I wasn’t going to post this video, but…what the heck. So first, Chris sent me a link to this video a while ago. Since Chris and I are both ATC nerds who used to work the Boston region on VATSIM a gajillion years ago, we thought it was pretty cool.
So when Robin stopped by the other day and I was showing him the in-progress ATC system (and to everyone’s surprise it didn’t just crash despite being under heavy construction that day) I made this video.
Like the other ATC video, this is taken with X-Plane 10 using version 9 airplanes and George Grimshaw’s custom KBOS v2 (I think this is the official convert that’s posted to x-plane.org).
We’ll probably make a better version of this video once the system is further along; on the day that I took the video, incoming AI traffic was disabled due to work on the code, hence you see a lot of planes leave on 22R, but no one ever lands on 27. This is life with in-development version 10; we all have our pieces of code work on and on any given day, someone else’s area might be under construction.
(BTW, we’ve moved the old video to YouTube. As much as I get secret enjoyment from forcing everyone to download a QuickTime H264 video that won’t play on some browsers, we like having YouTube provide our bandwidth for free a lot better. Click the graph to see the main website spike when we started hosting our own video.)
Hah, is that a subtle dig at the HTML5 video/WebM debate?
LOL, no, it was a subtle dig at our readers. 🙂
Years ago I used to do a lot of QuickTime programming, so I have this skewed view that QuickTime is a top notch technology that everyone should use. But I am reminded that QT as a distribution format doesn’t have particularly solid adoption out there.
This is as amazing as it gets! WOW! I SO dig your effort guys! This is going to be so good. Really looking forward to see more of the ATC system! An overview point of view at say KLAX (at 1x) would be so interesting to watch! Keep up the good work and chill yourselves out with a good beer on this sunny and warm afternoon! You really deserve it!
Wow, that is really impressive to see the AI handling a mixture of both commercial jet and general aviation planes.
What a fun video, thanks for posting this 🙂 Can’t wait to see it all come to life on my own monitor in V10.
One question.. aeons ago you showed a video that had heat-blurr in it (i think it was behind the Cirrus Jet). Is that still a feature that’s planned on being included in V10?.. it’ll make scenes like this all the more fun to watch (especially if the engine-smoke will actually be coming from the engines 😉 )
Very cool, Ben. Funny thing I noticed: Watching the “real” video, as the planes throttle up, the elevator goes down. On the XP video, the elevators go up. If the AI craft are obeying the same laws of physics that govern the player’s aircraft, wouldn’t that make them take off at basically the stall speed?
The elevator deflection when the AI plane rotates is almost certainly _not_ what you see when it throttles up; the real life pilots are following some on-board checklist; Austin’s plane is following an algorithm that is generic to all planes, based on v-speeds but not SOPs from the manufacturer. Anyway, I suspect that the real takeoff speed is something Austin picks, like 1.3 x dirty stall or something or other..
Real aircraft (not all) Boeings for example don’t have this in SOP, put full elevator down below something like 80 knots at which point they centre the controls and wait for the plane to reach the v speeds and then take off. If I had to come up with a reason for doing so, I’d argue that the weight transfer of the aircraft at throttle up puts the plane closeish to the tipping point and deflecting the elevators in such a way deflect what little airflow is occurring over the elevators from the engines to create as much lift at the rear as possible but this is just a guess based on logic.
As for the X-Plane video, it does look like the planes take off at stall speed to me which might explain why they level off to gain airspeed soon after (I would guess there’s some low airspeed protection logic built in). I think the best thing to take away from the video would be to just accept that it’s in development and it’s obviously not perfect yet.
I guess elevator down in the first part of takeoff roll, is done in order to transfer the most weight to nose gear and hence to give the most possible directional control in the low-speed part of the takeoff roll, when the rudder has no or little authority.
That’s the reason. Below 80 knots you push the yokw forward to get weight on the nose wheel for steering and after about 80 knots steering is done only using the rudder.
Awesome guys, can’t wait like everyone else!
Thanks for the fun vids.
Will these AI airplanes in X-Plane 10 world generate engine sounds?
Thanks for showing this video. ai traffic looks good, really thanks for sharing with us
the impressive thing about the real video is the speed and rate of the climb, even for the big heavies, XP10 is impressive as well as the differences between the two are well…minimal, I think that was the point Ben was making.
The hard part will be fitting in and keeping up to speed with those around you, and falling into line, i sweat just thinking about that….they just keep coming at me in Xtraffic.
Will we set up the AI aircraft like Xtraffic, or is there a different system used in XP10, I know you touched on this a while back on that they fly from airport to airport, but i was wondering if there would set routines we would download to fit them straight in…..
@Atomic_Sheep
I bet the A.I. aircraft are leveling off due to flap retraction lift loss.
Once you get the approach logic working, I’d like to see some approach vectoring from the cockpit. Can you set up preferred runway systems for airports?
I find that the music is quite annoying 😛
Do you have any plans to introduce some randomness to make the piloting of each aircraft a little less predictable?