sviridovt

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!

Yeah, I think it was something to do with your browser not recognizing the certificate and intercepting the response. I'd be willing to bet money that the request actually went through and it was the response that got intercepted. Either way glad you're enjoying the game!

I mean it's in your interest to do that regardless to make sure that planes keep flying (indeed this is what real airlines do), however if you wish to keep planes stationed (say overnight) just make sure that you either own the terminal or lease the gate that it's staying in since those gates are charged a flat fee rather than a per minute one.

Your revenue is number of pax * price of the ticket (plus whatever IFE you have this might bring some income). The costs of your flights do not depend on the price so may be discounted for this discussion. The default price is slightly lower than the median of what the willingness to pay is, such that with that price you should be able to capture about 80-90% of the demand, if you want to capture 100% you'll have to lower prices, similarly if you capture less of a demand, you may increase prices to generate more revenue per passenger. Further consideration is which passengers you're capturing, for example if your aircraft has 2 or more classes, it's possible to see that pricing your economy class might drive passengers away from business class as you have excess capacity in economy from lower cost pax opting to not fly (admittely there is no mechanic in the sim to say that if the prices are similar enough some passengers will opt to 'spoil themselves' and upgrade, this is covered in my plans for demand redesign). In this scenario, you might have passengers who are willing to pay a premium price but would still opt for the cheapest option, as you price people out of economy those folks will buy an economy ticket rather than a business class which may also decrease your revenue. Essentially it's important to remember that the passengers are 'fluid', and do not attach themselves to a particular class just as in real life your business class competes with your premium economy class and economy class etc. As for an ideal formula, there isn't a mathematical formula that I'm aware of, and while I'm sure that it exists, I try hard to make sure that there isn't a hard and fast way to 'win' the system. I aim for realism with the sim so want to keep some variability to keep things interesting.

'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).

Here is the new Arcade world, apologies for the delay as I didn't want to reset the world so close to reset of world B, I was also investigating an issue that turned out to be false alarm. World Arcade I Timeframe: 2020-2200 Starting Money: $10 Million World Speed: 7 Days/30 Minutes Difficulty/Rules: Arcade, no political restrictions or aircraft release dates.

Ok, I did a deep dive into the increase of latency since last update and it appears to be false alarm, after not being able to understand where the latency was coming from (since all of the page specific metrics/alarms were not showing any increase) I discovered that the issue is in the metrics scraping request which has seen a massive increase in latency. Not sure why, no updates to metrics were released in the update but either way there is no impact to the players. See graph below where green represents the total P95 latency (latency of the slowest 5% of requests) and yellow represents P95 if we exclude metrics requests (note that the update in question was released to prod on 12/27). As such, I will be launching Arcade I later today seeing as there are no latency concerns.

That was a purposeful decision to not add them as I would prefer to add other aspects that make a hub a hub instead of just having you label it a 'hub' and having it automatically put all the other things into place. If I was to add the term hub it would be purely cosmetic and I don't wish to do that until there is a more in-depth facilities system such that it's more than a checkbox.

That is kind of the the idea behind arcade worlds, for them to last a long time (although not infinite, to allow people to get in early in the world), Arcade 0 was a trial run hence the really short run time, the plan for Arcade I will be to run for over half a year IRL.

When you start a route, if you're going to be staying at an airport a long time make sure it's not using 'A' gates (short term stays in A gates should not be very expensive, it only starts getting expensive after you've stayed over 30 minutes). If there are gates available for lease at an airport it will lease them for you automatically (unless you have a terminal) when you create your flight.

It does that if the server response either crashes or doesn't receive a response but I'd be curious to see why it says not secure, I'm guessing there is some kind of certificate validation issue. I have validated that the certificate is correct so I'm guessing it's something with how your browser is validating it. Can you check that you're on the latest version of Chrome? Also does the same not secure message appear in your other windows?

