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Hi folks! 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!

Hey Y'all! Just wanted to give you a bit of an update on 0.2 as well as give you all a bit of a roadmap regarding what to expect in future releases of the game as we go through the Alpha development stage. 0.2 is going to have a lot of new features and I hope that you will agree with me that these features are worth the wait. AirSimWorld 0.2 Alpha (Release mid to late June): More details on your airlines finances (including breakdowns of how each of your cabins, aircraft and configurations are performing as a whole, more detailed flight financials etc.) Credit Ratings, Loans and Leases Ability to Bankrupt your airline/go into Bankruptcy Protection Airport Gates and Terminals Alliances Airline Reputation and Reach Staff options (setting salaries, dealing with unions, employee morale etc.) Logos, graphics and branding options Better mail system (aircraft deliveries split from general mail, mail reserved for important information Various bug fixes AirSimWorld 0.3 Alpha (Release mid July): This update will primarily be a UI update, that wont add many features but will be a significant overhaul of the UI. This will include things like making all the tables sortable (currently only flights and aircraft pages have those), add ability to add other columns to tables as well as have the ability to customize the UI to your own needs (One such feature is the ability to customize what is shown on the dashboard). This update wont do too much in terms of new features except bug fixes and tweaking of some game mechanics. AirSimWorld 0.4 Alpha (Release early August): This update will primarily add depth to existing ingame features, examples include adding aircraft options (winglets, extra fuel tanks etc.), more maintenance options, have aircraft maintenance actually take aircraft out of service (currently it only charges your airline money), more facilities upgrades (lounges, maintenance facilities etc.), better alliance options, realistic flight delays (cascading flight delays) etc. AirSimWorld 0.5 Beta (Release late August/Early September): This update will primarily overhaul the way you interact with agents in game (aircraft manufactures, banks, airports) by adding contracts and negotiations to the game, so you'll be able to negotiate with an aircraft manufacturer or an airport to get a certain price on things etc. This will also add more complicated things like aircraft options, termination fees etc. This contract system will also be used for player interactions for things such as inter-lining agreements (potentially but probably not in this update) codeshare agreements, and leases between airlines. Its also worth noting that minor bug fixes will be released between updates similar to 0.1. I would love to also hear your feedback and thoughts. Thanks!

Resetting world B World B IX Timeframe: 1950-2025 World Speed: 10 Minutes/day (Paused until tomorrow, 45 minutes/day until Thursday, December 28th 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 Note, that there will be a rebalance update for willingness to pay to reduce the amount that passengers will be willing to pay some point before the world accelerates to full speed. Further, this is likely the last iteration of World B (at least in it's current form), as I wish to move these longer running worlds to run at a pace of 7 days per turn to speed them up (currently World B runs for about half a year IRL, I want to make most worlds run at most 3 months or so to speed things up). I am working on plans to create new worlds and will share those details at a later time.

Hi! I'm sure many of you noticed that there was a bug that emerged recently whereby flights werent updating, this has since been fixed. The problem was that the code that runs the background tasks crashed, I'll be investigating the reasons for this but in the meanwhile it has been restarted and any updates you run should work now. You will need to refresh affected routes. I apologize for the long wait as I was busy with exams.

I'll look into it, I probably won't be adding any new planes until the introduction of Mojave service (which is a service I'm building to crowd source data for the game) (cause get it Mojave desert is where planes are stored when in storage?)

Good idea for the new scheduler. I'm planning to redesign the scheduler as part of the maintenance update that's on my list next. Have had a lot of work travel and generally work has been busy so very behind on what I have planned.

Hi Folks! I am now putting the new dashboard into preview as I have achieved feature parity with the current dashboard, there are still a few issues to work out and notifications/competitive outlook is still not supported (though will be before full release). This is also the first step in a UI revamp, so general feedback about the look is appreciated as well. I do want to add some more color into the whole setup and plan to play around with it more. Further, while the new dashboard does show fuel prices, and those prices are 'real' in the sense that this is what the sim will use once the fuel update comes out, the flight model currently does not use those prices. As always, I look forward to hearing your feedback. To get a look into the new dashboard just go ahead to the dashboard and press the 'Try Now' button. Thanks!

