Show HN: I made a flight simulator, except you're just a passenger
inflightsimulator.comBuckle 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!
This really made my day! I was a flight simulator engineer for 20 years and it brings back fond memories of a project I worked on.
Simulating the passenger cabin is important for crew evacuation trainers. Those are large, lifelike fuselage sections that you put on a hydraulic motion platform and run flight/crash/evac training scenarios.
To get a realistic out-the-window view, the trainers I worked on had a PC monitor behind each window opening. We used FlightGear in a master-slave setup: the master node simulates physics and feeds accelerations to the hydraulic platform, and the slave nodes generate out-the-window visuals for each window.
[Desire to know more intensifies]
So if I wanted to create something that could reliably jostle and move in response to a master physics node, like a racetrack simulator, cabin simulator etc. What kind of distributed controller scheme we looking at? Master node with strong compute, hydraulics with microcontrollers type set up?
Your comment made my day! Thanks for the insight, and thanks for playing :-)
I'd love to be able to click on the progress bar to jump ahead or back in the flight path. Perhaps the display on the back of the seats could show the actual flight path imposed on a map, and we could click anywhere on that flight path to move the plane there.
When selecting departing and arrival airports at the beginning, it would be nice to be able to click on the map to select the airport, useful if you don't know the airport code or the name.
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!
Wow, this is so unbelievably unoptimized. The sound of my computer fans makes it so immersive. The shadow map is being rendered twice with 300+ draw calls and 1M+ triangles. Full resolution GTAO is probably even more expensive with a lot of fetches per texel. I'm sure there are a ton of low hanging optimization fruits and I'm confident claude et. al can fix all those issues, but if you don't know where to look and never profile the app then you get a vibe coded unoptimized mess.
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 :-)
I have a few suggestions:
- as I mentioned above, the shadow map is drawn twice, probably it's being auto updated by three.js at some point
- the entire cabin has a lot of triangles while the player only sees a small portion of it
- cabin lighting could be baked
- a lot of triangles seem to be rendered without backface culling, that's probably not intentional
- don't run GTAO at full resolution, try half
And also, use the spector.js [1] browser extension to profile the app and have your AI agent analyze the capture.
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.
fixed the shadow map being drawn twice, and have deployed that. going through each of these and considering. thank you for your suggestions.
Googling "gtao graphics" results in "Grand theft auto online"
"Gtao technique" was more helpful: Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion
Sorry this seems to have ruined your day. /s
Or you could check out the non-vibe coded Airplane Mode from 2020:
This immediately came to mind for me as well. The game straddles "game" and "performance art", and the totally straight-faced delivery really makes it stand out.
> Mixed - 67% of the 355 user reviews for this game are positive.
And 10 euro, lol. I'll just go with the free one, thank you.
Interesting! But it seems there are quite some people who will pay for such content:-)
I've paid to drive a train simulator (in fact, I have a collection of several train simulators).
enjoy the browser based jank
That's... why?
I can understand slow games like EuroTruck or Farming Sim. But what's the point of this?
These days it's pretty unusual to think of an idea that hasn't been done yet, so when you do, I guess you just don't think too much and go make it.
Case in point:
That one predates vibe coding by quite a few years though: a lot of hard work went into Goat Simulator, and there were no doubt other more obvious choices for how the developers spent their time, but they still chose to make Goat Simulator.
From what I remember it was a project for Coffee Stain (the studio) to train up/onboard new hires, having started as a modding team with Sanctum for UT3 and later a full standalone release. Then they ran with it for a while after it struck a chord with people willing to give them money.
Also it's a geninue game with goals to complete, mainly cribbing from games like the Tony Hawk's series.
Two separate categories: Meme games[*] don't have to be vibecoded, not all vibecoded things become meme games.
[*] A "meme game" being a game which is tries to be ridiculous and is predominantly popular because of social media exposure. I would include games like Goat Simulator, Horse Magnifier, Squirrel with a Gun, QWOP, Untitled Goose Game, Trollface Quest...
