago, Kaiii3 said:

so far we as AIG have not been contacted by the developer. We offer a public documentation regarding our fileformat, so it could be that the Devs only need that to get AIG working, but this might result in some AIGTC specific features getting lost.

In the video, they suggested it would work with AIG models. 

I get a sense the developer of BATC always wanted to have it control AI, of course - it's a great feature. But if that's not your expertise, integrating traffic like that isn't just something that you can snap your fingers and do.

And then it becomes a matter of releasing something now as a v1 and get more resources for v2, or you postpone everything by 1-2 years and build that expertise from scratch and THEN release something. That's way harder to do and carries more risk. The original plan felt to me like the most sensible.

The opportunity presented itself with the FSLTL dev is fantastic and definitely brought things forward. But I do find the narrative from some parts of the community that vocal complaints somehow changed the dev's misled mind ignores the complexity and struggle of developing a tool like this.

Anyway, I was amped for v1, I'm even way more amped for this one.

5 minutes ago, knich said:

In the video, they suggested it would work with AIG models. 

Models, yes.  But flight plans???

looks like  beyond  atc is  now  able  to  control ai  traffic,  its  getting  better  and  better

 

 

9 hours ago, Fiorentoni said:

Guys coding an AI-controlling traffic tool is a HUGE task, and they are seemingly starting from zero. It's not only the actual "orders" to the AI traffic, it's the communication with them and with the user, all has to be put together in an immersive way. Also when externally injecting AI aircraft' position you get problems like AI traffic not being able to pushback or use jetways (like in FSHud). And - at the very last - any functional AI traffic controller will absolutely kill your CPU for anything more than 20 aircraft at the same time, so you'll probably see empty big hubs (like in FSHud).
So tldr it's absolutely impossible that this will be anywhere close to useful in version 1.
That said, I haven't watched the video yet, so correct me if I'm wrong.

This is straight from the Developer, Captain, about this very thing:
 

Quote

 

Hello everyone, we're so excited to share this announcement with you! We've been a bit quiet lately because some major changes have been happening behind the scenes. We have two exciting things to share:

1) BeyondATC will now inject and control its own traffic. We feel this is a necessary step to provide a complete top-to-bottom solution for ATC. The only reason we didn't choose to do this to start was purely down to resources and time availability. Which leads to:

2) The lead developer of FSLTL is joining the BeyondATC team and will be helping us to implement direct traffic control using the years of knowledge acquired from helping to build FSLTL.

Let's get into some answers about what this all means:

• State of FSLTL: FSLTL is to remain its own independent project from BATC. It is still very much being worked on by both the lead dev and by the other members of the FSLTL team. FSLTL will not be integrated into BATC, rather the knowledge of its creation will be used to aid in the creation of BATC's own custom injector.
• Other injectors: This means BATC will now directly control all aspects of flight, from the taxi, to the flight itself allowing us to control sequencing and provide a much more realistic flying experience. BATC will no longer work with any other traffic injectors, as BATC itself will now be its own injector.
• Injector Data Source: We do not yet know which data source we will use for traffic injection. We would like to find a live service (such as Flight Radar 24) but these services have special licensing requirements that must be met, so this will be an ongoing area of research in the coming months.
• Timeframe: This is a large amount of scope added to an already large project. The addition of a new team member will help us manage this, but even with that, the program will simply take longer to build. We'll do our best to hit our 2023 target but it seems more likely we will roll into 2024. This may be a bit of sad news for those looking to take BATC out for spin as soon as possible, but we as a team feel this new piece of functionality will truly help make BATC your one stop shop for all ATC needs inside Microsoft Flight Simulator and we believe this longer development time will be well worth the wait. As always, I stand by my statement that we will not release this until it's ready, so we really appreciate your patience with us while we work on this new feature.
• Model Source: BeyondATC will not include airplane models but rather use whatever airplane models you have installed on your system. That means you can use FSLTL's models, FSTraffic's, AIG or any other source you wish. We feel this is the best way to make sure you can continue to use your favorite product's models no matter which you prefer.
• Implementation and Performance: This is a large topic deserving of its own announcement honestly, but I'll try to summarize it as best I can. Most traffic injectors on the market right now use one of three main methods of injecting airplanes into the sim. They generate the plane and hand it to MSFS to control. When MSFS takes control of this plane it suffers a huge performance impact. The way to mitigate this is to inject the traffic directly, which means the injector controls the airplane position, bank angle, flaps, gear etc and not MSFS. If this is the best approach to minimize frame loss, why doesn't everyone do this?