Update 23.12.27 New Features Updated Willingness to pay formula to slightly increase pax willingness to pay on ultra short haul routes, decreasing it significantly for medium haul and long haul routes. Note that this change will not impact Arcade ∅ which will stay with the current algorithm but will impact Arcade I when that gets started, this change will also effect World B IX following any route updates. Changed default price for routes to be slightly below median willingness to pay, such that assuming there are no competitors you should be able to capture majority (though not all) of the demand for a route given the default price. The Scheduler direction selector will now flip on flight creation to make it easier to create flights in the opposite direction Various Scheduler performance improvements Bug Fixes Fixed an issue where updating the route in the Scheduler would not force a route update. Fixed an issue where the Scheduler would allow creation of flights before the turnaround time. Fixed Airline selector drop down on route research and some other pages not showing user's airlines. Please note that these willingness to pay changes are designed to make the game harder and will be applied to the current World B IX, as such you might need to re-adjust your prices down. I apologize for not getting these changes out earlier, I expected to get them out before the world reset but miscalculated when the B VIII was going to end. Also note that while this update changes how much pax are willing to pay, it does not change the demand itself. Please let me know if there are any issues or suggestions, I will continue to mess around with the values in the coming days to further tweak them for best in game experience. Thanks!

Hi folks! As we approach the end of 2023, we can reflect on the changes that happened to the sim over the past year. Although there were only a handful visible changes, there was significant work done to improve stability and optimize the back end to improve the experience for all players. Early in the year we migrated hosting from AWS to Linode, which has reduced the overall bill. Further I have used this opportunity to improve the overall infrastructure and reliability. The bottom line is that when the sim was created 5 years ago, I was not nearly the programmer that I am today (and hopefully in 5 years I will be able to say the same about myself today). I have always credited ASW with being the single biggest learning in my programming career, although I have been programming from an early age, this was my first long term project, and on more than one occasion my lack of experience with long term projects led to taking short cuts that led to issues long term. I have gotten better over the years, and I thank you all for giving me the opportunity to better myself. That said, I have taken the past year primarily to take what I have learned from 5 years of keeping the sim up, combined with my recent experience programming professionally for one of the largest tech companies to improve the sim stability, drive better user experience and create a solid platform before moving on to major feature work. Stability Improvements Improved Monitoring and Reliability One of the things that I did as part of migration was add in better monitoring capability for errors and latency. We have, since the early days of the sim had analytics on things like user counts, as well as taking a snapshot of the sim state during any crashes, which remains useful to this day for debugging specific problems. However due to how this data was stored, it was difficult to drive any actionable decisions regarding what to prioritize and where to spend more time on, both in development as well as bug fixes. As such, we added server side monitoring and log indexing (previously logging was done to a file, making it cumbersome to work with as there was limited support for even the basics like searching for a specific request). This gave important visibility into which pages were causing the most issues, latency for each page, as well as the nature of the issues. Along with that it gave important metrics regarding which pages were getting the most traffic, and which features were being used most vs least etc. Fatals reductions One of the main goals to come out of the expanded monitoring was tracking how many fatal requests were were receiving on each page, at the time we started tracking this metric I found that we were getting about 20 fatals per day (A fatal being a 5xx error, namely that page with the error code, that error code identifies a snapshot that I can refer back to debug the issue), however the vast majority of the fatals came from only a handful of pages. As such, much of the first couple of months was spent focusing on pages that were causing the most issues which included the scheduler, as well as the flight update page. The vast majority of the issues were down to lack of input validations (like having a string instead of number etc., notably while we were sanitizing input for things like SQL injection attacks, we weren't verifying input validity for the specific context). However some bigger issues were discovered as well. For example, about halfway through last year I transitioned to a CI pipeline for deployments (automating deployments such that deploying new features or bug fixes did not require manual actions on my side but rather a press of a button, a great improvement in my ability to get things out faster), however as part of that change I moved the beta server from my home server to the production server, and used the same instance for beta as I do for prod. This created issues causing fatals due to the fact that owing to the Event Manager taking a number of connections, when combining connections required for both beta and prod instances, we were running out of connections. Discovering this issue prompted to disabling beta briefly and undertaking a containerization effort which completely isolated beta and prod dependencies and greatly improved reliability, creating