In an effort to make the game more accessible to newer players, I have added two new banners to help players navigate the game. First banner shows up when you don't have any aircraft and looks like this:

, and the second when you have an aircraft but don't have any flights and looks like this:

One other change is that the new aircraft marketplace now shows lease costs as well as purchase costs on the page. 

Thanks!

It’s been a while, and I just wanted to check in. A lot has been happening recently — between buying a new place, moving, work, and just needing a break (after all, this is all a labor of love), I’ve been a bit tied up. But I’m back now and ready to share an update on what’s coming up as well as the long-term vision for the sim.

Over the past month or so, I’ve rolled out some bug fixes and general maintenance. But now, let's talk about some exciting updates on the horizon:

1. Connecting Flights Update

The connecting flights feature has been a huge undertaking. This isn’t just a tweak to the demand logic — it’s a complete overhaul using a new platform (code-named Atlanta, get it? Connecting flights…) that’s designed for speed and efficiency. The platform uses a graph-based database system that’s much better suited for modeling these relationships, and it’s built with a faster, compiled language that supports multi-threading to speed up both the demand calculations and support for connecting flights.

I’ve been testing it with historical world data, and so far, the performance has been solid. The cost to calculate itineraries with a city-based demand model and connecting flights is pretty similar to the current airport-to-airport direct model. The biggest challenge right now is the city clustering model. I’m just not happy with how metro areas are grouped. Currently, the model either groups too many large cities together (like New York and Boston) or spreads out a single metro into multiple cities.

I’ve mostly been using U.S. cities as a benchmark (due to familiarity and the fact that U.S. cities are generally more spread out), and finding the right balance for areas like Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, and West Palm has proven difficult. Once I’ve figured out the city clustering, I’ll integrate the sim with the new platform and begin releasing the updated model on newly reset worlds.

2. New Demand Model

This is an extension of the connecting flights update. The current demand model is fairly simple: passengers have a maximum price they’re willing to pay (the willingness-to-pay curve) and will choose the highest reputation flight they can afford. We also add some weighting for value — so a "worse" but cheaper flight might get a slight boost.

The new model (built on Atlanta as well) will split passengers into different segments, each prioritizing different factors. Rather than aggregating all reputational factors into a single score, some passengers will care more about departure times, others about price, and so on. This should give a lot more flexibility in the types of airlines you can operate, making the simulation even more dynamic.

3. Fleet Management

This feature is mostly already implemented as it’s been a work in progress, but it’s worth mentioning. The goal here is to improve fleet management by giving you better insights into how each aircraft type and configuration is performing. You’ll also be able to migrate flights more effectively between aircraft types/configurations.

Additionally, aircraft maintenance will now take planes out of service if you don’t have spares ready to take over. Maintenance costs will become a bigger factor in how you manage your airline, making it a more realistic and strategic challenge.

4. Moving to AirSimWorld 2

This is something I’ve been debating for a while. As I’ve mentioned before, one of my main goals has been to create a mobile version of the sim, but doing that requires migrating a lot of existing code to APIs and creating a whole new UI. While AI can help with some of the work, it’s still a massive undertaking.

This got me thinking: Is it worth the effort to simply rebuild the whole thing from the ground up? After all, I’ve grown a lot as a developer over the past few years — both from working on this game and from my career in software development. The core architectural decisions I made six years ago aren’t necessarily the best ones today. Some were mistakes, others were just based on what I knew at the time.

By starting fresh with AirSimWorld 2, I’ll be able to fix those mistakes and make the game even better. It will be based entirely on the Atlanta platform, and we’ll revisit some of the core mechanics to create a much more in-depth simulation experience that can last for years to come.

More info will be coming soon, but I wanted to give you all a sneak peek at what’s on the horizon!

Timeframe: 1950-1985

World Speed: 10 Minutes/day 

Starting Money: $5,000,000

Rules/Difficulty: Normal/10 Instant deliveries for new airlines

Also, I realize the logo fix has not rolled out in prod due to a mistake on my part with not rolling out the correct key. This has since been fixed, feel free to let me know if it still doesn't work. Thanks! 

