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That's actually not too far from how I was thinking of implementing cargo. Though that won't come until the existing features are where I want them to be

Alright folks, the long awaited 502 fix is here. From this update I will be focusing on working on 0.3 (unless something catastrophic happens). More updates will be posted on the DevBlog subforum, so make sure to keep checking to stay up to date! AirSimWorld 0.2.2 Alpha New Features and Improvements: New Airline Selection Screen Adsense Optimizations Better Logging (doesnt dump all in one file anymore, support for error codes) Increased cost of terminal construction Ability to extend/terminate leases Bug Fixes Fixed no form validation on new airline screen #135 Fixed the 502 bug # 133 Fixed world leak bug on airport page Fixed terminals past Z not being named properly #139 Fixed unassignable gates error when changing schedules #137 Fixed Configurations unable to be deleted bug #122 Fixed aircraft registration crashing with certain countries #140 Fixed leases expiring prior to aircraft delivery #133 Fixed ranking page not displaying properly bug Fixed leases not working properly bug Fixed Gate Slots page under facilities not working

Alright folks, the first world of the sim has officially ended! Congrats on all who made it through, and I hope that you will stick around for more worlds to come. For those that have missed it, World A II is now live and at full speed. Btw, feel free to use these images in your signature if you're one of the winners That said, here are the awards for World A I: Winner of World A I: California Express Final Valuation: $21,466,139,455,745 Weekly Passengers: 3,085,476 CEO: @dtp11 Runner Up of World A I: Zuidafrikaans Final Valuation: $20,394,461,221,848 Weekly Passengers: 3,886,377 CEO: @erroneous Third Place in World A I: Sheep Final Valuation: $19,410,258,609,475 Weekly Passengers: 1,597,134 CEO: @MDK6778 The following airlines and CEOs complete the top ten: 4. WingsAir (@Nico) 5. Sunrise Airlines (@Fred) 6. Favoritism (@IQuit) 7. CirrusAir (@Ellis) 8. WingAir (@wings203) 9. American World Airlines (@frequentflier) 10. Icarus Air (@bart12) Best Reputation Award (as calculated by the highest average flight satisfaction of a profitable airline): Malaysia Airlines System Final Valuation: $308,289,038,765 Weekly Passengers: 204,691 CEO: @Sazlah Most Profitable Airline: Zuidafrikaans Final Valuation: $20,394,461,221,848 Weekly Passengers: 3,886,377 Weekly Profit: $28,354,155,579 CEO: @erroneous Most Passengers Transported: Dragoon20005 Airlines Final Valuation: $4,164,705,919,690 Weekly Passengers: 3,985,279 Total Passengers: 5,395,353,880 CEO: @dragoon20005 Congrats to all the winners, and good luck in A II! I'll leave A I active (but paused) for the next couple of days to let people look at their airlines one last time before archiving the world later this week.

everything will be moved back

Depends on how many planes you have on the ground at a time. That said, if you have negative balance you won't be able to lease a gate. So it might be worth it to either fly your planes more (to avoid overages) or restart your airline.

If you have long turnarounds slot leasing can really add up

Check your gate slot leasing, you might need to lease some gates. Look to your financial report to see what your biggest costs are.

DM me on discord, I can help you analyze the situation. https://discord.gg/qudNez3

It depends, leasing a gate doesn't decrease your landing/takeoff fees but it does eliminate the gate use fees. Gate use fees only kick in after your plane has been sitting at the gate for more than an hour (one hour gate time is included in the cost of landing/takeoff fees), so as long as all your turnarounds are under 1 hour there is no advantage to leasing a gate from rent costs perspective. The only other expense associated with gate slot rentals is the ramp agent staffing costs which are a flat fee based on your aircrafts MTOW, for leased gates you hire your own staff. Generally speaking, since staffing costs are per cycle if you have a lot of flights in/out of an airport you'll save money on staffing, but if you only have one or two flights it's probably cheaper to use airports staff. You can look how much you're spending at each airport on slot rentals using the slot rental page under the facilities tab

