Our newest radar simulation is approaching completion, and should be available for purchase by the end of July 2012.  We have decided to offer six different levels, instead of four as originally intended.  Radar Chaos Hawaii Edition consists of two ‘enroute’ levels and four ‘TRACON-style’ levels.

You have seen airport environments in our earlier radar games, Radar Chaos, Air Traffic Controller, and The Simulator.  In these levels, aircraft land and depart from busy airports.  Hawaii Edition’s two enroute levels offer something a bit different.  These sectors have no airport.  They are designed to collect arrivals and stream them to the ‘approach’ controller for a specific airport.  They also disseminate departures to their correct flight routes.  There are many conflict points, and an understanding of the airspace shape is required.  In some areas, you are in charge of only the airspace that lies above 16000 feet. In some ways these levels are far more complicated than the approach TRACON’s.

We’ve fallen behind.  The original promise was for July 1.  However, we’ve expanded the project, by adding levels and features.  We’ve run into challenges that eat up time.  And, the Well of Inspiration does occasionally dry up.  Some days this project feels like a concentration camp of the mind.  We love it, though.  And like the rest of our games, we poured our hearts into this one as if we were building it for ourselves to play and enjoy.   RCHE will definitely ‘bring it’ on release day.

As with the original Radar Chaos, we ran into this issue of ‘what’s going to be fun’ versus, ‘what’s going to be real’. We could make it more realistic but it would become too complicated for most, and the instructions would be lengthy.  At the end of the day, a simulation that is dead real isn’t going to interest the majority of our customers.

If we really wanted, we could add multiple SIDS, assignable STARs, VFR climb restrictions, non-radar separation, and flow control. I’ve done this stuff in real life, and trust me, it gets boring.  The fun stuff is the vectoring, the sequencing, the handling of six aircraft that are all tangled together somewhere.  An arriving Cessna that’s getting overtaken by a B757, that’s fun.  A departing 737 that is stuck beneath a slow-climbing prop, that’s fun.  These are situations where you get to put your ATC cap on and do some air traffic controlling.  It’s crazy scenarios like these that make the work interesting.  Nobody enjoys relaying IFR clearances, coordinating time estimates to  adjacent sectors, or talking on the phone with the flight planning. So we are building something that will ultimately be a whole lot of fun, in risk of offending a few real-world air traffic controllers who will immediately recognize that this is not an exact replica of real-world ATC in Hawaii.

We should hopefully have another video up shortly.  If you haven’t watched the first one you can find it in our blog below.

Shortly after we finish Radar Chaos Hawaii Edition next month, we will be pushing out a new version of Sky Madness as well. Better graphics, improved game play, and way more levels!

This video isn’t the best quality, but it gives you an idea of what we are working on.
Radar Chaos Hawai Edition: Part 1 from Big Fat Simulations on Vimeo.

We’ve released yet another update to Airport Madness 4 which you can grab here, free to existing owners of this product.  New challenges have been added, my favorite being “Fast Forward”, which speeds up the game play to 2X speed.  I actually found it to be more fun than the core game itself, which suggests something.

With the first version of Airport Madness, there were complaints that players were not being given enough time to react. It’s a real-world problem as well, but nevertheless, I changed future versions of the game to be more ‘zoomed out’ with smaller airplanes, offering plenty of time to react.   But I think the game lost something when I did that.  The next version of Airport Madness has a bizarre theme which I’m very excited about, but it will require that I ‘zoom back in’.  Airport Madness was never a simulation, but all game.  I’m striving to keep it there, in risk of disappointing those who want ‘more features’.

I received a great email from someone the other day who feels that Airport Madness has become a big tangled ball of yarn.   In Airport Madness 4 there are different user profiles to choose from.  And you must pick a name.  And there are challenges and different levels.  But the levels must be unlocked.  And what’s the trophy case all about?  With each version, we experiment with new stuff.  The stuff that works gets added to future versions.  Everything else gets cut.

The next version of Airport Madness deserves a better name than ‘number 5’.  I think we can do better than that.  After all, it’s going to have an entirely different feel to it.  It practically deserves a new name altogether.  We will have to see.  I don’t think anyone’s going to by ‘Airport Madness 17’ if they already own the first 16 versions.  Realistically there are at least four variations on the Airport Madness theme that I would like to try.

Needless to say, we will be keeping ourselves very busy for the foreseeable future, not just with Airport Madness, but the Radar Chaos series, which will likely have several future versions of it’s own.  Sky Madness will also be getting an overhaul this summer.   If it makes a decent comeback, there could be future versions of that as well.

I hope to soon find time to try something entirely different.   I think there are untapped ideas in flight simulation, which seems to have kind of disappeared over the last few years.   You can read about it all here first.  I will do what I can to keep everyone posted!

Big Fat Simulations proudly announces that we have recently become incorporated.  This does not change anything on the surface.  We are still maintaining our fairly aggressive product timeline, in an effort to bring you more of what you like.

Repeat visitors to our website may have noticed a few changes lately, as we have been busy tidying up.  Most of our product pages have been given a fresh look.  Google Ads have been entirely removed from our website (let me know if you see any that I’ve missed).  The main website banner is also new.

A huge thank you to all of our existing and future customers, for supporting our efforts and enabling us to create fun games!

We are busy developing our next version of Radar Chaos, and hope to release it by July 1, 2012.  

