sviridovt

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.

4 hours ago, Rushaan said:

Can we have cargo and cargo aircraft?

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 

On 4/28/2019 at 7:21 AM, Saip said:

but Chinese airlines cant fly from Hong Kong and airlines from Hong Kong cant fly from China so they should be separate countries in the game.  

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. 

2 hours ago, IQuit said:

You might have noticed that most players are no longer actively playing. If the game is too easy or too fast, you can't retain players who get bored when the game is no longer challenging.

In real world, airlines take about 7 years to earn back the money they spend on buying a brand new aircraft. So if done right, you can only grow to about 16 times the size where you started over the course of 30 years. In the game, it only take 7 days! It is funny to talk about more new features (which makes the game balance even harder to tweak) to improve realism when the basic math is unrealistic ...

The game is currently too easy even for small / new airlines. The hardest part is you have to always remember to change the ticket price after setting up a new route, which some new players fail to realize.

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. 

7 hours ago, IQuit said:

It depends on how far you want to go and how much time you can spend. AE tried many things and mostly settled down with removing exploitable features. There are only a handful of developers and there are hundreds (if not thousands) of cheaters out there.

Hopefully all rules are enforced code-wise, else:

• honest players never break them, constantly at disadvantage
• 25% cheaters get caught and become honest players
• 25% cheaters get caught, retry more stealthily until they succeed
• 25% cheaters get caught and banned, come back with DDoS attacks
• 25% cheaters never get caught

Account base restriction can be easily circumvented by creating another account using another IP / ISP / fake IP. You will be surprised that many users have their whole family playing with them. 🙂

Sure. I believe it is even more important to write a script to monitor the game database and always show the aircraft sorted by usefulness.

Slot limited worlds are another source of abuse. How they abuse it is too long to write here. Perhaps you can have hard competition world (current implementation) and soft competition world (see AM@FB) for players who dislike competition.

CPU resource wise, the same players will play in more worlds. So it kind of offset the benefit of small worlds.

Most of this will be implemented programmatically, and even in cases of ip spoofers and stuff all deals will be evaluated by the anti-cheat and flagged for review of something seems sketchy (ie, someone sells a plane for way less than it's value). You may very well be right that I'm being too optimistic, but it's worth trying it to ensure maximum realism and avoid arbitrary restrictions.

On 4/12/2019 at 4:20 AM, KJS607 said:

Once we are in a place where reputation actually matters when competing with other carriers, it's definitely something that would set ASW apart

I mean, reputation matters currently, but only on a flight level. For 0.2 your reputation will matter on an airline level, class level, and regional level (your reputation will differ based on a country/region), plus the impact of your reputation will be impacted by your airlines reach (so an unknown regional airline won't get a lot of benefits from their reputation while a large airline might)

On 4/12/2019 at 4:22 AM, KJS607 said:

Would it be possible to do this maybe for only aircraft within the same aircraft family (as they will most likely have best identical speed and close turnaround times)

Maybe, I might have it use the same scheduler API that verifies scheduler schedules to check if the scheduler would work and then transfer that way, but then you'd be on your own if it can't be transferred.

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. 

8 minutes ago, IQuit said:

Then I will create a second airline and lease it cheap to my first airline so my first airline can be far more profitable than my competitors. 🙂The same goes to selling used aircraft, there is a reason why you can't decide selling price in AE.

I do agree that leasing is one way to help new airlines. If you limit the number of aircraft an airline can lease and buying new aircraft takes very long to break even, that will curb expansion of large airlines without making it too hard for startups. The limit has to be tied to capacity however, or everyone will just be leasing A380.

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).