You pretty much described any multiplayer game environment, let alone single player.
Sure, AI can handle narrow scripted use cases but that can become stale quickly as it doesn’t reflect reality all too often. That’s where AI has the problem.
I don’t play MSFS in multiplayer, and I imagine the majority of the players do not. That said, if somebody is doing something that shouldn’t, then ATC can still send warning messages. If you are lined up for final approach, and someone decides to get on the runway without clearance, then ATC can tell you to go around, but given that collisions between aircraft is ignored in MSFS it really doesn’t matter. You can still be directed to the correct procedure by ATC and follow it. AI traffic will also follow procedures to the letter as well. No need to worry about multiplayer scenarios in MSFS.
AI is not free, that’s why we have to pay extra for premium voices. Everything else in BATC is scripted and runs on your computer.
News from the Capt’n himself
Greetings! Thanks to everyone who came to check out our booth at FS Expo. It was great chatting with y’all and showing off all the latest and greatest features of BATC. We’re still making our way back and recovering from the show, so we won’t be able to get back to proper development work until next week. In the meantime I wanted to give everyone an update as to all the new stuff we showed off and announced at the expo.
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We showed a near fully working traffic demo with gate to gate traffic. That includes planes taking off, landing, spawning at the correct real world gates complete with animations, sounds and effects. We’ve still much work to do on this front, but the core is all there!
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Moving forward, we will be launching traffic for our users to try on the Experimental branch. This will most likely come within the next month or so as an early preview of traffic. The Experimental branch is available to all our BATC Supporter’s users. If you own or upgrade to the Supporter’s version of BATC you will get access to these features before everyone else.
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If you own the base version of BATC, you can expect to get these features a few months beyond the point we launch it into Experimental. As always, these dates are all subject to change pending our feeling like the feature is ready to push out. We will continue to work on the core program and bugs while development continues on traffic.
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We are announcing our traffic data source: We will be using a schedule of flights (over 15 million fights!) from Flight Radar 24 from a point of time in the past year. We decided to go with a schedule and not live traffic since so many of our users wanted the ability to set the sim time directly in order to ensure a busy airport. Live traffic has the disadvantage of being subject to whatever flights are currently active - which means if there’s no planes taking off or landing at that moment, it can appear there’s no traffic. Using a schedule fixes this and we’re very happy with the amount of busy airports we’ve seen from this. More info to come.
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We are actively developing a VR panel! That means you’ll be able to use a version of the BATC UI in VR. There is no timeframe for this feature’s completion, but we are happy to announce it is in development!
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We will be launching a taxi map in the next week for users with all versions of the program. This map shows a real-time recreation of the airport complete with taxiways, gates, and traffic (showing each aircraft’s airframe, destination, and departure airport). The map will also show you your taxi route! This will help demystify why some airports taxiways are wrong and will help show exactly what BATC is trying to get you to do. This was very well received at the expo and we think you’ll love it too! Look for it very soon. Here’s a pic of this feature from the show (Thanks Take to the Skies!) Discord
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We are developing a custom user data portal. All users will be able to submit suggestions for pronunciations, airport ops, runway wind ops and much more with this slick new online portal. If you make a submission, it will be submitted to our trusted users for review, and if accepted, will be pushed out to all users of BATC. No downloading profiles per airport or specific files, everyone will benefit from everyone else’s submissions automatically! Look for this feature in the near future.
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And last but not least we will be able to take payment from PayPal very soon, so if you’ve not yet had a chance to purchase BeyondATC due to the inability to use a credit card, a PayPal option will soon be available for purchase. Look for this in the next week or so.
Thanks again to everyone that took time to come hang out at our booth - we had a blast! We’re excited to share all these new updates with you very soon. Expect updates with more information as we get back into it starting next week.
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Well, if I MUST use their traffic instead of LIVE traffic, I guess I bought BATC for nothing. Oh well.
Well, I am looking forward to all that, thank you for the update. This and sayintentions ai, has changed my flight simming experience personally. Happy customer to both. I personally will happily continue to support these excellent products.
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Although they have never actually said they’d be using live traffic I always believed that was what was going to happen, especially when a dev from FSLTL moved over to the BATC team. So I’m not enthralled by this announcement - I actually like to see quiet periods, for me it’s better immersion.
But at least the actual ATC is far superior to the stock MSFS, and BATC is still worth it for that alone. Maybe there’ll be some options so I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve seen it in action.
