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General update & tech NOTAM

382 words2 min read
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    Name
    Phil
    Twitter
    lead engineer @ vatsim

Introduction

Happy New Year! (still okay, since we haven't posted this year...until now, right? :))

Hello again! It's been a while...the VATSIM technology team continues to be hard at work in the background ensuring that your flying and controlling experiences on the network are as smooth as possible. We've done a lot of work recently with METARs, data insights, FSD bug fixes, and our Kubernetes cluster. Watch out for the blog post on our new data insights stuff - it'll be coming shortly and it's very cool.

We're also working with the pilot training, supervisor, and VA/SoA departments on technology advances to make the network better for our staff and our users.

myVATSIM updates

myVATSIM is one of, if not the most used web service we have. Marcelo, our myVATSIM developer, has been hard at work making the backend of the portal more performant and fixing a lot of reported bugs.

One of the main focus areas for development is improvements to the myVATSIM pre-filing experience such as better validation, the ability to save flight plans ahead of time, and some additional guidance for newer pilots.

We hope to be able to reveal more details on this shortly!

Pilot Client Update

We haven't talked about the pilot clients on this blog yet, but we have a fantastic team of pilot client developers working behind the scenes who make flying on the network possible.

Several years ago, xPilot's developer, Justin, made the decision to remove the custom flight plan window within the client, and instead link directly to myVATSIM for filing flight plans. This provides better guidance for pilots and makes the pre-filing experience consistent between clients, SimBrief, PFPX, and other tools.

vPilot, as of the next update, is going to follow this convention. The new update (v3.8.0) will drop on the 1st of March 2024 and from that point, the "Flight Plan" button within the client will open the myVATSIM pre-file page.

Changelog - vPilot v3.8.0

  • Flight Plan window removed, button now redirects to myVATSIM pre-file
  • Right-clicking controllers in the list now gives the option to tune their frequency on either COM1 or COM2
  • PMDG models are automatically ignored - they are not used for model matching unless a specific VMR is used to include them.