> Horse Magnifier
I can only imagine: clearly I need to check that out.
Does everything have to be original and novel? I think reinventing a better wheel is a perfectly good use of AI tokens.
Is there a mosquito simulator yet?
Is there a mosquitto simulator, where you roleplay as an IoT pub/sub server?
Time for the more biologically correct Mrs Mosquito?
Well, now I'm intrigued. I can envision some interesting mechanics...
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
Every once in a while I would put Flight Simulator 2020 on my desktop and work on my laptop. I found that watching the digital world pass by while working put me in a slightly different headspace. Not sure it increased productivity but working while sitting in an actual plane does provide me a bit of focus.
Train ride videos on YouTube scratch some of the same itch.
Nonwithstanding the human fascination with simulation and simulacra, Airplanes and Air Travel represent a fascinating cultural touchpoint with much insight and depth to plumb depending on what aspects you simulate.
For example, think of a history class charting flight from the Wright Brothers, through the Golden Age of Aviation, right to the present day. Even showing the drastic differences pre and post 9/11 by reference to the processes and experiences of commercial airline travel would represent a worthy pedagogical endeavour. We do a lot more to achieve a lot less in terms of making 'history come alive' currently.
A game where you're narcoleptic and keep falling asleep at random unannounced times. While taking a flight from A to B, you wake up at different times entirely, on the same (or an equivalent) flight, seeing whatever was going on back then. Sometimes it's a flight with the Wright Brothers, sometimes you're flying during WWII, and sometimes you might just be on the plane heading towards the twin towers (right as you wake up back on your own original flight). Maybe even some mini-games where you might have the chance to foil a hijacking in progress, or maybe you need to be "the doctor on the plane", or maybe you wake up as the guy that's carrying the crying baby. You never know when, where, or who you'll wake up as.
Slow? There’s a Faming Simulator competitive esports league (because of course there is). You can find videos on YouTube.
Might be helpful for people who have never flown.
It's missing a few elements for realism: - Passengers on either side of you taking both your armrests - Continually crying baby seated just in front of you - Person behind you coughing without covering mouth every 2 minutes - Kids fighting for control of a tablet across the aisle from you - Tiny cans of Coke
thanks for the ideas, I will consider adding some of those!
You know what? I had fear of flying. I did a training with a pilot in a simulator, but it was in the cockpit. I don't have fear of flying in a simulator or in the cockpit. I have fear of flying as a passenger, I'm sit in a chair. That's what I would have liked during my training. I told that to Air France and they did not understand but this might seriously be useful.
Also useful for people who want to ride along with someone currently on a plane. "Honey, you are over Kansas right now!"
Useless things tend to be deeply useful to a select few.
I am loving this "re-weirding" of the internet. For the younglings, this is very much the sort of pet project that would bubble up in early internet days. No startup raising money, no pain point necessarily being solved, just one person's idea lovingly rendered to life.
Don't try to build something for everyone, build something that's everything to someone. - paraphrasing Ferry Porsche
I should have known he had views like this. I've heard similar things expressed and I believe this sentiment personally, but I'm happy to know I can add his name and the original quotation to my archives.
Or; don't be everyone's cup of tea, be someone's shot of whiskey.
UAL used to let you listen into the cockpit to ATC chatter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17656352 — I understand this was really helpful for calming some passengers' nerves during flying.
I really appreciate it when I get a pilot that actually tells us wtf is going on.
a good example here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlGySMlSxRs
BA (and presumably other airlines) run fear-of-flying courses where you have some ground sessions with flight crew explaining what happens during takeoff/landing, what noises you might hear, etc. Then you go up for a short flight as a passenger to sort of re-enforce what you learned earlier.
first fly to the UK to take the course...
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!
This is going to sound insane, but something like this for the backseats of various common, and maybe even exotic, cars would be cool too.
I have similar problems being a passenger in an uber for more than 15 mins. I lose my mind on roadtrips when it's not my turn to drive.
Not at all! Cars are an extremely common trigger for anxiety. You are far from alone in this.