a firewall between the two stages. We also now take greater care to track database connections to avoid this issue from happening again. All of this work focusing on stability paid off, following the improvements we have reduced from having about 20 fatals per day, to now having about 2, with all pages having fatal % well under 10%. A great improvement from previous years. Latency Improvements After concluding the fatals effort, the next area of focus was on improving the latency. A number of pages were marked as needing improvement, chief among them was the route research page. Apart from being the most requested page in the sim, it was also the highest latency with a P50 (median request) latency of about 23 seconds, and P95 (95th percentile) latency of over a minute and a half. This was unacceptable. I have taken a personal goal of reducing latency across the sim to a P50 of 2.5 seconds and P95 of 5 seconds. To achieve this goal, I have taken the strategy of reducing dependence on server-side rendering in favor of API calls, allowing data to load as it arrived. As the vast majority of the latency issues was due to waiting for data to load from the database, this kind of divide and conquer approach led to significant improvements, further pagination was added server-side to limit the data that is being loaded. When applied to route research page, where all of the table data (my flights, all flights data) was moved to API based approach we transitioned the page from being one of the worst pages for latency, to being one of the fastest with a P50 of about 250 ms with little variability between busy/non-busy flights. This approach was further applied to other pages, such as the airline ranking and flights list page to overall improve latency across the board. When I first undertook this effort, i set up an alarm for P50/P95 latency metrics, and at first almost every part of the site was in alarm for one or the other. After all of these changes we are regularly green on the alarms for specific pages. Although the work is not done as we are at 5 seconds for P95 sim-wide (and P99 over), we are in a much better place. One of the other changes that came out of this effort was a complete redesign of the new flight/update flight flow called by the scheduler, this page was problematic for both latency as well as fatals and bugs. As a result, I took the decision to completely redesign the page, and although the scheduler API still remains one of the higher latency pages (I plan to undertake an improvement when I redesign the scheduler which is planned) it was a noticeable improvement with a significant reduction of bugs in the flow and improvement of latency. Ongoing Feature Work New Dashboard/UI Redesign Although initially only meant as an improvement to support new fuel model (which is otherwise ready to go), this ended up a much bigger effort as I decided to take this opportunity to start migrating the broader sim to react rather than Django based templates, this is an improtant step to improve the usability of the website, further the new UI is designed to be mobile-first, addressing a major issue that currently exists with the sim. This is all part of a broader effort to move completely off of Django based views in favor of a React site, however as this would be a significant undertaking that would take over a year, I am in the meanwhile working on this 'halfway' solution where we integrate React components inside the current Django site that we can later transition. This way, you will get the advantages of the new UI sooner. As of now, the base work for UI is done, and I am currently working on integrating the newly created SDK to establish a front end/back end connection. Once that is done the new dashboard should be ready for release. New Fuel Model/Maintenance The fuel model is complete but is pending dashboard (I do not wish to release the fuel model without a way to see fuel prices etc.). As it stands, the model introduced dynamic fuel prices that are variable day to day. Further it fixes one of the main issues with the current fuel model, which is that it does not adjust to inflation, since at present we do not model inflation in the sim (and have no plans to do so to avoid having to constantly update flight prices), meaning that fuel is unrealistically cheap in earlier years. Maintenance Update One of the major updates planned is to the maintenance system, part of that update will also be a redesign of the scheduler which is intended to allow you to move flights between planes. More will be coming on this at a later time. New Demand Model One of my major undertakings for 2024 will be a redesign of the demand system, this will mean the creation of a new service, what I termed Atlanta service written in Rust to take advantage of it's more optimized runtime performance (also I just want to learn Rust), as well as a graph based database to allow implementation of connecting flights. The model itself is already worked out (math wise) and will introduce 7 different types of passengers each with their own needs and priorities when it comes to choosing flights, price will no longer be king when it comes to certain kinds of passengers. This should allow better diversity of airline carriers as particularly wealthier passengers would be a lot more pickier about which flights they want to take, though would be willing to pay top dollar to ensure their demands are met. Closing Thoughts As we go into the new year, the 5 year anniversary of ASW, I am excited for the future and to get back into feature work now that we have a good platform to build on. While my availability unfortunately remains unpredictable due to my job and other commitments, it always brings me great joy to work on ASW and interact with the community. Thank you for making it possible and I wish you all a happy 2024 and I hope you will join us as we celebrate our 5th anniversary! PS: As a thank you to our Patreons, they got to see this post earlier. Interested in supporting the sim? Become a Patreon here!

