From Transmitter to Volanta
All good things come to an end. Sometimes they are a blessing in disguise.
Some historical background
When Flight Simulator 2020 was first released, it coincided with me taking part in group flights with MyAir - a fantastic group of aviation enthusiasts that run their own ATC sessions. Of course ATC relies on radar to a great extent - or rather, the ability of air traffic controllers to see where aircraft are on the map.
There was only one problem - Asobo didn’t publish multi-player aircraft positions in the same data feed as AI aircraft - they still don’t - so suddenly the radar screens were empty.
I got my thinking cap on, and wrote a small program over lunchtime that connected to the simulator through SimConnect, and published your aircraft position to an online database. I then wrote a webpage that presented the data reported in the same format that IVAO reported their online pilots (mainly because they published the specification of their format - VATSIM didn’t). I did this knowing that LittleNavMap could both read the data, and you could set the refresh rate - reducing it to a few seconds between reads.
It worked wonderfully. Until it didn’t.
The problem with Transmitter
Over the course of the last few years, Transmitter became increasingly popular - attempting a trick nobody else was trying - broadcasting and sending data to as many as a hundred people at a time, at as much as 1 second intervals.
And that’s always been the problem in the design of Transmitter - it doesn’t scale. That’s why it keeps falling over. In terms of an example, the website hosting Transmitter received over four and a half million hits yesterday. All those small position reports and requests add up - and it looks an awful lot like a “denial of service attack” to a web hosting company. Most have automated systems that react rather swiftly.
A first solution - self hosting
One solution - that I have already put in place - is to encourage groups that rely on Transmitter, with enough skills to install and look after it, to host their own instance. I released the source code a couple of months ago, and several groups have already taken the opportunity to host it themselves. If you’re thinking of doing the same, you can download it from:
https://github.com/jonbeckett/virtualflightonlinetransmitter
Please understand that I can’t support you - there are not enough hours in the day. If you’re thinking of installing your own copy of Transmitter, you’ll need some basic LAMP skills (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).
The better solution - Volanta
Not long after Flight Simulator arrived, Volanta also arrived. The team at Orbx had seen the same problem we all had, and set about building a much more sturdy solution than Transmitter - that both showed recent aircraft positions, and recorded flight plans, and completed flights. Not only could you see where somebody was, you could see where they were going, and where they had been.
Of course Volanta doesn’t update every few seconds - but then no system can if you want it to survive more than a hundred or so users at once. Volanta is designed to cope with thousands of concurrent users.
You can download Volanta for free from:
Sunsetting Transmitter
We haven’t pulled the plug on Transmitter yet - we realise lots of people are still using it, won’t read this, and will no doubt ask “why isn’t it working” when it eventually does disappear - but rest assured, it is going to disappear at some point.
The obvious replacement for group flights, where you don’t need to know “up to the second” positions for your fellow pilots, is Volanta. It can handle thousands of people, plus you get a great record of where you’ve flown that you can peruse in the future.
As stated above - if you absolutely need Transmitter, you can install your own instance of it. If you are a developer, or you know somebody with development skills, you can no doubt re-imagine the application - it’s not a complicated program - it just tends to set fire to web servers :)