The original Radar Chaos, although fairly realistic, was based on fictitious locations.  We dreamed up what we felt would be “really cool” airports, adding in conflict points where we felt they were necessary.  The aircraft behavior in this game was highly realistic.  However, the control interface was extremely simple, basically offering up-down-left-right actions plus a few other features.  We were catering to Joe Gamer, who probably knew nothing about things like mach transitions and such.

When we asked ourselves where the Radar Chaos series would go next, we decided upon two things. The control interface should offer more realistic control options, and the simulation should be based on a real-world location, with adherence to real-world procedures.

An improved control interface which allows holding patterns, direct waypoint assignments, mach assignments, and “mach transition” assignments will be a welcome addition. The panel has an entirely new feel.  Rather than ask users at the very beginning of the game to choose their flavor, basic or advanced, we give the freedom to choose this during play.  Initially, the control panel is simple, offering speed, heading and altitude control.  But tap the “advanced” icon, and it expands to offer heaps of additional features, such as conflict management tools and the ability to give handoffs and frequency assignments.

As for real-world locations, we have chosen Hawaii.  One thing we noticed right away during initial testing is that sometimes “real” isn’t much fun.  So with that in mind, we have tailored the procedures and airspace delegations slightly.  For example, the real-world high-level sectors of Hawaii contain some degree of non-radar air traffic control, which requires a great deal of coordination work, but offers limited screen action.  When we discovered that an aircraft required 45 minutes to travel from the left side of the screen to the right, we knew that we would again have to make a decision between “keeping it real” or making something that is going to be addictive and fun.

I fully expect to receive emails from Oakland and Hawaii air traffic controllers (both real-world and vatsim) telling me, “That’s not right.  Oceanic traffic has much more than just 10 miles of lateral spacing!”.  Or even, “Hey, the Molokai Four Departure isn’t shaped like that.”.  I will thank them for their input, but politely explain that “real” isn’t something people are going to enjoy on their computer.  Nobody wants to stare at a an airplane for two hours as it crawls across the screen at glacier speed.  After all, this is supposed to be Radar Chaos!

So that’s where we are at.  We want to have our cake, and eat it too.  We want real, but we want to have fun also.  So how do we put chaos into radar?  By loosely basing everything on real world airports, terrain, sectors and procedures, but making the sector sizes smaller for faster screen motion and limited room to manoevre traffic.

Since its inception four years ago, Big Fat Simulations has maintained the same website graphics, which consisted of a banking Boeing 737 against an orange sunset.  In 2008 we were busy creating our first game, The Simulator.  The website needed to be created quickly.  We found a beautiful image on istockphoto.com, sliced it up and uploaded it to the server.  Presto!  A website in just 5 minutes.

An overhaul has been long overdue.  This week we gave the website a new look, which summarizes the spirit of our games.  We’ve got the serious-looking control tower on the left, and the Boeing 747 clumsily taxiing through the web page at the top.  A huge thank you to our artist, Sarah Radford, for her creativity and skill.

In addition to this new background image, we will be gradually overhauling the entire site, including a reorganization of our product line.  In our early days, a simple table on the home page containing all of our games was sufficient.  By the end of 2012 we will have enough products to demand categorization.  The likely categories will be Airport Madness Series, Radar Chaos Series, and More Games.

It’s been an exciting two weeks since we launched Airport Madness 4.   We had initially planned to complete Airport Madness 4 in November, spend a month testing it, then release it on December 1st.  However, we came up with some great ideas late in the game, and this delayed our launch until December 24th.  Number four in the series seems to have met or exceeded most people’s expectations, with the exception of a few bugs.  There are always bugs with new software, and we’ve worked out nearly all of them with with the latest build.  We’ve received some amazing ideas and solid feedback from users, and we are doing everything we can to process it all.

When we created our first game five years ago, we were so focused on building the ‘fun’ aspects of our game that we neglected to put any music in, and this was the primary user complaint.  However most of the emails we’ve received for Airport Madness 4 sound something like, “Could you add a music volume knob so that we can, you know, turn the music down?”.  Another complaint has been with regard to the voices.  When we launched, Airport Madness 4 came with just one voice, altered to three different pitch levels, for variety.  This was not well received, and we are happy to report that the voices have been improved for the latest build, 1.12.  We have not added a volume knob, but have lowered the music volume to match that of the other sounds.

Our game plan over the next few years is to launch a new version of Airport Madness every Christmas.  We have some terrific ideas for this and have already begun laying the groundwork for the next three versions.  Having said that, we’ve decided that our priority must always be to focus on the current game, and how to make it better.  Airport Madness 4 will not be abandoned for the next version, as with earlier versions.  Airport Madness 4 will be improved upon, changed, added to, and hopefully one day perfected.  Updates are always free, and automatic from within the game.

We also plan to give Radar Chaos a makeover this Summer, adding fresh artwork, improving the traffic generation system, and adding features such as holding patterns.  There will also be a second version of Radar Chaos, focussing on the ‘enroute’ aspects of air traffic control.

Airport Madness 4 Build 1.10 is now online. If you’ve already purchased this game, you can update it for free, directly from within the game. On the game’s main page, click on “An Update Is Available”. Check out this list of bug fixes and improvements.

We will be doing another release next week, hopefully adding more features, most notably some improved voices, as well as a second launcher for each aircraft carrier.

Unlike previous versions of Airport Madness, our goal is to make Airport Madness 4 stick, by adding fresh features and improvements on a regular basis. Check back regularly for updates!