Currently fuel prices for many short-range aircraft is bizarrely high, making realistically-priced routes impossible for them. I know the E-Jets, the Q400, and the CRJs have this issue, but there may be more. I saw on the discord that a new fuel model is being worked on, but considering the A320 has sensible fuel prices I think the root cause is a config error so that might need a look at before the new model is implemented.

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!

Hi Folks! I wanted to take some time to share some of the big things that are coming down the pipeline in the months to come. Although given my IRL time constraints I can't commit to a timeline, I do want to let you know what my plans are and what I'm working on. Some of these are game play features, while other things are more backend 'in the weeds' type changes. Over the last half a year or so, I've been working on major stability improvements and changes, and I hope that y'all have noticed the difference. As most of these changes have now taken shape (although the work of improving the existing game is never done), I can now focus more on adding new stuff to the game. This is a first in a series of posts that I hope I can share more details of how the sim operates internally, I'm hoping to be able to share more 'behind the scenes' topics, potentially diving into the more technical aspects. Let me know if y'all want more of that type of content. Keep in mind that this list is not in any kind of a priority order, and is mostly my thoughts of the things I want to work on. Event Manager Deprecation. One of the main parts keeping the game moving is currently the event manager. At present the heart beat of the entire sim, managing all asynchronous operations, everything from keeping the clock moving, to recalculating the flight demand, to handling aircraft maintenance etc. And overall, I'm pretty proud of my college self for developing the solution that I did to a fairly non-trivial problem, it has for the most part worked and apart from a few hiccups didn't cause too many issues. It does however, suffer from a scalability problem and is generally incompatible with some of the long term changes that I want to pursue, and as such has to go. I have already finished the replacement and just require further testing and infrastructure changes to get it out (I will make a whole other post comparing how the new solution will operate so watch this space. My testing server (which still lives in my parents place, about 500 miles away) is experiencing some hardware issues that have prevented me from being able to properly test everything, I'm hoping to get these issues resolved next weekend so hopefully I can get this out fairly soon. Overhauling Fuel. The first gameplay feature that I want to change is to overhaul the fuel and maintenance aspects of the sim, first I want to add randomness to the fuel prices. Currently, fuel prices are stagnant until 1970, and then increase linearly to 2020. The current system has a few problems; first, it's not using inflation adjusted values while the sim does not model inflation. I have gone back and forth on the idea of adding inflation to the game, on one hand my goal for the game is to create the most realistic experience, on the other I don't want the sim to be tedious and to force the players to constantly increase prices just to adjust to inflation. This is why ultimately I decided against modeling inflation at least for the foreseeable future. Instead I will adjust the fuel prices to account for lack of inflation, aircraft prices are currently pegged to 2018 inflation, so I will do the same for fuel. Second, the linear nature of fuel prices makes it extremely predictable and non-challenging, to address this I want to add some noise to the mix that should model variability in fuel prices, with periods of low and high prices. Although for now I'm limiting the model to this, long term we could add features such as fuel hedging and other features to expand on this volatility. Overhauled Aircraft Maintenance. Another thing that's on my radar is an overhaul of the maintenance system. This system has largely been untouched since the original release and I want to add more details to it. For one, I want maintenance to take planes out of commission, my current plan is to allow an airline to replace a plane going into maintenance with a plane that doesn't have any flights of the same type/configuration (similar to what real airlines do), this would add a new mechanic to the game of planning your fleet around redundancy rather than stuffing as many flights as possible onto a plane. Further it would allow airlines to better spread flight cycles around their entire fleet which will become important because, I want to fix the long running bug whereby aircraft with negative