Leaderboard

While working on a new fuel model I wanted to add some kind of a graph to the dashboard to show the movement in fuel prices, however I didn't just want to tack it on. I wanted it to be a well thought out part of the dashboard. The problem of course is that the dashboard itself is not incredibly well thought out. In fact it hasn't been touched since the initial release of the sim, when it was hastily created just days before public release just to not have a blank home page, the whole process probably took about 5-10 minutes. It wasn't meant to be a permanent design, just more of a temporary patch until something more robust could be designed. I have thought about updating it from time to time (including a customizable card based system) but it was just never a high enough priority. Until today, I wanted to show a mockup of a dashboard design that I'm considering, walk y'all through it and get some feedback. (that said, please do ignore some of the graphical issues, if the scheduler has not made it clear, I am no graphic designer) The Info Bar: The idea with the top bar is to provide a quick bird eye view into the key metrics for your airline, the long term vision here is that you can click on a given metric to get a modal to show you more details about whatever it is you clicked on. The Graph Module: The graph module will show you graphs related to your key financial metrics, you can click on the different metrics on the side to get a different graph. Notification Pane: The main core of the dashboard is the notification pane, the idea here is that it should give you a prioritized list of information of things that you can take an action on immediately. The idea here is that it would also replace the current mail system which is another under-developed component of the sim. Within the notification pane you would have 3 different notification types: Warnings, which will always appear at the top and represent the most important actions that need to be taken immediately (examples include aircraft with expiring leases, flights cancelled due to maintenance related issues when that's implemented etc.), info panels which will present currently actionable but not necessarily urgent issues, and advisory panels that present information that do not necessarily require any action but are useful to keep and eye on. Forum Panel: One of the goals I have is to increase engagement on the forum, I really value having feedback and want to have more people involved in the planning process (hence the point of these posts). While we have a decent player count, very few engage in the community channels like Discord or the Forums. The hope is that by having the forum panel on the dashboard this can promote engagement on the forum. Competitive Landscape: The ultimate goal of the sim is to promote player engagement with each other and the broader sim world, to this end I aim to introduce the competitive landscape panel which will show you what your competitors are doing as it relates to your airline. The current plan is to have the panel display when one of your competitors updates anything on one of the routes that you operate (like increasing capacity, or starting a competing service), as well as other information that other players are doing relevant to your airline. Airline Widget: For the competitive landscape cards and other places in the sim, it's not always ideal to have the full 250x50 airline logo to display, for this purpose I aim to introduce the airline widget as another logo type, by default it will be the first 50 pixels of the 250x50 airline logo, though I aim to introduce this as one of the first Patreon exclusive features whereby Patreon supporters would be able to upload a custom widget. Monetization strategy is something that I've struggled with, mostly due to my deep-seated opposition to having any Patreon features that would provide an unfair advantage, yet the fact is that ads on their own are not enough to sustain the sim and I'm currently paying for it out of pocket hence I'm hoping that introducing some Patreon exclusive features for graphical customization that do not affect game play is a way to attract more support. Please let me know if you have any feedback or other suggestions on reinventing the dashboard. Something I've missed or you'd like to have on the dashboard? Let me know!

Yeah, this is something I need to look at. The way countries are determined is based on city assignment which is based on proximity. This is something that I want to rework at some point.

There is a plan to do that as part of a broader effort to unbindle the user from the game server, that is I'm working on a separate service to manage users, achievements and such. This is largely for technical reasons, as I want to be able to add features that are not necessarily backwards compatible and deploy them over time to new worlds while still providing a seamless experience, as well as to be able to switch game servers while maintaining key statistics for worlds long gone. Currently, the way the database is interconnected it's difficult for me to clean a world up without removing key data from that world, data that I would like to keep as I plan to implement features such as player history, global leaderboard and achievements all of which I want to do retroactively. For this reason, the database from old worlds is largely kept entirely intact which is not ideal long term. As part of that change, it is my plan to allow the user to export some settings to be able to import them into their airline, though it might not necessarily be a first priority issue for that service.