sviridovt

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. 

On 11/9/2023 at 5:01 AM, MoeKitsune said:

I feel like additional game worlds would lessen this issue somewhat, but I do understand if that's not feasible at this moment.

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. 

On 11/18/2023 at 2:49 AM, Marco1887 said:

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

Is this after waiting for the blue box to disappear? The recalculations are weird until the flight updates. 

Which tutorial are you referring to? The blue notifications at the top of the screen? 

1 minute ago, Marco1887 said:

Maybe it is in weight because it is in weigth in real avation. I prefer to keep this unit.

That's probably why it is in weight as I was (am) quite a fan of flight sims so it was natural, but most sources use volume (liters, gallons etc.) when citing fuel capacity as well as fuel prices are typically volume based, hence to avoid errors it would make sense to use that. 

On 11/7/2023 at 7:51 PM, emp said:

In my opinion, I believe the dashboard should prominently feature an interactive map displaying airline routes. This map would allow users to visualize all available routes simultaneously, providing a clear overview. Additionally, the dashboard should include a table presenting route data, specifically focusing on load factors. For instance, it could highlight the 5 to 8 routes with the lowest load factors. This information can be invaluable for immediate improvements in airline operations.

I've recently started using this dashboard, and I hope my suggestions contribute to its continuous improvement, making it the best tool for its users. 🥰

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) 

23 hours ago, MoeKitsune said:

Sounds good. I'm sick right now so I don't have the energy to go through every aircraft and look for high prices unfortunately.

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. 

On 11/2/2023 at 7:00 PM, OpenBeta said:

i have a negative cycle plane still flying lol

 

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)

On 9/27/2023 at 8:08 AM, AndrzejSzymanski said:

I agree, I think we should have formats people can individually choose from. Personally, I think the route planner page needs a rework. Would love to see a much more easier way to plan routes rather than having to type the time in and worry about turnaround time & continuity.

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! 

On 9/9/2023 at 10:59 PM, OpenBeta said:

Maybe have different formats people can individually choose from, like a line chart, a bar graph, a guiding tool to help newer players into advanced stuff

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 🙂