Beta Test Status

Where SimGuild's Flying Circus revival stands right now, and what to put through its paces. The core game is playable online end-to-end — log in, pick a side and a plane, and dogfight. This is AKVaska+'s personal preservation project — the game itself is unchanged; only the server was written.

Updated 2026-07-11

📜 Original 1999 game rules — unchanged

Preservation-first: the flight model, per-section damage thresholds, radio ranges, and all combat mechanics on this server are the original 1999 SimGuild values, matching the documented behavior of the shipped client and its FAQ. AKVaska+ does not tune game balance, damage numbers, plane performance, or bullet counts — they are exactly what the original client expected.

• Per-section damage — pilot / guns / landing gear = 3 bullets to critical, engine = 15, wings / elevator / rudder = 31 (from the 1999 SimGuild FAQ).
• Hangars — 1000-hit maximum, destroyed above 700 (recovered from the shipped 1999 client). A direct bomb impact delivers up to 500 damage.
• Friendly fire — 5 friendly hits = traitor warning, 10 = your own death (from the 1999 README).
• Flight model — three classes, six aircraft, stall below airspeed 50, hard-turn bleed, spin recovery needs altitude (from the 1999 Flying Tips).
• Aerodromes — 50% or lower operational = can't take off from that field.
• Radios — F5 (channel radio, 1–65535), F6 (guard / friendly), F8 (broadcast), F9 for command line.
• Aircraft loadouts — fuel XX 1–100%, bomb X for 0/2/4.
• Nearest 12 planes visible — each pilot only renders the 12 closest other aircraft (the original 1999 client's ghost-slot pool is 12). Even in a big furball, planes further out just don't draw. The server matches that cap so no bandwidth is wasted on planes the client can't show. This is authentic 1999 behavior, not a preservation-server limit.
• Medals / callsign character marker — the original game awarded medals at kill-streak milestones (Order of Merit is confirmed by the 1999 COMBATSIM SimGuild interview, and the game's message wire has a dedicated medal category alongside join/kill/damage/battle/chat). A small character appended to the callsign changed as the streak crossed tiers. Our thresholds match the well-known WWI medal precedence; the exact original numbers are a decode target — see gaps below.

Anything AKVaska+ added on top (the battle-total tracker announcement, the website stats pages, this status page, and the admin controls) is explicitly labeled — not a change to original mechanics.

✅ Confirmed working

Verified live in play.