Hey folks! Those of you who have been around the Discord (link at the top) are familiar that one of the main features I have been working on for 0.3 is the new demand system. In fact, I am redesigning it basically from scratch. While the present system works, it is at its core very simple. Pax will rank their preference of flights based on different attributes and will select the flight they prefer the most that they can afford (which is decided by a separate Poisson distribution). Add on that the value calculations to give a boost to low cost carriers that provide comparatively cheap flights for what they offer and you have the existing passenger model. This model has largely remained unchanged since the earliest stages of the sim development (while the different weights were changed around, and other factors to consider added, the design itself did not change). This approach works but it does create issues, namely the following: Every passenger favors the same 'type' of flight, and thus favors a single type of airline Two flights that are comparable in their appeal will not split passengers in the way you'd expect since one flight will be ranked above the other Due to the simplicity of the mechanic it is possible to game the system in unrealistic ways Now I'm generally weary of releasing details about how the various game mechanics work in large part because I want to avoid giving any information that would allow people to game the mechanic and gain an unfair advantage. However I feel with this new model explaining how it works would serve to inform players strategy and prompt more engagement with the sim (and if I'm wrong I guess I'll have to rewrite the model again), plus this is likely to change in future versions and thus should be used more as a rough outline then a definitive guide. With that said here is how the new model works: First, there are 7 different types of passengers, the exact proportions of each for each route pair is something that I'm still working on, however they will not be the same, thus some routes will have more business demand for instance than others. Either way, here are the 7 types: Low Cost Leisure Traveler Middle Cost Leisure Traveler Upper Cost Leisure Traveler Middle Class Business Traveler Upper Class Business Traveler Executive Urgent Travel (think those flying for emergency purposes) In the same sphere, there are 11 different criteria that they weigh in deciding what flight to take: Price: pretty self explanatory, the lower the price the higher this score Value: The sum of all the other factors divided by price, basically a measurement of how much 'bang for the buck' a passenger can expect compared to other options on the market IFS: This is weighed equally between 2 factors, first is the soft product on the plane (things like food, amenity kits etc.), and the effectiveness of your flight attendants IFE: Entertainment and productivity options that your airline offers Seat: The quality, comfort, legroom and width of the seat Departure time: The day of the week and time (local time) that the flight departs) Arrival time: Same as above, but for arrival time Airport: Mostly a placeholder for a certain 0.4 feature, but for now deals with the airport and booking experience. Influenced by efficiency of your customer service, airport agents and airport crowding Loyalty: Another one mostly reserved for the future, but is also influenced by how many flights an airline has out of a particular airport (for instance for a flight between A and B, and A is significantly bigger than B, an airline that has a lot of operations in A is going to have an advantage over an airline that has comparable operations in B), as well as the country of the airline (same rules as for cities, pax prefer to fly on their countries carriers, so flights between India and the US will favor Indian airlines since most of the passengers on that flight are probably Indian and thus have a national preference) On-Time rating: Based on the efficiency of your pilots, maintenance workers and ground workers, aircraft utilization, turnaround time and operations at departure airports (more flights out of departure airport mean less likely to have a delay since more likely a spare plane is available in case of issues) Flight Time: Self explanatory, shorter time traveling = higher rating With that in mind, here is the 'grid' for how different pax prioritize different aspects: Keep in mind, a lot of things will still change between now and the release of 0.3 and many things about the model (such as the exact equations used to distribute pax or calculate proportions) will not be released, but for now, this is what I've been working on. And as always, I am open to suggestions or any other ideas y'all have.

I personally believe business traveller should weight seat, IFS and IFE more as their company will pay for their ticket anyway why don't choose a nicer one right ?

As far as I can tell, if you're leasing the aircraft then your company doesn't 'own' them, and is simply an operator of the plane. Therefore, it does not contribute to your value since you do not own it.

