Resetting the game in the airport menu now requires an extra click, to avoid accidental resets when switching between locations.
v4.1.2 (9 May 2020):
Option to disable panning/zooming by clicking the lock button in the display menu (this may be useful to avoid unwanted zoom events when clicking on planes quickly, or when recording gameplay).
Bug fixes (fixed achievement not triggering, corrected wake turbulence distance for some planetypes, fixed rare issue where planes did not go around properly, but instead continued their descend).
v4.1.1 (23 March 2020):
Bug fix.
Option to quit game by ctrl + Q command.
Per airport elevation. For example Luton airport is now about 400 feet higher than Heathrow, as it is in real life. Before, only one elevation was defined per airspace and applied to secondary fields.
Fast forward the simulation speed (20x) temporary by pressing and holding the menu button, or by pressing F11. A similar function was available before, but now it's more smooth and accessible without a keyboard.
Higher framerates when using monitors with 60+ Hz, for smoother panning.
Added runway configuration at JFK with parallel landings from the north, with a small localizer offset at 22R.
Added runway configuration at Tokyo Haneda with landings from the west.
Corrected departure headings at Toronto to allow for more parallel takeoffs.
Fixed the altitude restriction area at Luton, which didn't trigger incidents for any plane.
Planes in holding patterns correct for the wind on the outbound leg.
Planes near the airspace boundary won't leave and re-enter if they're already turning around. This may avoid some diversions.
If the mouse cursor is somehow not displayed correctly, you can type curs to make the game draw an alternative cursor, as a workaround.
Thanks for playing Endless ATC, and thanks for the feedback in the comments, forum and per mail which help to improve the sim in each update!
Added 9th airport: Sydney (YSSY), Australia. The parallel runways there are positioned closely together, so it's recommended to intercept the localizers with vertical separation, for example at 3000 feet from the west side and 2000 feet from the east side. In this way, you can use both runways independently.
Dark sidebar option. You can enable it in the display menu to find out if it looks nicer than the brighter UI style.
Flow indicator in sidebar. It calculates the amount of landings/takeoffs per hour, measured during the previous 20 minutes. It only shows it if there were 5 or more landings/takeoffs in that 20 minute window. Could be an interesting statistic, and it allows you to see what runway capacity you can achieve.
Initial descend level at London is increased from FL80 to 90, so there's a bit more flexibility in using vertical separation: as departures climb to max FL60, there are now at least 2 safe levels (FL70 and 80) to use, for example at the holding positions. Although it's best to avoid holdings as much as possible and try to increase the capacity/efficiency and avoid delays.
Pressing ESC does no longer close the game anymore, it just toggles pause mode.
More reliable wake distance indicator (the arc), trying the guess which plane will follow a heavy plane.
More reliable pilot calls when planes are near a beacon or localizer.
New option to choose between plane label styles: there's now a 2-line and a 4-line option, in addition to the default 3-line plane label. In real life, radar display layouts differ per country/facility, but in the game you can choose a style in the display menu that may look closer to the real thing. The compact 2-line ('American style') label alternates between current altitude+speed, and mode+type. The 4-line label shows all the data from the default label, plus the plane type, target heading and target speed.
The text at the bottom of the screen has a black background for better readability when plane labels overlap.
Handoffs for departures are now only allowed from 3000+ feet above the ground, to avoid (accidental) early handoffs and to encourage the player to handoff planes when they're high&safe in the airspace. It's the players responsibility to keep the planes separated until planes reach the top of the airspace, so it's best to keep them in control till they're near the top altitude, to avoid future incidents with nearby planes.
Lowered area restrictions at EDDF by 500 feet, to avoid issues with low GA traffic causing incidents that couldn't be avoided by the player. And it's actually slightly more similar to the (more complex) real life situation.
Added some more hints for beginners, to make it easier (hopefully!) for them to land their first plane.
Several minor adjustments.
Update v3.9.9 (18 July): Fixed some issues with the new label styles, improved holding pattern entry behaviour, and set Lambourne (LAM) holding stack to left turns as in real life.
