sviridovt

I probably won't add a route map to the dashboard as I would prefer to keep the dashboard as a 'quick summary' of sorts rather than omnibus of all the information (you can go on your airline page or flights page to get that info), though I do think having options to decide what metric top 3 best/worst routes are shown (by default this is revenue currently) would be a useful feature. It should also not be particularly difficult thing to add, since the APIs I'm working on should already implement these filters (I've been working on adding/relying more on reusable APIs both to speed up development as well as to move away from server side rendering which is a major driver of latency)

No issues, I'll look into it some time this week, working on an issue with my development server at the moment.

It's actually stored in weight, so in Kg (not ideal, not sure why I implemented it this way as it was years back). There are conversions involved in saving fuel costs so definitely an error prone process. I have to go through and check for errors. Might refactor this to a more sensible unit as part of fuel update.

Yep, that is a bug that I intentionally have not fixed, I plan to fix it when there is an easy way to move schedules between aircraft.

Thanks for the suggestion! I have thought about such a system before though have not thought too deeply as this would be a long way down the line if implemented. That said, we would need to be careful in how we implement it to make sure that the system is fair and difficult to abuse.

Yeah, inactive airlines are a problem. Although I'm generally against having 'hard set' rules like an activity rule, I do plan on introducing something where if your airline is in the red for some predetermined amount of time the airline will be liquidated. But still need to work out the exact mechanism for that.

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)

Yeah, the route scheduler is a page I wanted to redesign since inception as it wasn't meant to be permanent. It's a priority but also something that I really don't want to touch 😛

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.

There is a different formula for each, but generally it is tied to the number/duration of flights, number of airports you operate in and number of aircraft and distinct aircraft type.

Thanks for pointing this out, it's a low priority issue at the moment but is on my radar. Thanks!

Yeah the original vision some time ago had something like that, will see about doing something like that long term but for now keeping it simple.

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.

While I do long term want to do some inactivity cleanup, the the ability to 'freeze' airline would be a technically complex feature to implement and also one that I don't entirely agree with. The point of the sim is to try and create as realistic experience as possible, and 'freezing' your airline introduces some huge caveats into that as well as continuity of the game world, for example, do your planes still age while your airline is 'frozen' as aircraft age has a huge impact on maintenance cost, reputation and other aspects of the sim, the other problem is that it risks flights/airlines constantly disappearing and reappearing which worsens the experience for other airlines. For cleaning up inactive airlines, I do agree that long term this is something I want to do, though the exact mechanism is yet to be decided as I prefer to not implement hard and fast rules in favor of more realistic aspects that would drive activity (ie what would realistically happen if an airline stopped evolving etc.)

Yes, that's the one 🙂

Would you mind splitting these into different threads in the suggestions subforum? That way they can be discussed and tracked on their own, rather than having a long wishlist which makes it hard to discuss any one thing in depth.

Yeah, the exact aesthetics are still a WIP. I do think I'll have it line up top to bottom rather than side by side just just to be more small screen and mobile friendly (I realize the sim as a whole is not particularly mobile friendly, and while full support is not in the plans yet I am trying to be more conscious of it in my decision making) but the aesthetics will improve. As far as information goes, would there be anything else that you'd like to see added (or added as an option, I am considering making it an airline config that you can put different kinds of information as the advisory panel). Thanks!

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!

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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!

Can you ping me the airline and route? I can take a look. Value metric plays a serious factor so I'm guessing it's something to do with that.

Yeah, that's not supposed to happen. Can you ping me the airline link and the airport?

Yeah, I do need to rebalance the finance system. It's on my to-do list. Right now I'm prioritizing a few things: 1. Adding flexible fuel costs, this should specifically make the sim more challenging particularly in earlier years, make the sim slightly more unpredictable with periods of high/low fuel prices, and fix a long running bug whereby the fuel prices don't update properly 2. Add better modeling for maintenance, more control over how maintenance is to be done and tie it in more into the reputation system. Also stiffen the per model fees to encourage better fleet management, and have age play a bigger role (currently cycles impact the cost, I also want it to increase the duration and frequency of maintenance as well), as well as develop the interface for the same 3. Make maintenance take planes out of commission, the current plan is to allow you to use another plane with the same configuration and engine that does not have any flights to swap flights when one aircraft goes into maintenance. This then has the benefits of forcing you to balance your fleet and plan ahead, as well as spread the cycles evenly along your fleet. 4. Allow you to move flights from one plane to another, this will also come with re-enabling cycle enforcement whereby planes exceeding their maximum rated cycles are taken out of commission. This is a feature that is mostly blocked on the large amount of UI work required, as such I'm avoiding doing it :P

No, seats can only be selected from a preset list.

Have moved the year to 2000 as all planes have an end delivery date of 2050