• Website account — register (callsign + email + password), log in, view profile / leaderboard / medals.
• Client download — gated download of the client from the Get Client page (integrity-checked).
• Game login — email or callsign + password, authenticated against the site database. Wrong password or unknown account is rejected. Short callsigns (no underscore-padding) work correctly.
• Arena entry — country select, plane select, Ready Room.
• FLY → cockpit → back to Ready Room → FLY again — repeatable without restarting the game. The old ready-room-to-flight crash-to-desktop is fixed and shipped in the current client build.
• Multiplayer dogfight — two or more pilots see each other in AOI range with correct aircraft models, real-time smoothed position, tracers and gun sound; damage, smoke, and kills all render for the shooter, the victim, and bystanders. Confirmed in live 2-pilot combat.
• Team counter — ALLIES / CENTRAL counts read correctly in the Ready Room and in flight.
• Own callsign (top-center HUD) — your own callsign shows above your cockpit.
• Other pilots' callsigns floating above their planes — turn labels on with N; shows within about a mile.
• Ready-room map — the field selector shows all 18 aerodromes as clickable labels, with each field's operational state.
• Console text buffer — every server message renders in the in-flight message console.
• Message colors match the original — green (welcome / leave / medal / battle), yellow (broadcast chat), blue (ground chat), white (radio chat), grey (server messages), red (damage / kills).
• Chat — F8 (broadcast), F6 (guard / same-country), F5 (radio channel) all work, colored correctly. Your own client shows your line once (no double-print).
• Welcome / leave-arena lines — "The Allies welcome …" / "… has left the arena." fires when a pilot takes off / disconnects.
• Radio channels — set with F9 → "channel XXXX" in the cockpit, or from the Ready Room. Only pilots on the same channel hear each other on F5, and separate channels stay separate. Channel persists across re-flights.
• Enemy-only anonymous — type /anon in any chat channel (Bcst / Grd / Rdo). Opposite-side pilots then see your arena ID (e.g. "5") where your callsign used to be; same-side teammates keep seeing your real callsign. Say /callsign to reveal to enemies again.
• Per-section damage model — the original 1999 SimGuild thresholds, unchanged: pilot / guns / landing gear = 3 hits, engine = 15 hits, wings / elevator / rudder = 31 hits. Pilot and wing hits are lethal; engine hits are heavy damage.
• Visible damage — the target shows smoke and per-section damage sprites in flight, matching how bad they're hurt. Third-party pilots (bystanders in the fight) also see the damage on other planes, not just the shooter and victim.
• Combat text callouts — "<pilot>'s cockpit / engine / wing is critically damaged!" fires when a section reaches critical.
• Kill attribution — a kill is credited only when a pilot actually dies (pilot section saturated) or when their plane's positions stop consistent with a crash. A wing-critical or engine-out alone no longer awards a kill; the fight has to be finished. Prevents "phantom" kill awards during long chases.
• Kill announcements — "<killer> shot down <victim>." to everyone, "You are awarded a kill for <victim>." to the killer.
• Remote tracers and gun sound — when another pilot fires, you see their tracers and hear their guns.
• Mid-air collisions — two aircraft that fly into each other take collision damage (authentic air-to-air collision, enabled server-side).
• Hangar destruction — bombs (0–500 damage per drop, distance-scaled by the client), strafing bullets (+1 each), and field-knockout proximity pings all accumulate on a per-hangar counter. Authentic 1999 threshold: destroy at 700, ceiling at 1000. Two direct bombs (+500 each) guarantee a hangar; sustained strafing also does it. Destroyed hangars broadcast to everyone and stop rendering as operational.
• Join a fight already in progress — a pilot who takes off after hangars have been knocked out sees the current battlefield: hangars destroyed earlier in the battle stay down for them too.
• Aerodrome 50% rule — a field with half or fewer of its hangars operational greys on the map and refuses FLY ("NOT OPERATIONAL"), exactly as the original 1999 rule.
• Hangar rebuild policy (admin choice) — default: destroyed hangars come back the moment a side wins the battle. Alternatives: "timer" (per-hangar rebuild N minutes after it fell) and "never" (destroyed for the arena lifetime). All three modes ship and are switchable live from the admin panel.
• Refuel & rearm — land and stop on a friendly operational field to refuel and rearm; the ground crew confirms in the console.
• Stats & leaderboard — every confirmed kill records the killer, victim, sides, kill streak, and personal best; the leaderboard reflects them live.
• Ready-room stats panels — after a sortie, the "Total Stats" (career) and "Last Sortie Stats" panels populate with real numbers: kills, hits, assists, bombs, streak, sorties. The server pushes these panels continuously in the Ready Room so a client re-init can't leave them blank.
• Medals — the 1999 game awarded pilots for kill-streak milestones (the Order of Merit is confirmed by the 1999 COMBATSIM SimGuild interview, and the game's message wire has a dedicated medal category). Every confirmed kill / death updates fc_stats; crossing a threshold posts a medal to the pilot's record and shows on the Medals page and leaderboard. Tier list currently: 5 = Croix de Guerre (Allied) / Iron Cross 2nd (Central), 10 = DFC / Iron Cross 1st, 25 = Victoria Cross / Blue Max, 50 = Order of Merit — these are our best fit to real WWI medal precedence pending authoritative capture of the original thresholds (see gaps below).
• Battle-total tracker — kill totals per side; milestone and battle-won messages fire in the arena. Winning a battle also triggers the default hangar rebuild.
• Session history — every arena session (who / when / how long / which side / did they fly?) is logged for admins.
• Client version gate — running an out-of-date client shows a grey "update your client" message in the Ready Room and blocks FLY, so everyone online is on the same build.
• Player log timezone — the admin logs show times in the viewer's local timezone (not UTC).
• Same-NAT identity safety — if two clients from one public IP try to log in with overlapping timing, the server will never mis-attribute one's callsign to the other's arena connection. Cleanest case both join correctly; worst case one gets a red "IDENTITY AMBIGUOUS" line and a "close the game and reconnect" prompt.
• Graceful server restart — restarts broadcast a 20-second red countdown ("SERVER RESTARTING in 20s…") to every connected pilot, then close cleanly so the client returns to the menu instead of a silent connection reset. Fresh arena logins during the first 3 minutes after a restart get a red banner explaining that prior sessions were cleared.
• Stale-client protection after a restart — a client whose game is still running from before the restart but whose game state is stuck gets dropped by the server (no ghosts on the map) and prompted to close and restart the game on next reconnect.
• Live server tuning from the website — friendly-fire, damage multiplier, battle-win kill goal, chat rate limit, reserved radio channels, arena message-of-the-day, hangar durability numbers, hangar rebuild policy, admin-forced hangar destructions, and force-anon-for-all are all editable live from the Server Settings page; the game picks up changes within seconds — no restart needed.
• Admin hangar toggles — the Server Settings page has a checkbox grid for every hangar at every field. Ticking or unticking takes effect in the arena within about a second (hangar disappears / reappears for everyone).