Update v3.9.10 (26 Aug): - added more help for beginners: better hints and feedback from pilots when they go around, plus a help button with more info - fixed a crash that could happen when a certain hint for beginners was displayed - several minor bugfixes and graphical adjustments
A bit of polishing and maintenance in this small update of the simulator:
increased chance of light category aircraft (L), mainly at North American fields where that's more common, and several traffic and plane type updates
corrected Toronto departure headings, to allow for parallel departures at all runway configurations
added some explanation of the meaning of several buttons (SID, DCT, etc) for absolute beginners
bugfix to avoid a possible freeze when changing traffic mode
bugfix that should fix a crash when the icon file is somehow not found
V3.9.7 (2 June): bugfix for planes that sometimes didn't go around while they were too close behind eachother on the localizer. Also corrected the traffic at Tokyo.
Flow limit can be set up to 180 planes per hour. Before, the limit was 120/h, which may not be challenging enough when there are 3 landing runways available (like at KATL). However, the departure flow is unlikely to keep up with very high flow rates, depending on the runway configuration.
More departures from secondary airports when flow mode is enabled. The amount of traffic to secondary airports actually depends on the skill value you have set. If you want high traffic rates at secondaries, set a high skill value before switching to flow mode. Flow mode sets the traffic flow to the main airport.
Added wake turbulence information to the text at the bottom of the screen when the mouse cursor hovers above a near plane.
Added a low contrast option, to reduce display issues on certain monitors (VA panels) with slow black->grey pixel transitions, improving display quality when panning/zooming.
Fixed keyboard command for speed adjustment which didn't work for departures (for example 'S250').
V3.9.4 (14 March 2019)
Wake turbulence distance is more clearly displayed to the user. The arcs have a brighter color for better visibility. The infotext at the bottom of the screen shows the required distance to the next plane on approach, for example 'wake -0.5 NM' if displayed when a plane is half a mile closer than it should be.
Adjusted (increased) the traffic rate to secondary airports. The traffic flow to these airports depends on the skill value, but in the previous version the flow was pretty low even at high (20+) skill values. That is now corrected.
A small update with more wake turbulence categories, graphical adjustments, and bugfixes. Patch notes:
Added three more wake categories, totalling 6 (like RECAT in real life, which is used at several big airports). It isn't really noticable when playing (heavy and superheavy are still labeled H and J) but it's less strict for some combinations of planes, so it allows for more efficient wake vortex separation; fewer go arounds. The heavies and mediums are basically split up into subclasses. This system also allows for less time between departures: better flow rates!
Wake arc on the localizer will now adapt dynamically to the required distance between two plane categories (instead of displaying two arcs for H and M categories, now only one arc is displayed at the required distance).
Planes inbound secondary airports have a slightly different label color, so they're easier to distinguish from traffic inbound the main airport.
Panning/zooming is a bit more smooth.
Bugfix for an issue where planes went missed approach at CYYZ + TZ when a certain runway combination was in use.
A pretty big update this time, including two more locations! Furthermore, the amount of traffic and the weather can be customized more precisely.
Summary of what's new:
Tokyo Haneda Airport (RJTT).
Toronto Pearson Airport (CYYZ), plus the nearby secondary airport Billy Bishop (CYTZ).
Custom traffic menu, where the skill level, cap or traffic flow can be adjusted.
Weather menu where wind direction, speed and clouds can be specified.
Several bugfixes and adjustments.
In more detail:
RJTT is the busiest airport in Japan and has four runways. In real life flights arrive and depart via the Tokyo bay on the east of the field, with lots of operational constraints, but in the game you have more freedom, although as always you're limited to ILS approaches. CYYZ is the busiest airport in Canada, with five runways (max 2 in use for landings at a time). At the smaller CYTZ field, regional jets will takeoff and land.
