OpenScope Air Traffic Control Simulator | Hacker News Reader

OpenScope Air Traffic Control Simulator

openscope.io

100 pointskqr20 comments

For beginners a recommendation is to (a) switch to a lower-activity airport, and (b) go through the tutorial, which is actually very well integrated with the gameplay.

Thanks! I'm still going through the tutorial, but this looks neat! I love ATC games.

There are some other fun ones out there, like ATC-Manager-2 (https://github.com/sempostma/atc-manager-2) and BSD's atc (https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=atc). On Android, I've had fun memories playing Endless ATC and Unmatched Air Traffic Control. One thing I've noticed about these ATC games is that they tend to be more radar-based than ground-based. I kinda made an attempt to create a ground-based ATC last year - https://github.com/pncnmnp/roger.

Also, tangentially, a few months back, I was browsing my local bookstore when I came across a poster on "Navitrainer" - this was a flight simulator from the forties - https://pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/navitrainer.html - fascinating stuff!

Another fun experience: X-plane + VATSIM. Decent quality flight sim plus community of real-time simulated air traffic controllers.

To clarify here, the VATSIM controllers are real humans. The traffic is simulated, but also “real”, in that it’s human sim pilots flying “on network.” And the network is sim-agnostic. I’m still working on being good enough with my plane in MSFS to be able to fly online.

Yes, the idea of VATSIM is "There are people who want to play pilot simulators and there are people who want to play ATC simulators. What if there was a network protocol to link those groups together?"

There's a Japanese ATC sim series called "I Am an Air Traffic Controller" that I like. It's got a couple installments on the Switch and 3DS which is where I played them, but they go back as far as the PS1. Some but not all of them were localized (there is an English one on Switch)

I think originally it was a PC game series, I've watched some videos of the recent PC installments and they look TOUGH. Much tougher than the console ones

Wow, BSD's atc was a neat way of discretising what's usually a continuous experience. Good to remember!

Looks like a modern version of https://man.archlinux.org/man/extra/bsd-games/atc.6.en

Good grief, I'd not seen this before and now I've lost an entire evening to it. Who'd have thought a game nearly 40 years old could still be so engrossing?! Thanks

Wasn't there an ATC game for Apple ][? I vaguely remember playing it and loving that game.

In 2024 I would like this game to have voice controls, with pilot voice responses. Sometimes the pilot could have poor english and do a wrong thing.

Near Miss. Fond memories.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/175470605636

I had a fun 30 minutes with this but I cannot get the route or reroute commands to work at all. I have the map set to show the nav points but no matter how I tell them to route between nav points I always get "that route is invalid"

If "rr dorit" and "rr xukla" work in isolation, then "rr dorit..xukla" with double dots should also work. Which step fails?

Yeah, I forgot all about these kinds of games. I used to play something similar on Android, where you used your finger, so it was more game-ish, but it was a great mobile game. Anything like this for iOS?

I believe the game you're referring to is Flight Control, and it came out first on iOS back in 2009.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Control_(video_game)

Fun game but not at all realistic. I was reminiscing about it and the closest thing I could find today was: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/planes-control/id1015114550

This game has been around for many years. I remember playing it for hours when it first came out and really enjoying eventually getting into a flow state.

A couple of days ago there was a post for a site that would take you to hacker news on a totally random date; I had a look and ended up about 9 years ago. One of the posts I saw from then was this game! Many years indeed.

Can you uhhh crash the planes into each other?

Did you try? It should definitely be possible. Both near misses and fatal collisions lose you points.

Can you do intercepts? (Weapons director & Air Refueling sim!)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com