🧪 Ready to test — please confirm in live play

Wired server-side but not yet confirmed with several live pilots. If you break these, tell AKVaska+ — not the squad.

• Safe landing at a friendly aerodrome — glide a damaged plane home to any field on your side. You should NOT be credited to any shooter, damage should clear, and streaks are preserved. Any landing "far enough away" from a friendly field (over enemy territory, or a hard crash) still awards the kill.
• Same-NAT session correctness — two clients on the same public IP (same house, same NAT) both connecting close together. Each should end up with the correct callsign and identity, or one gets the red "IDENTITY AMBIGUOUS — close and reconnect" prompt. No silent callsign swap.
• Kill attribution corner cases — a plane that survives to land at an enemy field, a plane whose pilot ditches, a crash-kill after the shooter has already disconnected. Server logic covers these but they need someone to trigger them live.
• Precise damage-part callouts — left wing / right wing is now distinguished in the "critically damaged" red-text callout. Elevator, rudder, guns, and landing gear still fall through to the section-class label ("wing", "cockpit", etc.) pending one more decode round. Bang up different sections of different aircraft and see if the callouts read right.
• Bigger sessions — a full furball with a dozen-plus pilots, and longer multi-hour sittings, to shake out anything that only shows up under sustained load. Everything above holds with two pilots; we want more pilots online at once to prove it out.
• Server metrics on the website — a running dashboard of arena uptime, current player counts by side, live hangar-damage state, and kill/hit rates. Data collection is in; the display page is built but needs eyeballing under real load.

🔧 Under active development

Known follow-ups — not shipped, not blocking play.

• AI-controlled aircraft — computer pilots to help populate the arena when few humans are online. They currently fly patrols and can be engaged and shot down; combat AI (returning fire) is in development.

❌ Known gaps — not bugs (yet)

If you notice any of these, please don't file them as bugs — they're tracked. Anything else that looks broken, do tell AKVaska+ about it.

• Authentic 1999 medal thresholds — the game had a medal system with a small character/pip after the callsign that changed as your streak crossed tiers (that's where the "+" in some pilots' names comes from). We match the well-known WWI historical medal hierarchy for the tier names, but the exact 1999 kill-streak numbers and the mapping from streak → callsign character haven't been recovered from a primary source yet. Wayback Machine's capture of simguild.com is patchy and doesn't include the awards page.
• Kill count under your callsign in flight — the number below your name should be your running "kills without dying" streak. It currently shows the arena player-ID; the real value is already tracked server-side (fc_stats.current_streak).
• In-flight cockpit stats overlay — kills/streak are recorded server-side and shown in the Ready Room + on the website; the live in-cockpit stats overlay isn't wired up yet.

Logging in

In the game's Account field type your registered callsign, in the Password field type your website password, pick your side, and click Logon.

Short callsigns work — no padding needed. The Callsign screen that appears after login accepts anything; the server always uses your registered callsign.

Get the client