cycles still fly (technically it's not a bug, since I have intentionally left it in until such a time that I could redesign that system, but still). This does mean that as part of this I want to allow airlines to move schedules between aircraft to allow for better fleet planning. Further, I want to incentivize fleet planning by making the per type fixed costs a lot higher than they are currently, increasing the penalty in staff, as well as making that whole interface and breakdown clearer by creating a maintenance section in the UI to summarize all of that data. Long term the plan would be to allow airlines to build maintenance bases and allow players finer control over the maintenance schedule. New Demand Model and Return of Connecting Flights. Connecting flights were turned off a few months after the public launch of the sim, after all the processing required brought the server to it's knees. It was meant as a temporary fix. That was 4 years ago. I have made a number of attempts to reintroduce connecting flights and some were more successful then others but nothing that I was confident with releasing. The problem is that the architecture of how we store flight data (SQL database) is inherently not well suited to modeling connections. As such, my plan currently is to export all demand calculations to a different service I plan to launch (called Atlanta service, get it?) which will utilize a graph based solution that should be able to handle connecting flights much easier. The idea of putting it into a different service will also allow me to use Rust which should hopefully allow me to optimize performance further, which is important as the demand model is by far the most resource intensive part of the sim. As far as demand model itself, I have long worked out the design for the new model, that will model passengers based on 7 different passenger types that will prioritize different aspects of what your airline has to offer. I had already programmer a large chunk of this but had to pull the plug after it got bloated. Beyond the code however there is also the challenge of data collection, the model adds a lot of fine grain data to different cities, airports and nations in order to accurately represent the distribution of passengers and passenger volume. Although I plan to automate a large part of this work, there is a significant manual component to this that will take time. Something else I'm exploring related to this is the use of an AI based database system (such as MindsDB) to provide for a better simulation, though this would likely not be a part of the initial release of the new model. IPBoard Deprecation. One of my goals is to remove our dependence on IPBoard for authentication and to eventually deprecate it entirely. I want to more tightly integrate the community into the sim, however as it stands this is difficult to do. For one, IPBoard is written in PHP which although was my first language I ever learned, is one that I have not used for anything serious in close to a decade and I don't wish to revisit, second is that some of the features that I want to add would require purchasing additional subscriptions that I frankly find overpriced for what they offer. Further, IPBoard has increasingly put their resources towards their cloud offerings and makes the prospect of investing significant work into integrating with it further more precarious. This deprecation as such would require 2 parts, first is severing authentication from IPBoard, which is something that I plan to do by moving towards an open source IAM solution (KeyCloak is my current thinking) along with a new service to handle all user data (the idea would be to extract a lot of the data currently kept on game server, like world records to allow us to more easily swap game servers or even have multiple game servers with ease), and second to switch a forum to a different solution. As of right now I'm considering a few options though leaning towards Misago though again, the final decision has not been made. It does however offer a number of advantages the core one being that it's based on the same Django tech stack as ASW, making it easy for me to make any modifications I need with minimal work. I hope you're excited for what's coming and please let me know if you want more of this type of content. Thanks!

Yes, this was intentional. I added a feature whereby passenger demand will now trace with the year so it will be low in earlier years and increase over time. I was going to wait until I had the time to make a post about it and hold it in Beta until then, but had an important bug fix that had to go. I do have a bank of features planned in the same vein, with the idea of increasing the difficulty of the game and putting more of an emphasis on strategy, particularly fleet selection and planning.