What is AirSimWorld?

AirSimWorld is an online Airline Tycoon Business Simulator that tries to accurately emulate what it would be like to run a real airline. The goal is to give player a choice to run the most RyanAir-esque, no frills, bringing your arms on board costs extra airline, to the most prestigious gulf carriers, or anything in between. You can run a hub-and-spoke airline, relying on connections at your hubs to give you traffic, or a point to point model. The choice is yours!

Dynamic Cabin Classes

Unlike most Airline Tycoon style games, ASW doesn't limit you to having only certain classes, there is no such thing as 'business class' passenger, instead every passenger has a price they're willing to pay and certain perks they expect for that price. This gives you freedom to classify your airline however you wish, but be careful, offer too many perks to the premium economy passengers, and you might just see that they wont buy that business class ticket after all. 

Real Passengers, Real Itineraries

The passengers flying your airline are real passengers with real itineraries and real connections. Cancelling one flight will have an impact across your network of routes, so plan carefully! 

Real Maintenance

In ASW, maintenance is not an ongoing cost, each plane has its own maintenance record, with its own maintenance needs. Different checks will require a different amount of money. You might want to sell off your planes before they require a D check! 

I have been taking a bit of a break. I quite frankly wanted to get the connecting flights update out before resetting any worlds but then life got busy and we have 2 worlds that are expired. So moving forward the plan is that Arcade IV will be reset today, B IX will be extended by 5 years in game (or about 25 days IRL) to 1990 and Dynasty II will be extended to 2300 (about a month after that IRL) which should bring us back in sync. There will also be another update about where the game is going, the connections update is still coming though there are other updates in store as well. With that said, without further ado: 

World Arcade IV

Timeframe: 2020-2200

Starting Money: $10 Million 

World Speed: 7 Days/30 Minutes

Difficulty/Rules: Arcade, no political restrictions or aircraft release dates. 

Happy Holidays! 

World B is getting reset! As always for the first three days the world will run at a reduced speed. As with the previous iteration, everyone will get 5 instant deliveries for your first planes. As World A III is also coming to a close soon, I have decided to hold off on resetting world A until a new update (with the updated demand model) which I plan to release within the coming weeks.

Good luck!

World B IV

Timeframe: 1950-2010

World Speed: 10 Minutes/day (45 minutes/day until Wednesday, July 14th to give people time to join and set up their airlines)

Starting Money: $5,000,000

Rules/Difficulty: Normal/5 Instant deliveries for new airlines

World Arcade I

Timeframe: 2020-2200

Starting Money: $10 Million 

World Speed: 7 Days/30 Minutes

Difficulty/Rules: Arcade, no political restrictions or aircraft release dates. 

I have reset world A, as agreed in the previous poll, it will have 5 aircraft delivered instantly rather than 1. Correspondingly the amount of money you get to start has been increased to 5 million:

World A III:

Timeframe: 1970-2020

World Speed: 20 Minutes/day (45 minutes/day until Wednesday, November 4th to give people time to join and set up their airlines)

Starting Money: $5,000,000

Rules/Difficulty: Normal/5 Instant deliveries for new airlines

AirSimWorld 0.2.3 Alpha

• Airlines from old worlds no longer displayed on airline selection page/top navbar
• My aircraft view now allows viewing/sorting by cycles remaining/lifetime hours
• Added header links for Patreon/updated issue tracker link
• Ability for a world to allow for more than 1 instant delivery for new airlines
• Gates will now auto-lease when a new flight is created if possible
• New attributes for new demand model (this doesnt change demand in any way currently, just a way for the new data to start to be added to the database)
• BUG FIX New day script rewritten to not take forever

As discussed in a previous announcement, version 20.11 Alpha (new versioning system) will release in a week or two to Patreon supporters and to everyone else one or two weeks after that.

