Leaderboard

Hello, everyone! 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!