I'm currently migrating the server which is why the game is down. This is also why your anti-virus is complaining (since I moved the server it has a different IP, so the SSL certificate doesnt match, this should now be fixed). I'm currently transferring the database which should be the last step (albeit the longest one), the game should be back in a few minutes

better use of gate hours? I doubt it. I think the system has the gate usage very optimized already, I have so many flights on one gate I can't even count.

Most of the planes have cargo hold information already in the database, the main issue would be the mechanics of how cargo would work (I plan on having it work on a contract system rather than the normal demand model that exists with passengers). My current plan is that it will probably be implemented for 0.6/0.7. I dont really plan on implementing any completely new mechanics in game until 0.5 (which will be the first Beta release) and instead want to work on refining and improving the existing features. As such, this is the current outlook: 0.3: UI overhaul and back-end changes (complete overhaul of the demand model, more on that will be posted in devblog soon) 0.4: Facilities update 0.5 Beta: Contracts/contractual relations (subsidiaries, codeshares, more in-depth alliances etc.) 0.6/0.7: Completely new features, amongst those currently considered are cargo and charter flights.

It should have various different world going on at same time and player should choose which one to play. All should have there own benefits like one should no political restrictions while other should have long time has one day,etc. So I think you will think of it and support it.

Well honestly, I don't think now's the time to worry about all this. Getting a finished-ish game, or at least a beta seems the most important thing to do first. also, there are not really enough airlines to make the market competitive enough that you could call it "realistic". I believe having at least double the playercount in each world would be a nice start. That's the main thing airlines are fighting for nowadays.

I personally prefer slower worlds myself, but I also want to make what appeals to the most people. Eventually as the sim grows there will be slower worlds, for now with only a few worlds I don't really have much of a choice. I might make the modern world slightly shorter but slower (maybe something like 2000-2030 but at 45 mins/day) but I haven't fully settled that yet.

From what I've heard from the dev, the UI will be reworked in a future update, as bugfixes take priority (and making a UI is hard) But from what I remember, the UI will get the rework likely in 0.3.0 alpha.

World A will be reset as soon as it ends when it reaches 2020 (fun fact, I originally scheduled it to end on the new year but due to various game pauses and world slow downs, especially early on it wasn't meant to be), which should be in about 22 days. World B will be added whenever the aircraft data is ready, the data team is working hard to implement it asap. World C will probably be a modern world (since we already are going to have two historic worlds) and will launch a few months from now (depending on the number of active players)

