9 hours ago, Stearmandriver said:

there's no flight following

It does provide flight following, at least during the closed Beta, at the end of last year that I was lucky to participate. So, I can hope it’s still an included feature in Feb’24.

It was very impressive and awful at the same time. Again, it was during the Beta end of last year, early this year. Some features are really impressive as a VFR only pilot. Very (very) immersive. But the development process was kind of chaotic at that very moment. It may have changed since then. And as I'm passionate by radio communication in US for VFR, I explored some aspects and here comes the weak point. Some stuff (again at that very moment) were really broken from A to Z. One example, the AI ATC has no clue about the airport scenery that you have on your Community folder. So even, if a passionate developer 😉 has precisely redesign the taxiway naming of your airport, AI ATC will give you the crappy default Alpha, Bravo path of the default small airport where you are. So forget about appropriate taxi instruction.

Of course, nothing is perfect, but if you didn't follow a sort of scenario you touch the weak point again. For example it looks like a Chat-GPT prompt-response discussion: when you detect something wrong in a discussion and Chat-GPT says "white" once then "black" few seconds later. Again, it's was 2 months ago during the closed Beta and I can expect these fixed but it gives you the spirit of this generated AI that need some improvement somewhere :

- "Why giving me a clearance for runway 30? You know that there's no runway 30 at my destination airport?"

- "Oh, I'm sorry and thank you for mentioning this. Join left base runway 28"

- "Hum.. Left base from my position would required overflying the field, what about a right base 28?"

- "Ok, join right base 28"

At the end of the day, even if $30/month covered the infrastructure charges for the developer, it's way too more expensive for my personal usage. And I sincerely wish a healthy business for the dev.

For now, I can wait for an embedded feature into (the next) MSFS. "Copilot" is the name of all AI stuff of Microsoft.

Edited February 14, 20242 yr by vbazillio

On 2/13/2024 at 11:02 PM, Kaboki said:

You all judge it without even have tried it.

I judged $30 for ATC as a whoppingly bad deal so no need to try it.

I’d still recommend for a dollar flying over an area you’re interested in and getting a guided tour on 123.45 and then an afternoon flying around with the ATC.

 it makes for an entertaining day’s simming for only $1 wether you’re interested in the whole project or not.

Well., I gave this a shot. You can try the beta for 24h free.

It is very well done and actually looks promising.

Reminds me of FSHUD, but more immersive, because its not text base and the voices are really really good.

Price will certainly be an issue, but f you know you are going to have lots of time for a month and plan on doing VFR, it could be very manageable.

Certainly no worse than buying a payware airport your only going to use a dozen times.

Makes me wonder why not just go for Pilot Edge for a couple of months as the price is pretty much the same if not lower. Real ATC. VFR IFR.

I wish them luck and continued development.

 

 

IFR support is already partially implemented (and supports Simbrief as well) and Brian (the lead dev) expects the bulk of IFR support to be added in the coming weeks.

This really is an exciting project and, while I also balked initially at the monthly price, now that I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks, I can’t see myself flying without it in future - I’ll just have to buy fewer other things 😆

They’re adding new functionality with impressive speed. FSS support was added last week, worldwide ICAO support is available and being improved daily, they already have proof-of-concept support for AI traffic injection (just not released to us yet), and Oceanic HF radio support is currently being discussed.

The demo gives you 24 hours free and is reset each month so that you can come back and sample the improvements.

ATC response times and cost are the two things that they say they are working to reduce as quickly as possible (and I believe them).

 

Edited February 28, 20242 yr by Redge
spelling

When I look at what BATC will cost, this product now seems cheap:p

Edited February 28, 20242 yr by Kaboki

I'm still really eager to see what BATC has come up with, but I agree, for the equivalent immersion and voice quality etc, the cost of SI compared to BATC looks very competitive.

In another thread I was disparaging the voice quality of the different BATC voice levels a bit, but having heard some extra samples from their premium voices, I now actually think they sound fantastic (on-par with, and perhaps even better than the quality of the voices in SI). But it would then cost multiple dollars per flight to get that with AI traffic.

The (optional) inclusion of other pilots audio chatter in SI is also excellent, and not something I thought I wanted. It's cheap (because it doesn't require AI generation), and they don't really promote this much, but it can be used in a multiplayer context (if you're on the same servers - albeit with a bit of a delay currently), which is fantastic. I prefer my traffic in the FSLTL form though, so I have only used it a couple of times.

I'll be interested to see how the traffic injection with SI goes (and the implications that it has for pricing, latency etc) but for now I'm definitely on team SI.

Edited February 28, 20242 yr by Redge
clarity

On 2/13/2024 at 8:44 AM, sanh said:

They lost me at 30 bucks a month....

Well, they do say 'another day -another dollar', don't they!?😁