PS: The version at the bottom still has the 0.2.2d + git versioning, I will fix that later. I have a flight in a few hours I have to catch and still have a bunch to do before then 😛

World B II:

Timeframe: 1950-2010

World Speed: 10 Minutes/day (45 minutes/day until Tuesday, August 11th to give people time to join and set up their airlines)

Starting Money: 1,000,000

Rules/Difficulty: Normal

Have fun!

A small bug fixing update, more substantive updates incoming soon as well as a devblog update. 

AirSimWorld 22.10.16

• Fixed terminals not being named properly/causing crashing
  • All terminals updated, so should be a thing of the past
• Lack of leasable gates causes a crash
• Trying to change an empty config now shows an error rather than crashing
• Fixed scheduler hour > 24 causing a crash
• Fixed empty price causing a crash

World B III has been reset! All the same rules, dates and speed, the only difference is that just as in World A III, you will now have 5 instant deliveries and the starting money has been updated to reflect that as well (as it seems like people like having more planes delivered at the start). As always, time will be kept to 45 minute days for the first 3 days and then will speed up to the normal 10 minute days (same as B II)

World B III

Timeframe: 1950-2010

World Speed: 10 Minutes/day (45 minutes/day until Wednesday, February 3rd to give people time to join and set up their airlines)

Starting Money: $5,000,000

Rules/Difficulty: Normal/5 Instant deliveries for new airlines

Best of luck to all!

I had wanted to wait to use the new demand model for the new iteration of the demand model, however I'm still not satisfied with the metro city clustering enough to use it in a 'real' world. Instead I will at a later time start an X series of worlds for experimental features/new demand model. For World B I will just reset it with the current model: 

World B XIV: 

Timeframe: 1950-1985

World Speed: 10 Minutes/day (45 minutes/day until Wednesday, May 28th to give people time to join and set up their airlines)

Starting Money: $5,000,000

Rules/Difficulty: Normal/10 Instant deliveries for new airlines

I am happy to announce the release of the Fuel Update! Here are the features (some have been released in preview or were already out but are still encompassed here). Please note, that even though I'm not enabling the fuel portion for existing worlds this update nevertheless introduces a lot of re balancing changes that make the sim harder. You might need to look at your finances. 

AirSimWorld 24.04.22 - Fuel Update

• Fuel Model Update
  • Fuel prices now change dynamically and can have realistic ups and downs
  • Fuel prices now visible on the dashboard 
  • All aircraft fuel consumption has been audited, this resulted in a fair few changes for a number of aircraft where it appears unit confusion seemed to have effected fuel consumption
  • Aircraft order page now shows average fuel consumption for each engine option
  • Note: Fuel model/aircraft adjustments are not available in B IX and Arcade I as this is a disruptive update. World C I will have the new model and future iterations of B and Arcade will as well. 
• New Dashboard
  • Dashboard now shows more useful graphs, allowing for more fine grained selection 
  • Top/Worst flights now have user selectable criteria, allowing users to sort by profit, load factor, passenger count or capacity
  • Competitive landscape section will now show any other airlines actions on routes where they compete with the player
  • Added Forum posts to the dashboard 
• New Notification System
  • Notification system now replaces the old mail system
    • For UI support purposes we still have mail display supported. This will be refreshed in a future update
  • Aircraft delivery notifications are now grouped by aircraft type 
  • Notification details will now show more information, allowing you to navigate to the appropriate aircraft/route
  • Introduced new notification types 
    • New Airline/Welcome notification
    • Leases expiring soon notification
    • Leases expired notification
    • Loans paid off notification 
    • Aircraft repossessed due to non-payment notification (both loans and leases) 
    • Missed payments notification (both loans and leases) 
• Staff System Rebalanced
  • Staffing requirements audited to be more realistic 
    • Number of maintenance staff, ramp agents, airport agents required increased 
    • Number of executives, and customer service reps required decreased
  • Flight attendant and pilot reserves will now be accounted in flight expenses rather than calculated separately, allowing for more visibility. 
  • Note: First quarter expect a lot of turmoil as training costs/effectiveness will be impacted by rapid change. This should effect every airline in the same way and balance out over time. 
• Smaller Updates/Bug Fixes
  • Debt processing system has been rewritten to be more stable and optimal
    • Fixed bug whereby some aircraft that were leased would not be returned, and be stuck in zombie mode
    • Fixed bug where financial report would not accurately reflect lease/loans paid causing a discrepancy in totals. 
  • Fixed bug where gate leases were not showing up as expenses in Financial Reports
  • Gate Lease prices now calculate when gates are leased rather than once a month
  • Added World Initialization event for easier world creation 
  • Fixed a bug where ramp and airport agent attrition was miscalculated 
  • Fixed a bug where gate assignment would sometimes not find a an available leased/owned gate causing slot rental to be used
  • Fixed bug causing staff recalculations to occasionally fail
  • Temporarily disabled forum alliances in game, IPB does not provide an API for getting all of users alliances. I plan on deprecating IPB soon and so it's not worth creating a caching solution for the interim, so I'll just disable it for now
  • Deprecated event manager in favor of celery for background tasks