I don't think you can completely eliminate this as people naturally don't like giving up their agency which is usually going to produce at least a low level of anxiety.
Agency and information in a way. I actually feel safer in a tiny 4 seater plane than a jet, even though objectively that's probably backwards. Being able to look at all the parts of the plane, how the movements derive from the pilot's actions, actually see out the front, it is more reassuring. More similar to being a passenger in someone's car. It probably doesn't hurt that it is easier for my mind to imagine a Cessna gliding gently to earth than a passenger jet.
I like the idea of someone losing hundreds of millions of dollars if my plane goes down.
I’m not at ease in an airplane. I rarely fly but i actually like it, but I’m really anxious.
What helps me is always taking a seat near the wings. First that’s where the plane moves the less. And moreover, it’s pretty reassuring watching them supporting the plane in their great stability, they always move way slower than the cabin.
Plus you can alert the crew if something's off before take off (eg. loose/missing screws/panels). A forner colleague of mine did that, and got to see the entire maintenance crew come out for an impromptu RCA and incident response.
Total and complete elimination of anxiety was never the claim.
Management and reduction is enough.
I'm not afraid of the flight, for me its customs and surrendering all my data. They even want my balls ffs.
Do they contain more than 100 mg of liquid?
The rule on liquids is 100ml and I don't think it applies to semen. I object to the naked scanners, especially if kids have to be scanned. That'd be mass producing CSAM. Is TSA above the laws on producing CSAM?
Wow, at first, I thought "this is wonderfully silly" but within about 45 seconds of playing with it, I instantly wanted the window seat and thought, wow... I could see what it's like to fly over so many cities from above, just like with a window seat.
Nice idea!
This is awesome. You know, you should turn this into a game where you play one of the flight attendants and you have to deal with all the crazy shit that happens with passengers on a plane - like people fighting, being too drunk, etc.
Crashed within 10 seconds on iPhone 17 Pro. Love the vibes
You have to turn on airplane mode
underrated comment
Looks amazing for the 2 seconds before it implodes on iPhone though.
It's slow in FF, too. Cool for a flight simulator to crash, but it should simulate a plane crash. Not crash the simulator itself :)
Immediately crashes my FF on Windows 11.
ahhh your phone crashed! I was a bit confused for a moment... Could you imagine if the airplane crashed like 1 in every million plays?! :O
It uses too much RAM, it’s vibe coded so makes sense
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?
Yeah same here.
Hahaha this is awesome. I can teach what it's like to be on an airplane to my friend who has never flown before.
Currently playing on my usual route, ICN -> HKG. The flight path is too ideal. Due to airspace restrictions in china, almost every flight has to divert over taiwan in real life, but this one cuts thru mainland china.
Kindly simulate two hours of queuing at the Schengen border, a coin toss minigame over whether security is “laptops in” or “laptops out”, bonus if your belt pings, lounge access roulette, wailing infant(s), guy two rows back with the worst most productive cough you ever heard (still got that old N95?), retaining status planning spreadsheets, baggage systems failure at Denver, people using the loos in their socks, unstaffed rentals counter, tired neighbour using your shoulder as a pillow, Franz Kafka’s “The SSSS Boarding Pass”, guy who won’t close the damn window shade, creepily accurate PRC face recognition systems, shuttle bus orienteering challenge, Emerald ass-kissing, lost at Doha, cabin uncomfortably warm mid-flight, world’s most disappointing beef, go-around three times at Queenstown and diverted to Christchurch again, passport reader unresponsive, 7.1kg carryon rule nazi, 30 minutes of taxiing, US domestic “lounge” with no facilities at all and nowhere to sit, drunk British lady, gigantic American guy, bassinet accident, Tight Connection Sprint, can’t quite name the minor TV celeb in 1A, Hong Kong Monsoon Warning, crew yelling “sit down sir the seatbelt sign is still on”, toilet scrum during long final after breakfast on the redeye, and (my favourite) the consequences of sitting in an exit row and when they give you the briefing and ask if you’re willing to follow these instructions in an emergency, saying brightly “Looking forward to it!”
