After lots of testing including extensive stress tests, online virtual ATC network, VATSIM, has announced the release date of their imminent development, ‘Velocity’ to be January 31st 2022.
Velocity is the next phase of development for the online virtual flight network which promises to provide users with more reliability, greater connectivity and as the name suggests, lightning-fast performance. Velocity will enable users to see movements of other aircraft with greater precision as their positions are updated twenty-five times faster than previous experiences.
At present, VATSIM clients will pull data from the server and update aircraft positions every five seconds. With the development of Velocity, these updates will occur up to five times every second. Traditionally, VATSIM predicts where an aircraft will be within those five seconds between updates and the client represent that motion within your simulator. This typically works well but does occasionally results in some strange behaviour, such as aircraft sliding across taxiways or changing direction rapidly. With these position reports occurring much more often, the result inside the simulator becomes much more fluid and representative of real-world operations. Users will be able to see the smallest of details on other aircraft such as nose dipping under braking. This additionally benefits users in the air too, particularly when flying together in formation with other aircraft at slow speeds.
Some changes to VATSIM clients will happen when the switch to Velocity is made. Users that run xSquawkbox will no longer be able to connect to the network with the client and VATSIM encourages users to move to Swift or xPilot to log on. Access to the network after Velocity goes live will only occur after the user’s client is updated to the latest versions. The updates to all clients including vPilot, xPilot and Swift will happen during the network downtime so be sure to use this time to grab the latest updates.
The entire VATSIM network will be down for approximately 30-45 minutes on the 31st of January to enable the switch to Velocity to happen and VATSIM will communicate the progress of the update via their social media channels as to when they are back up and running.
