That is definitely up there in the todo, I wanted to try and render out 3d aircraft models too, if i could even get like 10-15 commonly used models and keep rest generic, it would still improve the viewing experience by a lot, for now the next update would for sure indicate the model number and the origin/destination on hover itself.
Glad to hear you’re adding origin/destination. I’ve seen other users mention it as well, but being able to quickly filter or search by country would also be very useful.
Modelling only the most common aircraft types sounds like a good approach.
With the ICAO type code, maybe you could group aircraft (wide-body / narrow-body / regional / cargo) to provide an accurate visual fallback when a specific 3D model isn’t available. Also, a slightly different shade for the generic aircraft could help signal that it’s just a placeholder rather than a real model.
I currently use opensky network api on the client side itself using their anon user thing, which limits me to burn credits, it could in practice load the entire world but you would get rate limited pretty much instantly by opensky.
For the same reason, I made it open source, you can throw in your keys in there and can render all the flights, but keeping it open and free was the priority here, so had to compromise on the distance, but within a given city it has all the flights accurately.
Currently it servers more aesthetically than accuracy when it comes to vertical scaling, its on the feature list to add 1:1 height scale, it isn't as pleasing to look at but definitely a must have.
Nice to hear. Just as an aside, the one I linked already has a (deep in the settings) setting to adjust the vertical scaling. But even at minimum 0.2 ~ 0.3 scale it's still not 1:1.
So I did play around with it for a while, and one thing that I kept running into is how dysfunctional the entire thing becomes at that scale, it looks really good surprisingly, yet the usability gets really limiting, and makes it X times harder to use, a logarithmic solution might be better here I believe.
still working on adding a custom terrain map, so its more realistic to view, while the globe part is just pure skill issue, i tried a few different approaches but wasn't able to code that in