With that, I'm also introducing World C I, which will run from 1975-2000. Overall I have decided to go towards worlds that run about 3 months long with some exceptions, in general this is the road map worlds wise (not all coming soon, this is more of a vision):

• Arcade world - Fast moving (7 days per turn), long term Arcade world (no political restrictions, aircraft restrictions etc.)
• Dynasty world - Fast moving (7 days per turn), long term realistic world (will run from 1935-2035)
• The letter worlds - Slower paced (1 day per turn), realistic world :
  • World A, "Dawn of Flight": 1935-1955
  • World B, "Jet Age": 1950-1980
  • World C, "Digital Age": 1975-2000
  • World D, "Modern Marvel": 2000-2030
• Open Challenge - Occasional challenge worlds with special restrictions/rules. 

With that, announcing World C I:

World C I "Digital Age" 

Timeframe: 1975-2000 

World Speed: 15 Minutes/day (45 minutes/day until Thursday, April 25 to give people time to join and set up their airlines)

Starting Money: $7,500,000

Rules/Difficulty: Normal/5 Instant deliveries for new airlines

Let me know if you experience any issues or any other suggestions. I will be making a dev blog soon about my plans for the next major release. Thanks! 

Time Frame: 1933-2033

Starting Money: $5 Million

World Speed: 20 Minutes per 7 Days (45 minutes per 7 days until Saturday, April 26th)

Instant Plane Deliveries: 10

Difficulty/Rules: Standard realism restrictions, aircraft release times etc. 

Regarding World B 

Apologies to those waiting for World B reset, my plan was/is to reset it to use the new demand system (Atlanta service) but I have not had the time to work on it in recent weeks. I will see where I am in the next few weeks while Dynasty II gets going and then we will see if World B can run with the new demand model or if not will just reset it as is. To be clear this won't be the full demand model per-say, in fact the actual demand calculation will still be the same however the new system will provide some niceties currently not available, such a city based demand system (so flights from different airports in the same metro compete with each other) and (depending on how much free time I have) flight connections. But we will see if I have the time to work on it. 

In the meanwhile I will allow World BIII to continue. 

Thanks! 

As part of my testing I have a few different environments that I use, the last of which is the beta server. Although access to this server has historically been reserved for Patreon supporters, I have opened it to everyone ever since I automated deployments (deployments are now a click of a button for me rather than a manual and error prone process) which means that new features and releases spend a relatively short time on beta before being pushed out (usually less than a week, or just long enough for me to verify that they won't blow up), so the value proposition of keeping it reserved for Patreon is limited (I still need to work out how to add Patreon in such a way as to make it appealing without adding any pay to win features, this probably looks like more customizability features which although is not a priority at the moment, servers don't pay for themselves). 