Things in the menu are shuffled around a bit: now the top most button is the airport selection/new game button. Right next to it is a new traffic button, where you can switch from normal mode to custom traffic mode. Normal mode is the default game mode, where the amount of traffic adapts to the skill value (while trying to improve your high score). In custom mode, you can set the skill cap (as in earlier versions, this limits the skill value, to avoid extremely crowded airspaces). But now you can also adjust the skill value itself. This allows you for example to start a game with lots of traffic and runways from the beginning, without having to wait for the traffic to build up. It's also easier to set a certain cap value, or close the airspace entirely.
In addition to setting a skill value (which determines the amount of planes to control at a time) you can switch to the new flow mode to set the traffic rate (the number of planes per hour). The flow you set is fixed, so independent of user mistakes. Set it for example at 30/h and you'll see planes arriving every 2 minutes, as well as planes departing every 2 minutes. A maximum and minimum flow rate can be set, to simulate inbound and outbound peaks, which will alternate every 30 minutes. When setting a flow, keep in mind that the capacity of the runways is limited. Each runway should have a capacity of about 40 planes per hour, or perhaps 60 in mixed mode. When the runway capacity is insufficient, the game may not be able keep up with the flow rate, and star will appear next to the flow rate, indicating flights are lagging behind the 'schedule'. To open more runways, you'll have to manually increase the skill level first.
Additionally, if you want to try something different you can disable all departures (press the 'no dep' button), or disable traffic from and to the secondary airports (press 'no sec'). Of course, high scores will not be recorded when using any the custom traffic features.
Weather is generated at random when you enable it, but now you can set the wind precisely is the weather menu, and enable clouds with a separate button. Press it again for more clouds. Use the runway change button to find a proper runway configuration (with headwind) allowing safe takeoffs and landings. Runway changes make take sometime to complete, but now at least they're instant if a certain runway use is unchanged.
Several bugfixes and traffic updates. Type 'nobar' to disable the sidebar if you don't need it. A display menu is added where range rings can be enabled.
So, many changes, I hope you like it. Thanks for the suggestions and support. Happy controlling! ːsteamhappyː
Better departure capacity from parallel runways. When, for example, a departure from a northern runway turns to the south after takeoff, the southern runway is blocked for a bit. But from now on, it's more likely that a departure from a northern runway will have a SID towards the north, allowing more simultaneous departures.
Change runway configuration (by clicking the rwy chg button in the airport menu, or hitting F12). Before, this was only possible when cap mode was enabled, plus it caused missed approaches as planes couldn't detect the runways anymore. Now, planes will continue their approach. Changing runways can be handy if there's weather near a runway, or the wind has changed. Keep in mind that after a runway change request, it takes a few minutes before the airport is ready for new approaches and the runways are cleared.
Inactive runways are visible (in grey).
Two new 'cheat' modes (in addition to F9/F10 to alter the skill level): type in nodep for a game without departures, or nosec to close all secondary airports. As this alters the gameplay, high scores/achievements are disabled after using cheats, until a new game is started.
Removed doubleclick ILS for LLZ mode (localizer only), as it has little use and could be selected by accident. LLZ mode is still available by keyboard commands, and hidden behind a longclick between the altitude buttons in the sidebar.
Hotfix 28 Aug: planes shouldn't go around anymore after switching between airports.
Hotfix 30 Aug: more bugfixes, and the yellow heading line remains visible after handoff, and hold right mouse button to show estimated time from plane to mouse position.
Long press and doubleclick functionality of the sidebar can now also be used with the mouse and keyboard commands, for example selecting ILS* mode by longpressing the Insert key, or longpressing both left and right mouse buttons at the same time.
Doubleclicking SID now automatically selects the highest altitude (handy for New York), and planes can be cleared for the localizer only (LLZ mode) by doubleclicking ILS (could be useful if still planes overlap and should not descend just yet), but don't forget to give the full approach clearance later on.
if you don't like to manually handoff planes, then the pilots won't notify you anymore when they switch to a different frequency automatically; this is to reduce repetative messages.
Hover the mouse above a plane to show the plane type and the distance from selected plane in the description text at the bottom.
After a (very) long delay, pilots decide to divert automatically (costs 0.5 point).