We asked senior developer, Cameron some questions to help get a bigger picture.

You’ve been working on overhauling the multiplayer servers. What prompted this?

It's a mix of reasons, but mostly it's because some architectural changes are needed to continue building new online features while maintaining performance with high levels of traffic. Our multiplayer server code was first launched in 2014, and while it has undergone a lot of improvements in that time, some larger changes are required to bring things in line with the rest of our server infrastructure.

Right now, we are working on two major areas:

• Optimizing the existing servers and running them off our new infrastructure
• A full rework of the multiplayer servers to allow for new features, such as synchronized jetbridges and ground service equipment

For reference, we reworked most of our server (non-multiplayer) infrastructure between 2020 and 2021. It's important to note that we have been working on optimizing our existing servers alongside our reworked multiplayer. More improvements should come with the rework.

What are some of the main goals behind this from a tech perspective?

Server loads, especially around releases and events can be quite heavy. Improved performance to allow for greater loads is really important and these updates help with that a lot. We will also have better operational tools to diagnose and address issues in production with minimal user impact. These changes will also bring the multiplayer server to our new infrastructure.

What were some of the main hurdles you had to overcome from a tech perspective?

For the optimizations, we needed to handle updates to our underlying tooling with the goal of being able to run our Multiplayer Servers on Linux and these updates address that. In addition, running on different operating systems came with some different, unexpected behavior that affected performance. We spent time investigating and improving certain processes to make them much faster than before.

Also important is that Infinite Flight is continuously in development, and we need to be able to make major changes without affecting the production servers or the released app. The server rework addresses this as well, with the aim of integrating multiplayer more closely with any new Infinite Flight features.

Lastly, networking at scale comes with challenges, such as latency and dropped packets, which makes debugging harder.

What can users expect to notice right away?

Hopefully, nothing new, except for improved performance and fewer random server drops and dropped messages! In time, our major rework will allow for features such as synced jetbridges/ground service equipment, and more.

Expert Server Beta

We are launching a new Expert Server (Beta) with the intention of stress-testing the server optimizations with Expert-levels of traffic. This server may experience disconnections or crashes, but we are monitoring stats with the aim of eventually replacing the existing Expert Server.

If you would like to use this server, please report any disconnections, disappearing aircraft, or server crashes via this thread.

The new Expert Server (Beta) will be available to anyone with Expert Server access. Please bear in mind that some downtime may be expected, especially if issues occur over the holidays, but these will be addressed as quickly as possible with a longer-term fix.

We've just pushed another update to our navigation and airport database (including new airport layouts, frequencies, fixes, VORs, and more).

You will need to restart the app to receive the updated database.

Airport editing is an ongoing task to keep up to date with real world changes, as well as adding more airports to Infinite Flight. The Airport Editing team is doing an amazing job at adding content to Infinite Flight, and anyone can join to help adding new airports or improving existing one!

If you would like to help, you can get started on our forum.

New Airports

Improved Airports

We've just pushed another update to our navigation and airport database (including new airport layouts, frequencies, fixes, VORs, and more).

You will need to restart the app to receive the updated database.

Airport editing is an ongoing task to keep up to date with real world changes, as well as adding more airports to Infinite Flight. The Airport Editing team is doing an amazing job at adding content to Infinite Flight, and anyone can join to help adding new airports or improving existing one!

If you would like to help, you can get started on our forum.

New Airports

Improved Airports

(header image: UKDD - Dnipropetrovsk International Airport - Ukraine)

We've just pushed another update to our navigation and airport database (including new airport layouts, frequencies, fixes, VORs, and more).

You will need to restart the app to receive the updated database.

Airport editing is an ongoing task to keep up to date with real world changes, as well as adding more airports to Infinite Flight. The Airport Editing team is doing an amazing job at adding content to Infinite Flight, and anyone can join to help adding new airports or improving existing one!

If you would like to help, you can get started on our forum.

New Airports

Improved Airports

We've just pushed another update to our navigation and airport database (including new airport layouts, frequencies, fixes, VORs, and more).

You will need to restart the app to receive the updated database.

Airport editing is an ongoing task to keep up to date with real world changes, as well as adding more airports to Infinite Flight. The Airport Editing team is doing an amazing job at adding content to Infinite Flight, and anyone can join to help adding new airports or improving existing one!