Either way, the point is that I'm opening up my test world on beta for any testing you guys want to do (also a good stress test for pre-release versions). The beta server and the test world are available at https://beta.airsim.world/ (I have also put it as a subcategory of announcement section on the forums)

The world parameters are as follows: 

Sandbox World

Timeframe: 2020-3000

World Speed: 1 Min/day

Rules/Difficulty: Normal settings

Starting Money: $1 Billion 

Note: As this is on the beta server, I make no claims as to the reliability of the server. The world may get reset, deleted or get changed without warning, any issues are not bound to be prioritized etc. 

World Speed: 10 Minutes/day (45 minutes/day until Wednesday, January 1st to give people time to join and set up their airlines)

Starting Money: $5,000,000

Rules/Difficulty: Normal/5 Instant deliveries for new airlines

Thanks y'all!

I would like to introduce a new game mode today, designed to be on a similar speed to Arcade mode but with all the realism restrictions of a standard world to allow for longer term, but fast moving worlds! This will also be a world that starts earlier in the timeline than any previous world, running from 1933 to 2033! To accommodate this earlier world a number of early 20th century aircraft were added including: 

• Boeing 247
• Lockheed Model 10 Electra
• Lockheed Model 14 Electra
• Lockheed Model 18 Lodestar
• Boeing 307 Stratoliner
• Boeing 377 Stratocruiser
• Lockheed L-188 Electra
• de Havilland DH.91 Albatross
• Junkers Ju 90
• Douglas DC 2
• Junkers Ju 52
• Lockheed Constellation Series

Note on 1940's, because some guy didn't get into Art school and threw a tantrum which among other worse things also caused a halt in civil aircraft production during the period, I have taken some liberties with aircraft production times at that time. For the most part any aircraft which ended production at the onset of WW 2 had it's production time extended until after that manufacturer released a new model usually in the late 40's. 

With that, the new world: 

Dynasty I

Time Frame: 1933-2033

Starting Money: $5 Million

World Speed: 20 Minutes per 7 Days

Instant Plane Deliveries: 10

Difficulty/Rules: Standard realism restrictions, aircraft release times etc. 

PLEASE REPORT ALL BUGS TO THE ISSUE TRACKER, I CANT MAKE THIS GAME BETTER WITHOUT YOUR SUPPORT! 

Also, the game will have bugs, its an early Alpha release

World A: 

Time-frame: January 1970-January-2020

Speed: 30 Minute days first IRL week, 20 minute days afterwards

Starting cash: $50,000,000 (loans/leases not yet implemented, but are slated for 0.2)

Also, unfortunately the person whom I hired to do the database entry kind of screwed up on a lot of the information, so feel free to submit corrections or new aircraft models here: 

Much Appreciated!

Enjoy! 

Further, I accidentally let World C I run faster which messed with my schedule, as such World C will not be reset for some time to ensure constant availability of fresh worlds for people to join. As such, the following is World B X: 

World B X: 

imeframe: 1950-1985

World Speed: 10 Minutes/day (45 minutes/day until Sunday, June 16th to give people time to join and set up their airlines)

Starting Money: $5,000,000

Rules/Difficulty: Normal/5 Instant deliveries for new airlines

Thanks y'all!

Timeframe: 2020-2200

Starting Money: $10 Million 

World Speed: 7 Days/30 Minutes

Difficulty/Rules: Arcade, no political restrictions or aircraft release dates. 

Timeframe: 1950-1985

World Speed: 10 Minutes/day (45 minutes/day until Tuesday, September 17th to give people time to join and set up their airlines)

Starting Money: $5,000,000

Rules/Difficulty: Normal/5 Instant deliveries for new airlines

Thanks y'all!

Timeframe: 1950-1985

World Speed: 10 Minutes/day (45 minutes/day until Wednesday, August 21st to give people time to join and set up their airlines)

Starting Money: $5,000,000

Rules/Difficulty: Normal/5 Instant deliveries for new airlines

Thanks y'all!

