sviridovt

Hey folks! As you all wait for 0.3 I have added into the database a host of open skies agreements and specialized political restrictions that should expand the game while you wait for 0.3. This was already implemented in the sim some time ago, though the data for these was never entered. The new changes are listed below, enjoy! Flight Restrictions US - Cuba, except exclusively between the following airports (there are others, but I lost the complete list, if you know which airports are missing please let me know): US: JFK, MIA CU: HAV US - DPRK (North Korea) Open Skies Agreements For these agreements, any airline based in one of the member nations can fly freely between or within any of the other members nations (an airline based in France may fly between Spain and Germany for example), for flights outside the agreement they still must originate or terminate in their home country. EU Open Skies Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Greece Hungary Ireland Italy Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden US (Partial member, EU members can fly to/from US from any of the member countries but can't fly within the US) Australia - New Zealand Open Skies Australia New Zealand (duh) ASEAN Open Skies Myanmar Thailand Vietnam Laos Philippines Cambodia Brunei Malaysia Singapore Indonesia Another restriction that I was thinking of implementing but was doubtful on (which is why I didn't implement these sooner, and why I'm not implementing it here) is Israel. Israel is weird, it only allows international flights to specific airports, which to me seems almost too restrictive but might make for an interesting challenge. Not sure where I stand on it, but would like to hear your feedback.

If you lease your own gate then you pay a per-month rate to use a gate (and therefore dont incur gate slot fees). Basically the slot system is designed for people to fly in, turn-around and fly out and the penalties are big on purpose to discourage people from hogging up gates (since they are not used exclusively by a single airline). To lease a gate either click "Lease Gate" in the top right in the airport page or on the flight research page under the airport to see the airports lease market which will give you your own gate for you to use as you wish. This a common issue and in the next version I have made it so that a gate is leased automatically if a turnaround is longer than 60 minutes (and a gate is available)

Route buying only works for regulated markets (US pre 1970's for instance, or many international flights), however I feel like this is one of those things that while realistic, would take away from the game. This is an interesting mechanic that I want to explore at a later time, however it would probably be restricted to only a few special circumstances (flights between US and Cuba for instance), and/or be made a part of some sort of a special ultra-realistic game-mode if it is ever to be implemented.

Hey Folks! Lately I've been working a lot on the new demand formula and all of the linear algebra involved with it (I guess @KJS607can take solace in my misery given how much work he'll have with all the new data parameters for different airports, cities and nations). With this, I can release a little bit more information about this algorithm. First, as mentioned in an earlier dev blog (which I will archive somewhere later, I was able to recover the old server HD, so I do have the pre-crash forums and I intend to archive the data from that forum somewhere, watch this space) there are now 7 different types of passengers that all have different requirements, and each route will have certain demand for each of those categories of travelers. The distribution of these parameters will depend on the city/nation attributes of the arrival/departure cities as well as of course normal things like population, distance whether the flight is international etc. So for example, JFK-LAX will have more business travel demand than OKC-TUL for instance. Of course, it would take some time after 0.3 is released for this to be modeled properly as it will take the data team some time to update everything (by default all the attributes are set as average for everything), inquire with @KJS607if you're interested in helping out. That said, there are a couple of other new things with the model. City Based Demand Model Currently the way that population served is generated is by looking at all the populations within the 50 nm radius of the airport, and saying that thats the population served. For the most part this works but does run into issues with airports that are very far away from the cities that they service, it also means that each of the airports is for all intents and purposes its own city. Flights into JFK do not effect EWR, FLL does not siphon passengers from MIA etc. This of course is not realistic, someone flying out of ORD can just as well fly out of MDW so even though Southwest might not fly out of ORD, they still compete with United's hub at ORD. 0.3 will model this by having a city-based demand model. The way that this model works is by first clustering a number of cities into a single metro area, then for every airport is assigned to serve a single metro area. Demand is calculated entirely using the metro area rather than the airport (the airport still matters as it effects the preferences of different passengers, as airports too now have attributes that make it either attractive or not attractive to certain passengers). Dynamic Distribution Currently every flight has a reputation value attached to it, this reputation is a combined value of different flight grading metric including things like legroom, IFS, IFE etc. with an additional value grading metric that gives an advantage to flights offering a better deal for passengers given what they are offering (this is not necessarily the cheapest flight, a cheap business class ticket that offers a lot of amenities might have the highest value without being the cheapest flight, though the value metric is primarily designed to benefit LCC's that offer very low cost flights). Each passenger has a maximum price they are willing to pay which is dictated by a Poisson distribution. Every passengers will purchase a ticket on the highest reputation flight that is still within their budget. If no flight is within the budget, the pax dont fly with anyone. This system works but is very simple and very easy to game and figure out. It also creates the unfortunate effect where in especially contentious routes a flight that is only slightly better than a competing flight will see a significant boost in the number of passengers. This is changing. Rather than having a list of preferences, each passengers now has a probability of selecting any given flight, and then thats how a passenger is placed into a flight which should provide a more realistic distribution. Fuzzy Preferences Passengers in real life are not scientific in their selection of flights, if two flights are exactly the same except one offers 0.01 inches of legroom, no one is going to really take that into consideration except the most pedantic. As such, rather than using the very percise reputation metrics that are currently in game for ranking flights, the reputation attributes are fuzzied and rounded to make very similar flights get treated more or less the same. This means that for one flight to be ranked above another there must be a noticeable difference between them (either in price, or quality). Artificial Demand When Ryan Air adds a flight to the middle of nowhere for 1 pound, the demand comes, and so it will in 0.3. If a particular flight offers a very good value, then low cost tourist demand will artificially increase. This demand will have diminishing returns, and will never be a significant increase (you wont get to sustain 20 daily flights to GEG (unless its a major connecting hub, but more on that at a later time)), and of course you should consider profitability when pursuing this tactic since you need to provide a very cheap ticket. But it is there for you to try. I hope that this update provides a little bit more of an insight into the behind the scenes changes coming to 0.3! PS: I was able to recover the old forums and will be archiving it for y'all to have access to old posts, as well as restoring all the proper roles for veterans etc.