If you would like to help, you can get started on our forum.

New Airports

Improved Airports

We've just pushed another update to our navigation and airport database (including new airport layouts, frequencies, fixes, VORs, and more).

You will need to restart the app to receive the updated database.

Airport editing is an ongoing task to keep up to date with real world changes, as well as adding more airports to Infinite Flight. The Airport Editing team is doing an amazing job at adding content to Infinite Flight, and anyone can join to help adding new airports or improving existing one!

If you would like to help, you can get started on our forum.

New Airports

Improved Airports

We've just pushed another update to our navigation and airport database (including new airport layouts, frequencies, fixes, VORs, and more).

You will need to restart the app to receive the updated database.

Airport editing is an ongoing task to keep up to date with real world changes, as well as adding more airports to Infinite Flight. The Airport Editing team is doing an amazing job at adding content to Infinite Flight, and anyone can join to help adding new airports or improving existing one!

If you would like to help, you can get started on our forum.

New Airports

Improved Airports

In v20.2, we will be removing display names and replacing them with community forum usernames. Linking to your forum account will be optional and will be done by navigating to the newly added Account settings page. From there, a new option to connect your Infinite Flight Community profile will be available.

Your forum username will then show while you're flying or controlling online, and lets you easily identify other community members flying or controlling around you. Community managers and moderators are always looking for new ways to connect pilots and controllers when disagreements or mistakes arise, and this change helps facilitate that.

Often, community members will showcase their virtual airline or organization in their forum profile. Connecting the online servers to the forum in this way helps connect the dots for new users looking to get involved. Callsigns will remain unaffected with this change, and if you have selected an approved virtual organization in your forum preferences, it will be displayed in-app along with your callsign!*

A challenge related to display names is moderation. With users from all age ranges and walks of life, we put a lot of effort into ensuring everyone can enjoy flight simulation without fear of harassment. Over the years, display names have required a great deal of attention from staff and moderators due to misuse. With the current system, users are able to set their public display name in-app with very few constraints in place aside from some banned words filters.

One solution would be to rework the username system from the ground up, however we believe that by simply linking to community forum accounts, it will make for a better experience for users who want to be recognized both in the app and in our community. By removing and replacing with community forum profile names, staff and moderators are more available to focus on making Infinite Flight a better experience. Again, this linking process will remain completely optional and users who wish to be anonymous will be able to do so. You will be able to unlink in settings at any time. Should you choose not to connect your forum account, only your callsign will be displayed in-app.

Can I keep my display name?

No, display name functionality the way it exists currently will be gone. We believe that the advantages of connecting community members to our virtual skies will outweigh the benefits of the current system. Another huge advantage to this new system is helping users who require support. Being able to communicate efficiently with these people is very important to us.

More details about if and how users will be able to change their community forum username will come at a later date as we continue to process these system changes.

We've just pushed another update to our navigation and airport database (including new airport layouts, frequencies, fixes, VORs, and more).

You will need to restart the app to receive the updated database.

Airport editing is an ongoing task to keep up to date with real world changes, as well as adding more airports to Infinite Flight. The Airport Editing team is doing an amazing job at adding content to Infinite Flight, and anyone can join to help adding new airports or improving existing one!

If you would like to help, you can get started on our forum.

New Airports

Improved Airports

We've just pushed another update to our navigation and airport database (including new airport layouts, frequencies, fixes, VORs, and more).

You will need to restart the app to receive the updated database.

Airport editing is an ongoing task to keep up to date with real world changes, as well as adding more airports to Infinite Flight. The Airport Editing team is doing an amazing job at adding content to Infinite Flight, and anyone can join to help adding new airports or improving existing one!

If you would like to help, you can get started on our forum.

New Airports

Improved Airports

We've just pushed another update to our navigation and airport database (including new airport layouts, frequencies, fixes, VORs, and more).

You will need to restart the app to receive the updated database.

Airport editing is an ongoing task to keep up to date with real world changes, as well as adding more airports to Infinite Flight. The Airport Editing team is doing an amazing job at adding content to Infinite Flight, and anyone can join to help adding new airports or improving existing one!

If you would like to help, you can get started on our forum.

New Airports

Improved Airports

We've just pushed another update to our navigation and airport database (including new airport layouts, frequencies, fixes, VORs, and more).

