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VATSIM-Radar / vatsim-radar

Vatsim Traffic Monitoring Service
https://vatsim-radar.com/
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Aircraft location heatmap #108

Open fdrake97 opened 4 months ago

fdrake97 commented 4 months ago

Your Vatsim CID

1664386

What do you suggest?

Implement a sort of "heatmap" option that shows locations where many users are densely populated. Amusingly, a current glitch in SimAware shows a rudimentary version of this exact feature. image

Why do you need that?

Currently, in all vatsim trackers it is difficult to tell which airports are more heavily populated without zooming into individual airports to check the amount of traffic. Having a heatmap that shows the locations where more aircraft are located would allow users to easily find airports with traffic, and choose flights between particular airports. SimAware has a top-10 most popular airports list, but it doesn't help much with choosing where to fly because it doesn't show how close together popular airports are. In the attached screenshot, someone could look at the heatmap and choose their flight based on how long they want it to be. For example if they want to do a ~1 hour flight with some traffic, they can see that SFO-SAN, JFK-DCA, DCA-ATL are all good options, for a ~2-3 hour flight they could see ORD-JFK, ORD-CLT, and so on. A top-10 list just doesn't help as much for planning a traffic-filled flight.

Alternatives

No response

Additional info

This could be very easily accomplished by making a map layer where aircraft icons are shown as almost completely transparent, very wide discs rather than actual airplanes. If each aircraft's disc adds onto the other aircrafts, we will have a heatmap where the brighter parts of the map are more densely packed with traffic.

Validation

RoboFun01 commented 4 months ago

I think it would be very cool and nice to add, but for me it would definitely be nice if it was a type of map layer, so that I can toggle between the normal view, as it is now, and the heatmap. 😀

fdrake97 commented 4 months ago

I think it would be very cool and nice to add, but for me it would definitely be nice if it was a type of map layer, so that I can toggle between the normal view, as it is now, and the heatmap. 😀

Oh absolutely! Separate from the normal map for sure.