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  1. 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.
    3 points
  2. 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!
    2 points
  3. 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!
    2 points
  4. 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!
    2 points
  5. 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.
    2 points
  6. 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!
    2 points
  7. 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!
    2 points
  8. 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.
    2 points
  9. 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.
    1 point
  10. 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.
    1 point
  11. Interesting, I'll take a look later. Trying to finish redesigning event manager that's blocking some notifications I want to add, as I don't want to add new events without finishing the event manager redesign
    1 point
  12. At present I'm planning to rework the demand system to be more dynamic such that you can implement different pricing strategies depending on your strategy. With that in mind, such a system would not work. I haven't decided what the default price should be in that scenario either, though I'm at present steering towards some kind of a default price per mile for each service class.
    1 point
  13. Intercontinental is a US based carrier, with its headquarters in La Guardia airport,NY. With more than 17 destinations, It's one of the most valuable airlines in the US.
    1 point
  14. '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).
    1 point
  15. Hi folks! We are now introducing a new world and a new game mode, Arcade Mode. Unlike standard worlds, Arcade Mode is a faster game world, without any political restrictions, aircraft manufacture days, meaning you're free to fly whatever and wherever you want. The game world further moves at a faster rate of 7 days per turn, which for this world would happen every half hour. This means that 1 real life day is approximately 1 in game year. For now this is just a preview world that will run for 20 days, however I will officially launch a long running world after. As always, I would love to hear your feedback regarding any changes you'd like to see or issues you face. Thanks! World Arcade ∅ Timeframe: 2020-2040 Starting Money: $10 Million World Speed: 7 Days/30 Minutes Difficulty/Rules: Arcade, no political restrictions or aircraft release dates. Unlike with other worlds, we will not have an initial slower launch period.
    1 point
  16. Sorry for double post, but I#m not allowed to edit my previous comment. Next weird fact: The Net Income was around 900k when the loasfactor was 13k/13k. After I decreased the ticket price for eco the loadfactor is 13k/13k again and the net income is now 1300k (business still 0/2k due to more supply than demand)
    1 point
  17. Ok, I'll take a look later. It does appear that something hasn't gone right since you do have gates without any flights in your new terminal, so there should be capacity.
    1 point
  18. Your flights should move in automatically assuming there are enough gates in the new terminal to support them.
    1 point
  19. Hi folks! In addition to a small update to the ranking page a few weeks back to make the ranking table dynamic, the my flights page has also been updated. This should make those two pages, which have been some of the slowest pages as far as latency is concerned much faster. Further the APIs that were implemented for those changes will be used as part of the new dashboard. Further APIs were added for the new fuel model, though at present they're unused but progress is being made on that front.
    1 point
  20. Released a small fix, there was a minor bug whereby if there are services classes with 0 seats, they would cause the routes API to error out and table to not load. This resulted in 11 requests failing over the course of the day. This is now confirmed to be fixed. Let me know if there are issues.
    1 point
  21. Hi, I don't think the fuel price balancing is the only problem here. Sometimes I can't follow the flight financials. I link the latest case below. E.g. my route has a load factor of 100% and a net income of -200k. I increased the ticke price and the net income increased to -1k at 100% load factor. I increased the ticket price again and the the net income changed back to -200k at 100% load factor. https://prod.airsim.world/flights/research?orig=PEK&dest=DAC
    1 point
  22. Seeing as the possibility of unit issues was said in Discord, I think that if fuel units are supposed to be in gallons, maybe these planes have their liter number used instead. Would explain the ~4x increase in fuel cost of a 737 over a320 as a US gallon is around 3.8 litres
    1 point
  23. There is a plan for a new demand model (probably going to be my primary focus next year, as it's a major update) to introduce city/nation ratings of 0-20 that will impact things like tourism and work travelers (the new model will split travelers into 7 different groups, each with their own preferences). If you'd like to help out, we do need to start compiling this data which is already in the database but unused (and all data currently sits at a default value). The values I'm tracking are as follows: Avg Personal Wealth Income Inequality Immigration Laws (How open a given country is) Travel Appeal Luxury Travel Appeal Domestic Commercial Activity International Commerce These values are there for each nation and city, with the city rating being relative to the nation rating (so an average commerce rating in a city with high commerce will still have high commerce, the nation rating acts as a base level)
    1 point
  24. 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.
    1 point
  25. 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.
    1 point
  26. Hi, there will be more options in world's future.
    1 point
  27. I do plan to allow you to move flights from one aircraft to another. However I don't plan on adding ability to copy or duplicate routes as I believe it promotes spamming behavior that I would like to discourage (the goal of the game is realism, and this means encouraging thoughtful approach to schedule creation). In regards to moving flights it is a prioritized feature once I get some stability improvements out that I have pending.