I think a good addition to the game would be advertisements. I think the way they should work is there are different types, each with different costs and efficiencies. Also another interesting idea is sponsorships. Anyway, that's what I thought up of. Regards-thecat

World B IV Timeframe: 1950-2010 World Speed: 10 Minutes/day (45 minutes/day until Wednesday, December 29th 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

My current plan is to have the ability to upload an airline livery for free, and an ability to upload livery for each aircraft type be Patreon only (in time also a feature for Patreon supporters to also upload custom liveries for a particular aircraft, but not yet as AWS storage is quite low so until we move away from it this probably won't be implemented).

Yep, planned for the next update 20.12

I agree. Stopovers should be added.

I might have not added it, I remember I was working on those features on a flight and there was something I didn't finish in time. So maybe I should finish that 😛

Hey Folks! 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 😛

First of all, allow me to say, I discovered this game two days ago and I am incredibly addicted. That being said, I would really like to see something added to the airport screen. I think it would be really nifty to be able to see the flights you have scheduled being displayed on an airport board (image attached) It'd give the player a sense of accomplishment, seeing their flights displayed on an actual board! 😄 Might be a tad bit difficult to script but seeing what the developers have managed to do so far, I do think they're capable of it! 😄 Thanks!

I'll definitely look to add something like that following 0.2 update or maybe 0.3

AirSimWorld 0.1.6 Alpha Database Optimizations in Event Manager Database Optimizations in route management Night Mode (leaked in from early 0.2 build) Better Logging Support

I mean part of what new features add are new expenses which are currently not modeled correctly. I do agree that finding a balance is a must right now, and it will continue being tweaked and worked on as time progresses. I honestly have just been too busy with school in recent weeks (end of semester) to be too involved in development, but an update is coming.

While I might not implement a full swap (since due to different aircraft speeds/turnarounds will be difficult if not impossible), I do plan to make it easier by making the scheduler more flexible, allowing to schedule several flights at a time or several planes) which should make the whole process of transferring schedule easier.

Leasing is going to be added in 0.2, I am not yet sure whether airline to airline leasing will be a part of 0.2 or not, but it will be added at some point for sure.

I was thinking about this, its not an issue for now but definitely in the future I'll add some inactivity thing. What I was thinking was something along the lines of: 7 days inactivity if the airline has no planes and no revenue 14 days inactivity if the airline has operations but has negative balance + negative revenue 30 days inactivity otherwise

Yeah, I do want to add 5th freedom flights.

I do want to add charters, though won't be a thing for a little while Not against it though I don't believe enough information is known to be able to model the plane in the sim.

I am generally against having fictional planes, ok with having future planes (even if not all the details are known) but fictional planes seems like too much a departure from realism that I'm aiming for.

Begumpet Airport (BPM) was the main airport for Hyderabad, India, until 2008, when Rajiv Gandhi International Airport (HYD) opened. Commercial traffic to BPM ceased after that.

A system that does its best to recommend ticket prices based on how much pax are willing to spend and costs of running the route. Basically a thing that min-maxes costs-profit.

'Recommended' prices are just slightly below the price a median passenger is willing to pay, if you're well below the demand you should be safe to increase the price by quite a bit. If you're still having issues making a profit, it's likely that the aircraft you're using is not a good fit for that flight. The price passengers are willing to make do not take anything about the aircraft you're using into account to determine their willingness to pay (reputation impacts associated with your configuration and other aspects like how fast the plane is impact how preferrable your flight is, which plays a role when consideration competition as your passengers might still prefer your airline even at a slightly higher price but it makes no impact when there is no competition).

Hi, there will be more options in world's future.

Some shared Terminals would be great.

I've noticed the city information for quite a few US airports is quite wrong. In some cases the city listed is actually the city of another major airport so I could see how that data easily got twisted during an import but in other cases some cities listed don't even have an airport so its just odd can't explain those. In one case like Chicago O' Hare its even reported in the wrong state, though the coordinates seem fine. Doesn't really effect the game but it bugs my OCD so figured I should probably start a list, lol. My list is kinda growing should I just post all of it here in a thread as a reply, attach a file, something else what's your pleasure?

