A behind-the-scenes look at building large-scale passenger simulations: what’s working great in Unreal Engine, where performance challenges begin, and why my experiment with NVIDIA Omniverse turned into a frustrating dead end—for now.
Ever wondered how airport queues behave under different conditions? I built a lightweight, real-time 2D simulation in React that lets you tweak variables, hit play, and instantly watch bottlenecks form—or disappear. Simple visuals, fast insights, and a fully interactive demo you can try yourself. Enjoy exploring the chaos behind the calm.
Taking my airport simulation to the next level! I've implemented spline-based movement for airplanes, giving me full control over their paths. Now airplanes can land on runways, taxi to gates, and depart naturally instead of just appearing out of nowhere. This is a crucial building block for the airside operations I'm planning to explore next.
Excellent! Today I spent another evening tinkering with my latest airport simulation in Unreal Engine, and as always, you never quite know what’s going to challenge you next. So airport simulations really are just like a box of chocolates, Forrest: you never know what you’re going to get.
Next stop: passenger flow balancing! As we all know, airports can be rather crowded at times. To ensure passenger safety and comfort, it's crucial to balance the flow of people throughout the terminal. In this simulation, I experimented with a simple navmesh setup where passengers are represented by capsules and have to navigate from A to B.
It feels like only yesterday that I was playing around for the first time with Unity's NavMesh system. The journey from those initial experiments to now has been nothing short of exhilarating. I made this video almost two years ago, but it still marks a special milestone in my airport simulation adventure.
This is the first post of my new adventure! Welcome to AirportSimulations.com, the official home for a (yes, pretty darn amazing) side project. I recently discovered the modern world of game engines and was blown away by the breadth of possibility...