    1 point
  28. 1. Ask and you shall receive, B VIII will run until 2025 2. We don't have airline bases persay, just headquarters (which don't actually affect the gameplay at all), so not sure what you're asking? 3. Fair call out, will add it to my backlog 4. Yep, I have plans to work on that so it's in the pipeline 5. Also in the pipeline
    1 point
  29. Hi folks! 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!
    1 point
  30. Over the past few months I have been largely focused on stability improvements and generally making the game that already exists better rather than adding new features, I took a bit of a break from active development for a bit and wanted to fix some of the long term issues before starting to do feature work again. The vast majority of the things I worked on are things that probably few would have noticed, fixing common errors that people are seeing, stability improvements etc. However one improvement that I think people will notice that was deployed earlier today, is the redone Flight Research page, as while it has not changed in substance, it did see a significant speed improvement. The Flight Research page is perhaps the oldest part of the game, having been present as part of the earliest tech demos that I created when I first started working on the idea before there really was a game to speak of. I wanted to get a screenshot but unfortunately I couldn't get it to run to take a screenshot; maybe another day. And while it has certainly seen it's fair share of changes the overall structure has largely stayed the same with new things added on. Combined with that fact the fact that this was my first major long term project and code maintainability was not something high on my list of priorities (although I had been programming for a number of years at this point, my experience was limited to shorter term smaller projects) meant that as I was trying to add things to the page for the initial release it created a mess that was difficult to untangle. As such, it was time to restart and rebuild the page from scratch, although it may not look like it (and frankly I didn't touch the front end code too much on this one), the back end of the page is completely different. What's next? While I am looking to get back to feature work soon (and I will be making a separate post on that later, there are some exciting things I'm looking to work on), I did want to focus on some structural improvements that I'm taking time to work on. Not all of these are going to take priority over feature work but I do want to get these done Deprecating Event Manager The Event Manager is the beating heart of the sim, almost any event from new days to new flights to regular maintenance is managed by it. While it has served us honorably (and I am still proud of my college self for coming up with such an elegant and versatile solution to make the game event based), it has caused me a fair bit of headaches since we migrated to the new server. Further with some of the other things that I want to pursue the event manager as it works right now would cause some issues and require major changes. Thankfully there are plenty open source solutions to this problem and I have been working to migrating the event manager to a RabbitMQ based system which is going to serve us much better long term. Severing front end and back end Currently the game is written using the Django framework and uses it's template system for the front end with most of the front end done using server-side rendering. This fits what I like. I don't generally like writing a lot of front end code, and there is no love lost between me and JavaScript, I have always been a back-end developer and the more I can offload to the back-end the happier I am. That said, there is a lot of merit to severing the two and doing more work on the front end to improve the user experience. While I usually cringe at the thought of doing anything dynamic in the front end (there is a reason I haven't made significant changes to the scheduler or the seating configuration planner, despite not liking how either looks), I don't hate React. That's progress. I am looking to eventually move everything to a NextJS based front end with APIs being the primary ways of communicating with the back-end, and I have been offloading more and more work to APIs rather than server side loading using the template system. Adding multi-server support Currently there is no way for me to link multiple game servers together, while I could spin up a different server (as I do for lower environments like the beta and alpha servers I use for testing) these servers do not have any means to share data between them (like aircraft/airport data), or have a unified airline selection page. This puts some limitations on the work that I can do, for example if I wanted to introduce a feature that is not backwards compatible, it is currently impossible without doing a clean break (full server reset) which is also a very difficult process as it requires manually moving quite a bit of data between the two servers. Further if we ever do introduce a new game server (say in a different region) we cannot currently have them have a unified experience. To address this challenge I'm working on creating a separate service that can facilitate communication between services, as well as manage common databases like that for planes and airports. Admin Console As of right now doing any maintenance task is a pain! Creating a new world involves manually creating the world in the database and then running a script to set everything up; changing game data involves going into the Django admin panel which is basically just a database interface and manually setting everything up there. If there is any need to take a moderator action that also involves a database change (or at least logging in as the airline in question and doing it that way, which is the one thing that is currently supported). For my sake I want to create an admin panel to make these operations simpler. I hope y'all don't mind the more nitty gritty technical post, but I wanted to share with you some of the things that I've been up to/am planning. There will be another post talking about some of the features I want to work on in the near future but for now, these stability and other quality of life improvements have been my priority. Thanks! - sviridovt
    1 point
  31. Inter island would work, though for NYC area I imagine that would be a problem for when we move towards city based demand
    1 point
  32. While this was originally a bug (the original design of the game shouldn't allow you to fly with negative cycles), I have decided to not patch it out until there is a better way to transfer flights over to another aircraft, once that feature is implemented I will patch out the ability to fly with negative cycles. As it stands, the main dis-incentive that exists right now from using planes with negative cycles is the higher cost of maintenance.
    1 point
  33. We're back after the server issues over the past week! There was an issue with the SSL certificate on the forum which took the game server down as it relies on the forum for authentication. I have also released a small patch to try to fix the server crashes we've been seeing since migrating to new servers, though a long term fix is still in the works. Thanks!
    1 point
  34. We're experiencing issues with the event manager (that manages the calendar and is basically the heartbeat of the game). I have something in the works that should be deployed soon. Apologies for inconvenience!
    1 point
  35. 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?
    1 point
  36. and by bad things i mean time freezes on arcade I again
    0 points
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