I love air travel.
This is the most comprehensive collection of first world problems I've ever seen. And hilariously accurate :)
It needs a Health HUD with indicators for boredom, thirst, hunger, bladder distention, etc. Also cabin indicators for noise, temperature and humidity, CO2, methane, smells, etc.
you missed (not a complete list): the TSA travelling over to your country to give to their "was it as good for you as it was for me" inspection on your home soil, the non stop 16h conversation between two strangers right behind you, 45min of bus ride following the 30min of taxi, followed by catching an uber between the international and domestic terminals, carry-on luggage overhead tetris, people somehow coming on the plane with 4 or 5 large pieces of carry-on, the "can you swap seats with me and my middle seat because my partner/child is next to you" tap on the shoulder, the "Missed The Tight Connection" walk of shame, the overnight in a cheap hotel miles out of town because it was the airlines fault, the body odour buddy, the snorer, the last minute departure gate change, the 2h on the tarmac at ATL due to thunder storms, and the ironic applause when a nervous pilot puts you all down rather bumpily.
> creepily accurate PRC face recognition systems
Gait recognition, too?
3 overhead reading lights for a 2-2 configuration? On a trans pacific flight? Literally unplayable.
Would love to see this open source and extended!
lol!
I asked for beef, they only had chicken. 10/10, average flight experience.
I had the fish.
I had lasagna
Steak or fish.
Beef or cow?
Please remove the login screen. Is love to try this.
Hrm. I can play it without logging in
I can't it covers half of my mobile screen and it doesn't seem dismissible.
It's almost comical how annoying it is. I just want to try it.
Yeah, not a great experience, but it will let you play if you just register with something random.
Likewise.
This is brilliant. Some improvements I'd suggest
- Let me use the arrow keys to walk around the plane, having to keep double clicking on the floor to move is quite annoying
- Would be good if there was business class seat
- Add video to the inflight entertainment, you could probably just embed youtube
- Optimise it. Run okay on my M5 mac air but not that smooth
I like the way it smashes the CPU so that the fans sound like jet engines.
Seems to hate not having location access on iOS. Keeps refreshing until eventually Safari just gives up.
This is rad
Had to use uBlockOrigin to remove the login prompt. Think there could be a way to dismiss it without tricks like that.
I just closed the window instead, it wasn't that interesting
Sitting all alone in the plane I'm reminded of the movie Knight and Day (Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz) where they are nearly the only passengers (with some adversaries).
Nice.
Waiting eagerly for the "crying baby" extension pack. The "get to your seat" MMO. And the "I want to pee, but the guy next to me is sleeping" campaign.
Also, inflightsimulator: 1980, with ashtrays and lethal weapon playing on dropdown TV sets
Dropdown TV sets, luxury! i seem to remember a projector and a screen at the front of the aisle :)
Or the passenger who is friendly and wants your window seat, but doesn't want to straight out say it. Then turns deranged when they find out they are in the middle seat for the whole flight.
Thanks for playing! I'll be sure to consider so of those for the next release!
The Boeing extension pack and watch how the plane deteriorates in the air in real time! Door plugs, MCAS, the works!
What a great idea! How about, a kid behind kicking your chair, the person in front of you abruptly putting his seat back all the way, and a person of size next to you spilling into your seat.
This is brilliant. Future enhancements can match the inner design of the plane to the actual plane used for that route by that airline, and the ability to choose economy, premium plus, busines class, etc...
This is really cool! Also, my girlfriend suggested it would be nice if she can login and be on the same flight so we can fly home together.
thank you! I had actually made that feature and then removed it to simplify. I will consider adding it back :-)
Selfie mode was too funny these characters are ridiculous. Also a whole plane to myself? What a steal!
>Also a whole plane to myself? What a steal!
Except if you're the main character of a plot !
This is really neat! I loved flying from MDW to ORD
This is fun. I would love if it used real flights, and filled the cabin with the avatars of anyone else "on" that flight.