Check those routes and see if your planes are out of cycles, if they are you will need to replace those planes.

Finances take some time to update, is this a problem that persists over several days?

@KJS607

It takes a few years to establish your credit rating, I would recommend leasing aircraft for the first few years.

Planned for 0.6 probably

Alright folks, World B I has been reset. Due to the server issues experienced earlier, there wont be awards for B I, however you will still get credit for your achievements in that world as your accomplishments will be reflected in the leaderboards that come out with 0.3 later this year. There will not be any changes for B II, so all the same settings apply. World B II: Timeframe: 1950-2010 World Speed: 10 Minutes/day (45 minutes/day until Tuesday, August 11th to give people time to join and set up their airlines) Starting Money: 1,000,000 Rules/Difficulty: Normal Have fun!

@handude123 that might be a bug, please start a bug report here: https://airsim.world/index.php?/forums/forum/6-bug-reports/ Thanks!

Employees are hired at the start of every quarter automatically. Before then salaries for pilots and flight attendants are still paid as those are charged per flight hour which is what you're seeing in the financial report.

Bookmarking flights is planned, as for finished worlds I just haven't gotten around to closing OC III as I have been a bit AWOL, though I will do it in the coming days. Also I should mention that the flight research page is getting redone from scratch for 0.3 (hence why it's taking a while, getting motivated to do anything front-end related is not easy when you're a back-end dev)

@KJS607

Hey Folks! We're back and running on AWS after a hard drive failure on my main server. I apologize for the inconvenience. While I had the backups of both the database and the files of the sim and the forum, the forum database backup was corrupted and couldn't be recovered. I was able to find a (really) old backup but it unfortunately means that the vast majority of your forum accounts are lost. That said, YOUR AIRLINES ARE SAFE. Here is how to get them back! First, you will need to recreate your account on the forum. USE THE SAME USERNAME AS YOUR ORIGINAL USERNAME ON THE FORUMS, if you changed your name use the original name you registered with. This is important so that I can find your sim account, you can change your display name once you create your account, but your actual account name must be the same. Second, once you have done that, please GO TO OUR DISCORD: https://discord.gg/qudNez3 In the discord, go to the channel #account-relink and post a link to your forum account, this can be found by clicking your username at the top and then profile, for example, my profile link is: https://airsim.world/index.php?/profile/1-sviridovt/ Third, WAIT. Do not create any airlines in the meanwhile as they will be lost. Once I have re-linked your account, I will post on the #account-relink channel and thumbs up your comment. Please avoid making any extranious comments on the #account-relink channel to make this process as quick and easy as possible. If you want to ask questions or leave comments use the #general or #game-chat channel instead. If for whatever reason you prefer to not use discord, you may also PM me on here. That said, it would be much easier and quicker if you use the #account-relink channel. Again, I apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for sticking with us over this challenging time. We are now running on AWS and should hopefully not have these issues again (and the sim should run a little bit faster as well). 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!

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

They should be different countries in game, however, currently the way that countries are assigned to airports is a bit screwed up. This will be fixed at some point soon

Hey y'all, The game is live again. No major changes for 0.1.5, just needed to make some changes for it to work on AWS: AirSimWorld 0.1.5 Alpha: AWS Support Changes to authentication When you first log in to the game, it will ask you to verify permissions with the forums and again every few hours.

Hey y'all! I am currently in the process of moving the game over to AWS, as such, the game server has been temporarily shut down. Should be back tomorrow hopefully.

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 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.

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

I dont think this is going to happen, there might be in far future an app that people may use, and maybe an ability to have custom worlds (although I don't see any way for that particular feature to be free due to the computational requirements involved). I don't have plans to release the games source code both because of the effort that went into it and because the game benefits from the social network effect (the more people that play the game the more people it attracts), so having everyone play in their own world worsens the game for everyone. Although smaller worlds are definitely going to be a part of the game.