I know there are many discussions about this, though I thought good to start a new and fresh one, since third party addons evolve so quickly.
I’m enjoying vatsim a lot since a few years, although, for a few reasons, I am looking for a good offline ATC alternative, wanted to know your feedback on which would be worth trying. Looking for something not too complicated - I tried Pilot2atc before, and it was quite the learning curve - compared to vatsim there is much more configuration to do for each flight. I may also enjoy that offline ATC as I’m often flying in europe very early the morning (as I play on eastern time), therefore, almost no vatsim coverage.
It’s also OK if you guys recommend me the built-in atc if that’s what is best at the moment. Heard it may receive some love for SU12 also ?
No, nothing is going to come close to an online network dedicated to it (others exist) in my opinon. As a VATSIM user of almost 14 years now my suggestion to you is to continue not limiting yourself on where you fly. I mainly fly in the US but there is downtime. When this happens I fly somewhere else in the world on VATSIM.
I am a bit late but there have been some new ATC addons released in case you are unaware. Sayintentions.ai and BeyondATC are both recently released ATC addons that improve the controlling experience offline. I personally haven’t tried sayintentions.ai as I believe the pricing model is a little expensive, however, I can strongly recommend BeyondATC. Despite it still being in early access I have done multiple full flights with no major issues. You do need to file a flight plan with simbrief (it uses this for routing) and the roadmap is looking promising, with support for emergencies and custom traffic injection coming soon. The addon features localised accents, meaning frequencies in different parts of the world will sound different.
I agree with the above. I got BATC yesterday and have done one flight and I was impressed. It switched me from a STAR to a vectors to ILS approach and added a layer to the single player workload which was credible, timely and very enjoyable. Very pleased with it and looking forward to the next flight.
The thing is no AI can recreate/handle situation as human would. Humans can think & react according to the situation being presented to them. For me that’s a big difference between Vatsim/IVAO and AI ATC. When flying on Vatsim and as a controller myself, when traffic situation permits - ATC can offer a straight in approach…etc.
I haven’t used any of offline ATC mentioned above but I don’t think it will come close to how vatsim controllers operate.
Started using SayIntentions and I’m blown away both by its capabilities and by the speed with which this thing is being developed and improved on a (literally) daily basis. At 30eur/month it was expensive indeed, but now the sub has been reduced to around 18eur/month or so. Given the level of immersion it provides, it’s a no-brainer for me (though at some later point I may also try BATC).
After all these years, I finally have an offline ATC I can work with.