Hey folks, As many of your are aware, there have been one pretty major bug since 0.2 that has so far alluded my attempts to fix, that's the 502 bug on leases and loans of gates and airplanes. This has been by far the biggest issue in the game since the 0.2 update and it has taken me a while to find the root cause of the bug. This is in large part because I couldn't get the bug to replicate itself on my dev build, making it hard to track down the source of the issue. It is also further complicated by the fact that the crash happens as a result of a timeout rather than a code crash, meaning that there is no detailed stack trace in the logs for me to follow like there would be with a normal crash. The problem was further complicated by the fact that the crashing happened in several completely different functions (leasing a plane doesnt use any of the same functions that leasing a gate does except those that are also used all over the sim without issue). Thus this has been a very difficult problem to solve. Until today, I have finally managed to track down the source of the timeouts. And the problem has nothing to do with either of the lease or loan functions. Indeed I have found the reason for this bug while solving another bug that I have noticed, which is that it seems that sometimes the Event Manager (the part of the sim that manages all of the background tasks like advancing the time, giving airlines money etc.) would get 'stuck' for up to an hour at a time. I knew that the issue was a hanging process that was bringing everything to a halt (the EM is set up to run several tasks at once, but there is a limit to how many it can do), but since everything was moving, just slower it wasn't game breaking and thus wasnt something I was going to worry about until I could find the solution for the 502 bug. Which is where we get to today, I decided to throw in the towel for now on the 502 bug (instead moving the charge part of the code to the end of the lease/loan function, making sure no one got charged when the crash happened) and focus my attention on some of the other bugs for 0.2.2 update. This is where I started looking at this EM bug, and the moment I saw the cause of this bug, it all clicked. First, a bit of background, the game has a table in the database for the financial reports where all of the financial data for all the airlines is stored (basically the data you see in the financial report section, minus some extra statistics that I store there to piggy back off it. Now to give a bit of background into how databases work, is that they work using queries, which is basically a command where I can tell the database to increase this value by 5 or insert this data or whatever and each time I send in a query it has to evaluate it, run it and save the data. These queries can be quite elaborate, and one of the updates in 0.2 was that I moved a lot of the heavy-lifting to the database from the code. One of those functions that I moved were the functions to process calculating revenues and expenses every day (which is actually a quite complicated function since it also has to account for things like slot leasing, variations in IFE/IFS revenue etc.), this is one of the things that made 0.2 so much faster. Now to avoid concurrency issues, whenever the database is working on updating one table in the database, it locks it, meaning nothing else can work on it until it is done. This is usually not an issue, the other processes can just wait until that thing is done and continue on their way, and is something I tested for when working on the 0.2 update. However the sim has seen great growth since the release of the 0.2 update which is where the Big O has really started to catch up with me. So this process that was now taking much longer was blocking other things from being able to run. And since most of the processes rely on modifying the finances in some way (it is a business sim after all), they were getting stuck waiting for this one process to finish. Now it would eventually finish, so the game wouldn't crash but it would slow. But back to the 502 when acquiring planes and gates, one of the things that the function does is subtract money from your airline, which remember it couldn't do because of the lock on the financial report table. Since that part of the code came before the creation of the plane, the HTML request would timeout and hence the 502. This makes sense as to why the issue happened as well as why I couldn't reproduce it, since it wasn't a constant issue and would only show up when the table was locked, which was actually pretty rare. But when it did happen, it would be stuck for minutes at a time, making you unable to conduct any direct financial transactions. Now you ask about the fact that the system did seem to take your money, and this is where we get to the other part of the story. The sim stores two values for your airlines balance, the real one in the financial report table, and a memoized one (a copy of the real one) in the airline table. The airline table value was updated, and since thats the value that's displayed to you on the sidebar, it seemed like the money was taken. However, since thats the fake value it would get reset during the start of the next financial quarter when those values would sync up again. Either way, thats the explanation of probably the worst bug that has impacted ASW to date, I will work on a solution for it tomorrow and release it as part of the 0.2.2 update. TL;DR Doing processing work for the sim is a balancing act between doing stuff in code and doing stuff in the db, on this occasion I swung the pendulum a bit too far one way creating a difficult to detect issue. It's Alpha software for a reason folks.

Hey y'all! Some of y'all showed interest in having a bit more updates about the development as well as other stuff, so rather than having that one really outdated roadmap (which is still accurate in regards to features, just not time-wise), I want to try having this section of announcements to just give updates in regards to development and other stuff in regards to the sim. 0.2.2 0.2.2 is currently in the works and is about halfway done, I'm currently in the middle of finals for school so it probably wont be released until I'm done with those in a week or so, but 0.2.2 will fix many of the bugs in 0.2.1 (including the 502 bug hopefully), as well as add some new features including the ability to replace aircraft, buy from leasors/extend leases. It also sets out a number of important UI updates that wont really have an impact this time around (except for the airline selection and maybe flight research pages which are going to be the first pages to be updated), but will be important come 0.3 which will be released sometime late December/early January and feature primarily usability features and UI improvements that should make the sim a lot more stable. World B As per the poll, World B will be set in 1950. While everything is ready on development end for a second world, the biggest issue currently is that there is only about 2 planes in game that would be available then. @KJS607 is working on bringing more early era planes into the sim but obviously research takes time, if you want to help feel free to drop suggestions in the New Aircraft Topic. Just be sure to cite your sources so that its easy for Kai to verify and I'm sure he'd appreciate the help. World B will start as soon as there are enough aircraft in the sim to give some variety.

Yes, although not in 0.2, but it is planned for 0.5