rkotcher
rkotcher on Hacker News
Thank you! appreciate the bookmark!
thank you for your comment!
I had looked a bit into doing the realtime views and actually had it working. I could get the real aircraft heading and orientation. I was able to get it for free with community ADS-B aggregators (though data was incomplete), but doing long-haul flights was difficult because there's no ground coverage. Even sites like flightaware I believe estimate a lot of things when over oceans. But, Maybe I will look back into it!
I really appreciate your comment.. thank you for playing!
Thanks for the suggestion. I could actually consider doing this - the flight itself is procedurally generated, so it's entirely possible.
As for the second suggestion, it actually is possible now! but maybe it's not obvious and I should change the style or something to make that more clear.
Thank you for playing!
well, I'm the kind of person who stares out the window for the entire flight, so to me this sounded fun to make and recreate that experience. but really, no point at all to this haha
Your comment made my day! Thanks for the insight, and thanks for playing :-)
thanks for the ideas, I will consider adding some of those!
fixed the shadow map being drawn twice, and have deployed that. going through each of these and considering. thank you for your suggestions.
awesome, I will look at each of these, one at a time. my bigger issue today was that I was not expecting so many people to try the app and have unoptimized bandwidth costs. bringing those down first and then will be looking into optimizations like you have listed. I honestly just built this thing for fun & it was running fine for me. now that others are using it it's time to start thinking about performance more. Appreciate the thoughts.
thank you! I had actually made that feature and then removed it to simplify. I will consider adding it back :-)
It's a work in progress. I have cut down on the original mesh size by quite a bit but continue to do that. I also fade out the resolution of the map tiles as you approach the horizon so you aren't loading ihgher res satellite images than you need. I've run entire flights on my 2022 mac pro with no issue, but as this is a side project it remains not as optimal as it could be. Any suggestions for order of operations / what should be fixed next are welcome :-)
well, actually I had tested in iphone and did some things to but back on mesh size & also streaming terrain so that I'm not overrendering textures. I have not tested on all devices as I only have one mobile device. The tradeoff is render quality - maybe I'll make a lower triangle or 2K texture mode?
yes, a few people have mentioned this. I am making it toggleable in the view menu and will push shortly. Thanks for suggesting
Interesting. were you sitting on the tarmac for some time before takeoff?
Thank you! I will definitely be adding things like this! Just wanted to get something out there, and then add to it! Thanks for playing!
I will look into adding it.. I'm all for beautiful takeoffs and landings!
You can! just have to get out of your seat to then choose the next seat to sit in. can probably improve on that
Thanks for the feedback, I'll fix!
Interesting, thanks for the idea. Would be pretty cool if this app did have some real-world applications, beyond being a bit of a meme app. Thanks for the comment!
Thanks for playing! I'll be sure to consider so of those for the next release!
Posted by
rkotcher on Monday September 14, 2026 @05:08AM
from the show-hn dept.
https://inflightsimulator.com
Buckle your seatbelt, secure your tray table, and open your window shade. Now you can simulate flying anywhere in the world as a commercial passenger, from takeoff to touchdown. Terrain, weather, and realtime sun position included. Don't worry, the latest release now features legs, so you can get up and go to the bathroom on longer flights. Enjoy!
Hi stagas, great job on wavepot! Is there any way we could get in touch off of this thread? My startup company is working on a very similar idea, and I think it would be great to know each other. If you'd like I can send write down my email onto this thread. Hope to talk soon!