You will need to restart the app to receive the updated database.

Airport editing is an ongoing task to keep up to date with real world changes, as well as adding more airports to Infinite Flight. The Airport Editing team is doing an amazing job at adding content to Infinite Flight, and anyone can join to help adding new airports or improving existing one!

If you would like to help, you can get started on our forum.

New Airports

Improved Airports

We’re about to ship Infinite Flight 18.1, our first update of 2018 and we wanted to talk about what’s coming in this latest release, and what isn’t.

Changelist

• New liveries for the A321, 737-800, 747-8
• New ATC Messaging Interface
• ATC voices are now configurable
• ATIS is now available
• Added support for Visual Approach requests to ATC
• Flight info is now available when selecting planes in map view (Expert Server only for now)
• Online Flights Logbook with Ghostings/Violation information
• Aviation and Airport Data can now be updated without app updates
• Various bug fixes and performance improvements

You may have noticed that there is no mention of the CRJ in that list. There’s a very good reason for that. We once again significantly increased the complexity and quality of our aircraft to the point that it negatively affect performance, especially in multiplayer mode.
We’ve decided to delay the release of the CRJ to have more time to experiment with a new aircraft and terrain rendering system we have been working on. This work should help us reach new heights in terms of quality while ensuring the best possible experience, especially with many aircraft on screen (and even allow more that currently possible).

We understand that it may disappoint some pilots out there, but they should find some comfort in the fact that this work should allow us to render more airplanes with better quality at once (along with many other new features it will enable). We will keep you updated on the progress once we can share more about this development.

Bear in mind the fact that our 3D modelling team is already hard at work on the next couple aircraft, so once we solve this performance hurdle, we’ll be able to ship those in a shorter amount of time.

Now about what’s coming…

Liveries

A320: Alaska Airlines (2018)
A321: Delta, Frontier, JetBlue, Spirit
737-800: Aerolinas Argentinas, GOL (2018 Livery), Qantas, SAS
747-8: Lufthansa (2018), Seattle SeaHawks

ATIS

We’re adding a new option for ATC Controllers to open an ATIS frequency. It will allow them to broadcast weather, active runways and general airport information to arriving and departing airplanes. Tyler and Mark have prepared videos to explain how to use this new feature as both pilot and ATC.
Note that ATIS is only available on the Expert Server for the time being.

ATC ATIS Tutorial

Pilot ATIS Tutorial

ATC Voices

We have added the ability for pilots to select custom voices. The voice settings are sent with messages and played across the network if receiving devices also have those voices installed. Note that this will not work across platforms. Messages sent on iOS and received on Android will play with the default voice set on users devices.
If you want diversity, make sure you visit your device Text To Speech settings to install new voice packs. Note that some of the voice packs can take a substantial amount of device storage space.

Visual Approaches

ATC now supports visual approach requests in addition to ILS and GPS. This allows pilots to fly visually to the runway when they have the airport in sight instead of being guided on a localizer by ATC. Make sure you check our youtube channel for videos explaining how to use this new feature.

ATC Visual Approach Tutorial

Flight Info

Infinite Flight now has the ability to show a flight path by selecting airplanes on the map. The information panel will show the flight plan, time flown and ETE to destination. This is only available on the Expert Server for now.

Online Logbook

We have added a new logbook tab that shows Online Flights with Ghostings & Violations summary.

Aviation Data Updates

The aviation database has been updated and will now be updateable over the air without requiring an app update. This means that we are able to push a new cycle of the database whenever we need, regardless of the app release schedule.
If you would like more information about our airport and navigation database, please visit the airport editing team website 333.

New ATC Interface

We have reworked the interface for sending ATC messages. It is now shown in boxes instead of rows to make it easier to hit commands under busy situations.
Also new in this update are two features to help with speedy ATC communications.
The acknowledgements or default responses are now shown in a separate list that is visible at the bottom of the ATC comms page so it’s easy to quickly reply.
Another way to rapidly respond to messages is to hold the ATC button when a response is pending until the default message is sent. This is very convenient in extremely busy situations, no need to open the ATC window to respond to take off or landing requests for example.

We expect this update to roll out in the next few days. Stay tuned for more news about what’s coming next in Infinite Flight and thanks everyone for your continued support!

Happy Landings!