Slight bug report - might just be HN hug-of-death related - on Arc browser, mostly without it as the active tab, I seem to have been stuck over Slough for some time (an ignoble fate).
I believe Arc reduces resources allocated to background tabs, and I don't think it likes being a background tab.
Nice concept but It would've been better if you don't force people to sign in with the auth box always shown I had to delete it from the node tree using chrome devtools. also why not enable WASD keys or even arrow keys to move?
yes, a few people have mentioned this. I am making it toggleable in the view menu and will push shortly. Thanks for suggesting
3 dolphins and 2 acres of rainforest well spent. I like it.
Survival horror, my favorite genre
That’s a nice idea. Taking off from Frankfurt am Main felt like that ultra long runway in Fast & Furious 6 though.
I like how much work you've put into just being a passenger :) I'm building a little world in the browser myself, so I like finding projects like this.
Unfortunately the flight plan is incorrect.
Geez how strong is the chess engine? No chance on hard... even on medium this is a struggle.
EDIT: which is true to form on some airlines lol (but on others, even hard is trivial)
I was hoping for a very detailed menu with more flight avionics in the in flight entertainment screen but I guess the speed and altitude in the HUD is all I get. I want to know the exact plane T am flying in
can you pause halfway through a flight and come back to it?
Genius doesn’t always look like you expect it will. Well done!
(Kill the login panel though —- it wouldn’t go away for me)
When will having to go through TSA be added?
It's very nicely done. I snapped the seatbelt on and that dread of a long boring flight automatically hit me. :)
Amazing reproduction, I even got some PTSD from it :D.
Can't press the Continue button, because the footer overlaps it. Firefox on mobile.
Thanks for the feedback, I'll fix!
This cannot be a true passenger simulation unless it also contains full airport experience, complete with TSA cavity search and CBP detaining you or denying entry for the pettiest reasons imaginable (in case of the US).
Is this visual style Fable or Astra. I see it everywhere now. It’s the new black and purple
Nice idea. But would be better if there are other passengers as well. Also somehow has slow frame rate.
Missing FCA (Glacier international airport in Kalispell, Montana, USA).
It's small but a beautiful flight!
I will look into adding it.. I'm all for beautiful takeoffs and landings!
I love that this is in real time and this jokes :D Even we have chess game :3
Flying to NYC, sitting next to nobody, never happened to me before :) - see you in 4h
Stuck on 0h 01m elapsed after 12 minutes.
Interesting. were you sitting on the tarmac for some time before takeoff?
Can be fairly accurate perception of time on a plane.
Wow, that's quite some leg space!
Congrats on shipping this.
kind of unique idea, but who becomes the pilot? an ai ??
really wish i could sit by the window
You can! just have to get out of your seat to then choose the next seat to sit in. can probably improve on that
Now if we can watch fresh movies, that would be ideal …
A pirate website disguised as flight simulator? What a madman!
Pirate websites evading detection by using disguises is real. There's one out there in a totalitarian country that pretends to be a parked domain.
HAHHAHAHAHA
Next up: Airport Simulator! Enjoy security, customs, and the inevitable panic of missing your gate across more than 50 international airports around the world!
It's lovely, but its flight physics model could use some updates. For example, there's no SkyMall, no Biscoff cookies, and no flight attendant (or on-screen video) giving a humorous, memeable explanation of the plane's rules and safety features.
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!
Ah, it's flying Paris to Bogota in a 1 aisle, 4 seats per rank regional plane, pretty unusual if you ask me :)
I dig it. Got it bookmarked. Nice job, keep it up.
haha this is fun!
cool
Thank you!
nice one!
Pretty cool! I could see leaving it up on another screen to enjoy while I go about my workday.
Finally, a use for a second screen!
Thank you!
I'd pay $1 to upgrade to first class. $2 if I get a hot towel, a pre-departure beverage, and warm nuts.
I always have warm nuts on a plane...
no
What if they add snakes?