Airwave Blog

devlog

Written by: TheDevBird

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I don't know if you've played Airwave recently but the aircraft are dumb. When they were instructed to land, they would turn almost 90 degrees toward the localizer, close to perpendicular. Then, they would go back and forth, overshooting it as they went. And on the ground, they were not aware of each other, never stopping to avoid a crash. This would result in two or more aircraft occupying the same spot if the ground controller wasn't paying attention.

Immersion ruined. Let's fix that.

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Written by: TheDevBird

#devlog


Air traffic controllers don't get enough credit. They manage the entire sky, every single aircraft that isn't on the ground. The amount of aircraft in the air at any given time is around 10,000-20,000 (source). A single air traffic controller can manage from 45-70 aircraft per hour (source). All of this happening 24/7. Luckily, there are strict rules on what areas a controller has jurisdiction over and how aircraft are transferred between them, alleviating some of the workload (and adding some too).

We were enthralled at this; controllers all over the world managing every single flying aircraft. That's cool. ATC games don't really go past a single airport, aside from Vatsim, a player-run ATC system for Microsoft Flight Simulator. So, after conquering the voice-to-task and ground control systems, we wanted to expand further.

Of course, this would be challenging, right?

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Written by: TheDevBird

#devlog


At this point in development, Airwave only modeled the operations of an approach controller. Aircraft would enter the airspace and the players would guide them to land. But, what happens after an aircraft lands? In the real world, they need to taxi from the runway and to their gate. Thus, we begin our journey of following a flight from beginning to end.

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Written by: TheDevBird

#devlog


Most Air Traffic Control (ATC) games force the player to enter their requests into a text field, and for good reason. Computers are bad at understanding you. Even if you knew the real-world commands, these games may force you to learn a new, custom syntax. Very few games allow for voice input and none of the ones (that I've tried) break away from using their own syntax.

But we have AI now, so why not use it?

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