I must say I have never understood the whole fascination with live traffic. Not criticizing, just don’t get it. I suppose I could understand it better if BATC was being set up like PSXT, just position updates to determine where it is going and how it is getting there. I.e. no actual controlling (ATC) of any kind. I suppose in that situation it is true ‘live’ traffic. I will say that though I do really like PSXT, there are a LOT of downsides to true live traffic from a sim perspective.
That is not what BATC (nor SI) were stated to be. They have been planned to be ATC programs designed with the specific intent of controlling injected flights, be they historic, ‘live’, or some hybrid. From that standpoint the source matters little, at least that’s how I see it. The historic flight that left the gate at this time yesterday is just a live as the one departing in 10 min. While they are/were both actual flights, most likely neither is going to exactly match what was actually flown by the time the sim ATC gets done controlling it. In other words they are simply AI flight plans with RL callsigns, gate assignments and dep./arrival times.
For me it does not matter too much if it is live or scheduled. The minute it gets injected and controlled by the sim ATC it ceases to be ‘live traffic’ in the true sense of the word. With all that said I can understand the feeling of being let down due to reality not matching expectations. Perhaps there might be an option to choose at some point. I think that would be the ideal situation.
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I doubt non-supporter users will get AI traffic before MSFS2024 and if Asobo improves their ATC I will probably never touch BATC again. I only used it 3 or 4 times since I bought it. I find default ATC more useful than this and it does not look it’s going to change before MSFS2024.
To each their own, but I’m surprised you find that. For IFR I find BATC considerably better than the in game ATC, although it still has a long way to go.
Regarding the traffic I think they’ve gone with an excellent approach to start with. We get pre-recorded live traffic replayed to match your actual flight time. It’s real traffic even if it’s not live.
This is a huge win for anyone that ever changes time in the sim so they can fly in the day or night or whatever they want. It means we get real traffic that matches the in sim time we are flying at. This is much better than live traffic, the biggest problem with FSLTL et al for me is always that when I’ve time shifted to fly in the daytime while it’s dark outside then I often get empty airports where they should be lively. This will be heaps more realistic.
They’ve confirmed they have at least a full week schedule, so you’ll get the right traffic for a given day. I really can’t see how true live traffic is better than that unless you like watching Flight Radar 24 for some reason.
Also this is the plan for the initial traffic release, they’ve not said they will never support live traffic injection.
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Exactly this 
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I’m on the US East Coast and love to fly in Europe, and on my evening flights with FSTL I usually have no traffic at all
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I did now a couple of flights with BATC. What do I miss?
- Taxiway Ribbons with an on/off toogle (another solution is already announced)
- The marshaller at the parking spot
I still hope for a VFR option. Just contact ATC and go without having to file a flight plan via SimBrief.
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It is undoubtedly better in many ways, but in one fundamental way not: the inability to select approaches and runways. Which after a few weeks of endless visual approaches, which I was ignoring so I could fly the IAP I wanted to practice, I realised there was little point in running an ATC add-on that I largely ignored. And so back to stock MSFS I went when not on vatsim.
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Ah yes it does love a visual approach in USA, if you want to fly instrument approaches then that can be annoying. Outside of America it usually gives instrument approaches, including Europe, Asia, Oceania. I flew into Canberra yesterday and it gave me RNAV Y 17 which was exactly what I’d planned for.
As a pilot IRL you don’t have to accept a visual approach and can request instrument, and the tool needs to allow for that. Also I’ve found the vectors to visual in the USA can sometimes be implausible.
it also puts you on a visual approach and then asks you to intercept the localizer. all in all, i am quite happy with it but there are definitely some bugs that still need to be worked out
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Sayintentions cost just went down to a reasonable price, for me. I’ve been using BeyondATC but have to admit Sayintentions is FAR BETTER. I did purchase BeyondATC, but am not sure I’ll ever use it again.
That happened to me at KLWS. I had to go fish for the localizer frequency, despite it being severe clear, airport in sight the entire time. Was not happy about it.
Question - and apologies if I have missed it previously but this thread is getting huge now…
Will the current fsltl injector still function when beyond atc with traffic is fully launched? It’s the same developer, right?
I fear they will disable it and force everyone down the paid route. I hope I’m wrong!
BATC will use their own injector for traffic. You will not be using the FSLTL injector.