Timeframe: 2020-2200

Starting Money: $10 Million 

World Speed: 7 Days/30 Minutes

Difficulty/Rules: Arcade, no political restrictions or aircraft release dates. 

A lot of announcements today both minor and major so lets get the minor announcements out of the way,

1. I have restored all the Veteran/Patreon roles from the old forum server crash, so that should be restored. If you use a different account now please reach out and I'll update it.
2. I have now created an archive of the forum on https://archive.airsim.world/index0e5b.html?/forums/, so if you want to refer to the old forums for any reason its there should you need to for archive purposes.
3. I have also fixed all the role badges and stuff.
4. Forum Alliances are back!

Now for the major announcements. As most of you have noted 0.3 has been taking a while, this is in large part because of the huge time commitments I have with grad school as well as just the scale of the update. To this end, I feel like the idea of having a bunch of major updates is just not working insofar as I am unable to produce updates as quickly as I would like. Another part of it is the fact that it has become a bit of a wish-wosh of different features in different stages of completion which is also largely due to the large time frame of the release (I dont feel like working on the same things all the time, keep in mind this is a project I do in my spare time that I actually lose money on). I like having major releases both because of the hype that it creates (its great to see people excited for an update, and probably is my single biggest inspiration for working on this) but also because it allows me to more easily keep track of features and allows me to group the various database changing features together (since live database changes are both the riskiest and most painful part of deploying a new version, because although there is always a backup that is ran to ensure the safety of the data, restoring the backup takes a while, and the preparation I go through to ensure that the update runs smoothly (basically doing a practice run on a local build) takes a while). That said, having one major update a year is pretty slow pace.

And so to this end I think I will make a pretty significant change. First, probably tomorrow though no later than before A II resets, I will release 0.2.3, which will be mainly a maintenance update with bug fixes and auto-gate leasing (because that's the single biggest source of confusion for new players) as well as support for new parameters for the new demand model so that the data team could get cracking on those (those wont do anything until the new demand model update gets implemented). From there on out, we're going to switch to a rolling release type system, whereby rather than grouping a bunch of features together I will just work on what I can and try to get an update once a month, some months there will be major changes, some months very minor, some months there might not be an update and others there might be more than one, but thats the rough idea. Basically every month I will put out a Patreon test build, let it run for 1-2 weeks there to test it and the deploy it on the live server (BTW, if you want to help support ASW please feel free to support our Patreon here, I will be introducing Patreon only features into the sim (cosmetic non-game changing ones, so nothing that would give an unfair advantage) with the first rolling release as well). As for versioning we're going to move on to the calver versioning system, whereby the version will be YY.MM.Micro (so the first rolling release will be 20.11.0 Alpha) (ps, if you dont care for versioning schemes thats fine, I just always found them very interesting). This will probably need to change once we're out of Alpha/Beta but we'll deal with that when we get there. As such, the first rolling release will probably the November release whereby the Patreon early access will be released in late October/very early November, and then a full rollout a couple of weeks after. For that update it will have a bunch of UI updates, updates to maintenance and (maybe) the new demand model. The way that I will get these releases out is by continuing to work on 0.3 and then just merging finished features that get completed into the rolling release to ensure that no unfinished features break anything, which should allow me to also still keep track of progression and work on multiple features at the same time.

BTW, if we get more Patrons and there is significant interest I am willing to put the in development version of 0.3 or whatever version I'm working on a test server but currently its just not worth my time, but if the Patrons are interested I would be ok with it.

Either way, let me know what y'all think, I'm always looking for feedback and to see what you guys want to see. The support you guys have given me has been great and really keeps me going. Thanks!

Timeframe: 1950-2025 (extended the end date to make this the long running world, we might re-introduce world A as a second world halfway through this one)

World Speed: 10 Minutes/day (45 minutes/day until Wednesday, June 14th to give people time to join and set up their airlines)

Starting Money: $5,000,000

Rules/Difficulty: Normal/5 Instant deliveries for new airlines