I plan to restart Arcade I in the near future (I wanted to have a bit of a gap with it being very close to World B reset), I do also have a long term strategy for more worlds that I haven't finalized but in general I want to move towards a more shorter, but faster moving worlds. Further I'm working on addressing an issue caused by the last update to prod, whereby since it was pushed latency has slowly creeped up across the board. This is due to a slight increase in CPU utilization for the prod container, likely caused by a bug fix whereby flights weren't forced to update in some scenarios where they should be. This significantly increased the load on the container and thus increased latency on average. I am working on addressing this but would be necessary before adding any additional worlds. I do have a long term plan to bring on another server (in FRA, in addition to the current server in ATL) though this will have to happen after IPB deprecation to keep the finances in control (currently it runs on a separate server). That said, my current plans for the worlds however are as follows: World A IV: 1970-2000 (1 day every 10 minutes) World B X: 1950-1980 (1 day every 10 minutes) World C I: 2000-2030 (1 day every 10 minutes) Arcade I: 2000-2150 (1 week every 30 minutes) Campaign 1: 1940-2050 (1 week every 30 minutes, all realism rules apply) These are bound to change of-course and will be launched in a staggered manner (plan to start around March) but that is the current plan.

Looks like you're doing slot rental, which is what's costing you. Basically when there aren't enough gates at an airport for you to lease one, it will utilize a slot rental system whereby you will pay per minute that you're parked at the gate, that gets very expensive if you stay at an airport for a long time. You can tell you're using slot rental if your flights arrive/depart in A gates.

Arcade world is over, hence why you can't do anything. I will reset it to Arcade I in a little bit but wanted to give it some time since World B just reset as well for spacing purposes. 1. Yeah, currently that's the way I have it set up. I do plan to make it possible to do an immediate configuration change for a (significantly) higher fee. 2. Do you get an error? That should work even in paused world.

Correct

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!

I'm sorry what's the issue?

hmm, I wonder if it's still updating in the background but removed the box too early, these are the kinds of shenanigans I would expect if that were to happen.

World B IX will have all the same configuration as B, though I might play around with game balancing to reduce revenue and balance the game out during the swap. There is also a new world in the works to be an open arcade world where there are no political restrictions, planes can be bought at any time, and time will advance by a week at a time rather than a day. That world would also reset every IRL year and be 'endless' rather than fixed to a timeline. Currently working on all of the required changes for that and plan to get a preview world out hopefully within a week as a test run to run for the rest of the month.

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.

Update on the new dashboard I haven't had quite the time to work on it as I had hoped due to work commitments, but have made some progress. For one, I have made a decision to move away from the 3 pane approach and instead have 2 equal panes with the left pane being the informational pane, showing cards that will show up all the time including valuation graph, fuel prices, top/worst flights etc. with the long term plan to support user customization on which cards there are and where they appear. The left pane, or the notification pane will show notification cards, such as alerts about issues with your airline (plane leases expiring, aircraft running out of cycles etc.), aircraft deliveries, as well as competitive outlook when any of your competitors update prices, add/remove flights etc. This notification system will also replace the current in-game messaging mechanic thus deprecating that system. On mobile and smaller screens the two panes will appear as tabs instead, thus furthering support for mobile users which is a priority for me. The other use of the new dashboard is the introduction of React into the game as part of an effort to refresh the UI and add interactivity to the sim as well as increase performance. At present, the entire UI is processed server side, which results in some issues such as high latency on certain pages that require a lot of data, as well as limitations on the interactivity we can do (we do leverage APIs to enable interactivity in some places such as the seat map generator or lately in dynamic tables, but currently this is very much an exception rather than the rule). This is a quite dated approach and one I hope to replace. The long term plan here is to completely sever the front end and the back end, however with the amount of pages we have, with most requiring some amount of new APIs this is significant amount of work. Instead of stopping working on new features in favor of dedicating significant effort to purely front end work (or as I would call it, hell), in the interim I am redesigning pages as I go to embed react pages as components within existing site. Since the dashboard is the first such page, there is a lot of additional work to set everything up, especially since I want to be cautious about having all of this new work in a separate package such that whenever the full migration does happen, I can just import it into the new UI rather than needing to put in a lot of effort migrating everything over. I'm happy to say that much of this pre-requisite work is completed and I can now start working on the actual dashboard.

Your flights should move in automatically assuming there are enough gates in the new terminal to support them.

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.

I am playing with an idea of an arcade world, so a new world might be coming. Whereby the world is unending (or at least runs for a predefined real world period), has all aircraft unlocked, no political restrictions and time advances by a week at a time. All of those features except the last are already supported (done through a world configuration). Was going to play with that idea this weekend but haven't had the time. Not sure if that will help with inactivity and I do plan to do something about that but since the idea of a new world was brought up 🙃

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.