As you can probably guess, despite being the most optimal way to control traffic, this method requires you to manage all these calculations yourself, for every single airplane, every single frame (sequence the planes, taxi the planes, should the plane have its gear out right now, is the plane doing a pushback and needs to have its lights on, when does it go around, etc). To do this properly requires a higher level "AI" that understands the context for each airplane; to understand what it's doing locally (right this second) and what the plane is trying to do globally (what is the plane's ultimate goal). It just so happens, that's exactly what we're building! So the choice was clear.

Think of this like a massive real time strategy game where BeyondATC will need to look at each airplane, decide what that plane wants to do, what it needs to do, pass that information through a ATC system that will derive its intended action, create an instruction for that action and finally pass that instruction to the airplane via speech, all while considering every other airplane's position/intentions/goals/spacing the whole time.

We already have this system available for the player, so BATC is perfectly suited to this task. That means, we can use direct traffic control, not the methods that create huge FPS loss. We think because of this, BeyondATC could be one of the most frame friendly traffic injectors available. Very early tests have been extremely promising with 50 live, moving airplanes creating a near ~4 fps drop. Let me stress, these are early tests. We'll see how they hold up once we get further into development.

• Next Steps: This is a big change in our system's core architecture. This means we have to rewrite a ton of code to support this new functionality, which sets us behind where we were before. This is the reason we've not yet released our VFR video or European flight video. We are getting the program back to where it was before we made this change. The good news is we have done in about one week which previously took us months - the advantage of hindsight and copy paste is a beautiful thing. So once we have the systems back to where they were previously, we will continue to put out new content videos to show off these flights. It will still be a while yet before we're able to show off traffic control to a competent level.
• Conclusion: These are the early days of this vision. This is a very ambitious goal and we have yet to see if we can pull it off. I believe we can, but nothing is guaranteed, so please have patience with us while we work through the inevitable growing pains of adding a feature of this magnitude to an already huge program.

As always thank you for your support and kind words during this process, we can't wait to share some progress with you and we'll make sure to keep posting here to let everyone know how it's all going.

 

 

8 hours ago, Tuskin38 said:

Controlling every frame sounds CPU intensive. 

I reckon that's how its down with PSXTraffic which essentially replicates live traffic from ADS-B sources. It manually injects it every frame (or up to 100 times a frame as @kiek has indicated) and thus moves it all around the sky (and ground).

To your point - Yes, it is intensive and hits frames harder (for me anyway) than having the same number of aircraft in the sin being controlled by AIGTC or FSLTL (which is clearly handing over the the defauly MSFS engine).

 

Its the one reason I don't use PSXTraffic at the moment - The main thread hit is just a little to much compared to AIGTC or FSLTL.

1 hour ago, jetlag said:

Models, yes.  But flight plans???

I don't think so..I think Beyond would control the flight plans.

9 hours ago, virtualstuff said:

Get ready for VRAM performance issues (< less then 12 GB VRAM majority out there) (biggest FPS killer with AI) which FSTL has already lol Personally switched over to AIG and o boy night and day difference with the new MSFS stuff 😉

Not to talk about sound issues with to many sound objects in current MSFS

well i converted all textures with AI Texture Optimizer for MSFS to 1k liveries and all models used 32gb  went down to 9gb so that nothing fo the vram  and visually is not big difference due ai traffic is always not that close.

This is going to revolutionize the market, mark my words. I still think they have a lot of work to do on the voices. All of this sounds like I'm talking to someone in the room next door and not ATC radio and the tone of the voices and accentuation is just not like the real deal and I listen to LiveATC daily while I work. I am really rooting for these guys and hope they deliver what was missing in the simulator for years. 

Edited August 26, 20232 yr by Drumcode

The only thing is that now it is not going to be released this year anymore as was promised earlier. The other players in the market also will develop their products further.

It is going to be released when it is ready. (this sentence reminds me of something with a EFB)

Interesting to see where this all is going!

Edited August 26, 20232 yr by rob0203

6 hours ago, jetlag said:

Models, yes.  But flight plans???

based on the Infos, posted in different forums that quote their Discord I wouls say: No. We have special information in our AIGFP files for some airlines that do require AIGTC to run for now - at least no other traffic injector is currently handing this instructions. I have the feeling they will go with some live service (payware) and only use live-data for now. So it might be just a FSLTL with ATC.