Messages

181

Bugs / Re: Cannot join Public world 2707

« on: September 24, 2013, 03:22:03 am »

Ali,

The problem is likely being triggered by a character limit of 30 on the airline name. Looks like your name is 42 characters in length. I'm pretty sure you've used that name before though?

182

General Chat / Re: Negative hours

« on: September 08, 2013, 11:04:36 pm »

I took a look at all occurances of negative hours on aircraft in World 2677 (Maintenance World), and there are 8 aircraft with negative hours. 4 of which belong to the one airline. I will take a look to see why this happens.

183

Bugs / Re: Error of distances between airports

« on: September 06, 2013, 03:34:11 am »

Hi there,

Thanks for the bug report. I have updated our master airport table with the updated co-ordinates. The co-ordinates in our database were for JUZ not JZH resulting in the wrong distance.

Thanks!

184

Bugs / Re: base error

« on: June 21, 2013, 03:43:51 am »

Hi there,

Each foreign base counts as two normal bases, and is also included in the bases cap. So in this case you have 2 out of 4 bases in use, plus 2 more for the foreign base giving a total of 4.

The system is not very clear and in the last update to gating I tried to make it a little easier to understand. At some point I will switch it and get rid of the 2 bases for every 1 foreign base cap.

185

General Chat / Re: New world - the future

« on: May 10, 2013, 01:41:38 pm »

Could we just use something like a 1% increase each year?

There are plenty of fuel cost forecasts out there, I would probably pick a relatively well known study and take their midpoint forecast.

186

General Chat / Re: Maintenance

« on: May 10, 2013, 12:26:15 am »

Hi there,

The existing maintenance formula does not react well to large purchases, or high value aircraft. You may see spikes in maintenance costs as this happen. You are on the right track by reducing your average fleet age. The game takes your entire fleet as an average when calculating costs, it will not look at specifics. That way a big order being delivered can send maintenance costs shooting up despite the fact these are new planes where you would otherwise expect low maintenance costs on them.

Watch out for a public world with the new maintenance cost attached to it, we will test it out in a public beta soon.

187

General Chat / Re: New world - the future

« on: May 10, 2013, 12:23:25 am »

I recently gathered some of the data we required for aircraft in 2011 & 2012. I also made a note of data for upcoming aircraft such as the Comac C919 and Bombardier C-Series. 2013 is a strange year in that it doesn't have any commercial airliners entering service so I have to modify the code we use to allow it to be used as a game year. It would then be possible to add more years beyond the current year as long as we have a forcast fuel cost for each year planned.

188

General Chat / Re: Fluctuating airports?

« on: May 01, 2013, 02:26:03 am »

The idea would be that airports can grow to contract depending on the service there. Every year or every month the total traffic in the airport would be calculated and the total number of passengers would then go up, down or stay the same. That way if airports go underserved compared to flights in real life the airport will shrink. If you created a hub at a particular airport that was quieter in real life there is a good chance you can grow demand there.

We never actually worked on the feature but when we created the world structure we fully intended on allowing functionality for it some time in the future.

189

Bugs / Re: Gate Problems

« on: April 10, 2013, 02:07:37 pm »

This is a bug that comes up from time to time, I haven't found the reason for it yet though. I will refund you the cost of re-building the gates.

190

General Chat / Re: Only one public world?

« on: April 04, 2013, 01:46:44 pm »

Hi there,

On the Select World page, if you click on Display Active Worlds on the top right you will see all 3 public worlds. The reason they don't show by default is because they are already full. The game will create additional public worlds depending on how many spaces are left available. So far it thinks there are enough spaces available.

191

General Chat / Re: World Creation

« on: February 14, 2013, 02:04:34 am »

The reason we integrated the improved maps was to give an alternative to Google Maps that can handle entire route maps and alliance route maps. The Great Circle Maps (GCMaps) will cut off routes after the first 2,000 or so, this is due to a constraint in sending data to GCMaps to generate the map. Using improved maps is the only way alliances can see their combined networks through the alliance rankings page.

192

General Chat / Re: Aircraft Leasing Cost

« on: February 10, 2013, 03:28:38 am »

Hi there,

The cost on the right hand side marked as Lease Rate is the cost per month. You can return the aircraft at any time without penalty, many players set a generic number for lease length like 99 months which in shorter worlds is essentially unlimited.

193

General Chat / Re: Is the wiki/manual down?

« on: February 10, 2013, 03:23:40 am »

Hi there,

The link disappeared during a change to the menu layout but the manual is still available:
http://www.airlinemogul.com/manual/

All distances in AM are the same, we try to use nautical miles for everything. Don't worry about what one page says versus another for the units they use, they are all common.

194

General Chat / Re: Large Aircraft

« on: February 09, 2013, 03:05:27 pm »

We did bankrupt them once they went into a negative value quite some time ago, but we turned it off as some could make a come back. We never went back to see if we can do a smarter choice when bankrupting airlines with a negative value. The players will either ask for a reset or possibly just leave their airline alone if they cannot recover.

195

General Chat / Re: Large Aircraft

« on: February 09, 2013, 05:26:44 am »

I'm sure this has been asked and answered many times, but why is it designed this way?  Obviously real world airlines make profits with large long haul.

Its not that we specifically sat down and make it work like this, it is more the dyanmics of the game and the model we use. There is no connecting traffic in AM, and there is only a small bonus at airports for large networks. The entire game is built off of single class of service, at maximum economy configuration for seating. The best financial results are from medium sized narrow body aircraft where a strong fare can be maintained with a low frequency. When you try to benchmark a long-haul route in AM vs the real world you will find only a few examples where these are similar.
The assumptions and the model are far from perfect but so far they have delivered an easy to use game that many people enjoy. We are always working on improvements, and model improvements are a little bigger and are less likely to appear in any game world without a major change.