Hey, I was wondering if we were going to get a new game in here soon, and if so if it could last from 1930-2020 or 1950-2022. Thanks!

Or say, if the airport merges with another airport (like what happened to SFX [Berlin Schönefeld Airport] in October 2020) then the airline is transferred to that airport.

Stop overs are not a part of the sim yet though are coming in the future build. Open skies are in the sim though I don't remember if I added UK to the EU open skies agreement. If someone can let me know what is happening with that I can change that pretty easily (database update).

Series Name: Tupolev Tu-114 Model Name: Tu-114-200 (almost all 114s eventually upgraded) Base Cost: $62,700,000 (from AE) Crew Count: 5 Cabin Length: Cabin Width: Number of Doors: Maximum Capacity: 220 First Flight Date: 15 November 1957 Stop Production Date: 1963 Maximum Cycles: Rated for 14,000 flying hours. Not sure if that's the same thing. Empty Weight (kg): 91,000kg Max Fuel Weight (kg): 72,980kg Max Hold Payload (kg): couldn't find this, but I assume it's the MTOW minus the fuel? So like 99,000kg MTOW (kg): 171,000kg Turnaround time (min): 55 min (AE) Engine Manufacturer: Kuznetsov (Kuznetsov Design Bureau) Engine Model: NK-12 Cost: Only engine option Empty Range (nm): 5909 Full Range (nm): 4,830nm Speed (knots): 470 max, 420 cruise

So currently I have trouble finding airports, since I cannot filter them by country etc. I have no idea why some airports show up in the result, even though the name does not include what I typed. Would be nice to see some result filtering or something to make searching airports slightly easier.

Fab to hear, this is definitely something I'd like to see myself

All of those are planned for 0.2 although lounges might be pushed back to 0.3

I'd like to hear @sviridovt 's word on this one, but personally, I don't see it happening.

Yes, I'm working on having one of the most extensive and comprehensive aircraft options out there for an airline simulation platform. (Watch out AE)

A QSI (Quality of Service) model, along with some other industry standard network planning formulas will fix these issues. This will make it so spam can liners will have a low passenger preference compared to a L-1011 in a nice config with 5 star service. (for example). There is a way to balance it out so new airlines don't get hit as hard too. All the other sims don't have this model in place, you can tell because spam can liners ALWAYS win vs another airline. If you go down the the path of AirwaySim, and start nerfing the Boeing 757 and other planes because the model is wrong, well that will just make the game too hard. On the contrary, Airline Empires has too loose of a model, where you can basically create demand in the millions/billions from nothing. From what I see now, it looks like the implementation of certain formulas will fix it, along with a payload/runway calculator (so I can't fly L-1011s on MDW-LAX anymore), catchment area calculator, hubs/connections and realistic traffic rules. I am sure I will come up with more once I dig into my files further.

Yeah, the plan is currently to write rules (and make it impossible code-wise) to lease/sell to your own airlines but I havent got around to writing 'official' rules or anything like that. The plan to do that is something along the lines of: You cant have more than one airline in one country (unless its a subsidiary which will be added in the far future) You cant sell/lease planes between your own airlines You cant have a business relationship with your own airline (except maybe have it be in the same alliance) Another idea that I had as part of an anti-cheat system (which is coming later), have all transactions analyzed for 'fairness' and if they're deemed sketchy have them marked for manual review by an in-game mod or something similar. I want to avoid setting arbitrary rules since I want to have the ability for people to do anything that could hypothetically happen IRL. All of this will also be less relevant since over time the game is designed to run with lots of small worlds rather than one large one (in fact, there exists a set number of airlines (that I have not calculated) at which point creating a new world would be more computationally efficinent than adding an airline to an existing world).

Yea, I'd focus on the hubs I recommended and fixing bugs and adding the necessary features to make this a full game.

Yeah, thats what I did for now. Eventually I'll need someone to go through the data to correct it and adjust prices for inflation (since there is no inflation in game, all the plane prices are super cheap in the 70s/80s). There are a lot of errors in the db right now.