BeyondATC is coming to X-Plane, the developer has announced via its Discord community. The team says it has spent the last several months building official, supported X-Plane integration directly into the product. It describes this as “not an experiment or a compatibility layer”.
BeyondATC is an air traffic control add-on that adds voice-driven ATC to the simulator, and it has so far been associated mainly with Microsoft Flight Simulator. X-Plane is the flight simulator developed by Laminar Research, so the announcement would open the tool to a new group of users.
According to the developer, the news was originally planned as a surprise for FSimUK, which was only a few days away at the time of writing. The plan changed when a community-made bridge appeared that tries to make the current version of BeyondATC run with X-Plane. The team says it has seen the excitement around the bridge and that this reinforces its belief that bringing BeyondATC to X-Plane is the right move.
The developer was keen to clarify their position on the bridge. They state that they love mods and have no interest in shutting down community projects simply because they interact with its software. However, they say the bridge ports an actively developed commercial product onto a platform they have not yet supported, without involvement from the team. They also say the bridge relies on a workaround that effectively tricks both X-Plane and BeyondATC into believing they are communicating with the systems they expect. The developer says this is not an implementation they can support, endorse or stand behind, and that it creates technical, support and product issues, particularly while its own native integration is in development.
The official integration is designed specifically for X-Plane and will be supported by the BeyondATC team. The stated aim is to give X-Plane users the full BeyondATC experience rather than a compatibility bridge. The developer says they will have much more to show and talk about very soon.
No price or release date for the X-Plane version has been announced yet. For now, the announcement and further updates can be followed on the BeyondATC Discord, and we will keep you updated here on FSNews as more details emerge.
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