A new lobby, and a pause menu that stays out of the way
We looked at two weeks of numbers for the first screen. On a desktop, one guest in five took off from the bare front page. On a phone it was closer to half. Almost everyone who flew decided in the first minute, and the people who left usually looked for thirty seconds to a minute and closed the tab. Very few of them opened anything else on the page.
So the lobby was rebuilt around one question: what does someone need to see in those thirty seconds to press the button?
What you see now
Live numbers. Under the title, one sentence: how many aircraft and ships our receivers hear right now, across the whole network. A number we could not read is left out rather than shown as zero.
We tried naming a city in the title ("Take off over Hamburg") and took it out again. The city came from your rough location, but the game picks the take-off point more precisely, so the title could promise one city and put you over another. Not everyone gets a city either. The title now just says where you are going: the real Earth.
One button, two craft. The gull and the FPV drone sit next to each other above the big button, and the button says which one you will take off on. The gull is still the default. On a keyboard, Enter takes off.
What to do once you are up. Three short notes: fly anywhere, catch real traffic with the binoculars, race drone tracks. They are three choices, not three steps, so do them in any order. Under them, one quiet line with the controls for your setup.
Watch a flight. We recorded twelve seconds in the game over Hamburg: photoreal tiles, the gull, a real aircraft with its plate. On a computer it plays right in a small screen in the right column, muted and on a loop, as soon as you see it. Tap it to pause, or use the corner button for full screen. On a phone it is a small "Watch a flight" button near the top: tap it and the clip opens in place, with ✕ to fold it away. We don't start it on its own there, because it would cost you mobile data you didn't ask to spend. If your system asks for reduced motion, the clip waits for a tap too. The background stays a still picture, so the page loads fast and the text is easy to read.
Who else is here. On a wide screen a card on the right shows how many people are flying and how many are in the lobby. On a phone it is a chip near the top, next to the live globe.
At the bottom: Map, Directory, Stations, News and our community links, with "More" for the rest of the site.
If you have been here before
Signed-in players see their own things first: the streak, today's missions with how many are done, the next step of their path, and friends who are online right now.
The pause menu
Pressing Esc used to show the whole front page again, logo and links included. Now it opens a small menu over the world: Continue, your craft, Settings, Map, Missions and Back to lobby. "Site sections" opens the full list of pages, so nothing from the old menu is missing. The phone menu behind ☰ has not changed.
Tell us in Discord what you would put on the first screen. You can also start from the live globe or read the news.