My thoughts

[Eric.B]

1) City based demand.
THAT is city based demand. YOU create the world, or at least the game makes you think so.

AirwaySim and other games get boring because it is the same. Everytime. I even have a spreadsheet for Los Angeles that, and I'm 100% sure about that, can even get the biggest noob a #3 airline because it's step by step for building routes and which aircraft to use when.

City based demand creates a new experience everytime and this experience is build around the player.

This already exists in GC (Although it was heavily nerffed in 1.15 because people were creating too much of a different world (Sorry, Paris per capita can't be $500,000 in 1980!)) I've re-enabled it and balanced it in 1.19.1.

In any event. I don't consider this as "City Based Demand", but "Dynamic Growth" which is guaranteed to happen in AM as it's not as difficult to do as you imagine.

2) Manufacturer Image
Many games simply ignore the fight between manufacturers. In real world airlines get benefits if they decide to change the manufacturer or, other way around, get penalized if they ignore a manufacturer.

PanAm for example had huge influence for a very long time with Boeing and Douglas, not only giving us aircraft like the 747, but also making sure PanAm was the premium customer for those aircraft (ok, it didn't help PanAm, but that's not the point ).

Coming off of GC, most of our user base has already requested the ability to build aircraft (much like GC) While we may not go that far we will probably end up allowing large Airliners to influence designs of new aircraft much as your reference PanAm story.

On top of this, manufacturers will have to be able to create ahistorical aircrafts simply for the fact airline companies may keep them in business longer than normal. I always hated this in other games, specially since I always try to fly something like BAe 146s

So yes, airline influence over manufacturers will be included.

3) Dynamic Airports:

This is also based on the idea in #1, therefor it is not important how an airport is today, important is
a) what was the airport in 1946, at least somehow
b) ignore the real world data and simply start 1946 with generic airports for city sizes, like: huge city 3000m concrete runway+1 real Terminal, smaller cities 2000m concrete+1 real Terminal, towns 1000m grass+no real terminal (and therefor way slower handling) or whatever. Keep it simple but make it modular and dynamic.

In terms of starting points, I imagine we'll have fixed points like in GC. If we allow for selectable dates we'll interpolate between fixed points.


I'm not sure about the runway size being displayed in the game, but maybe it'll be broken down into grades. Kind of like the stars in GC. So runway 2 stars, grade 1 star. You're not going to be able to land your 747 which require 4 star runway and 3 star grade... But I'm not totally against numbers. It's really the same thing programming wise, just different in the display. Input on that would be nice.

I'm also considering more along the lines of a supported number of flights instead of X runways of Y length. But not the extent that Airway has time scheduling and slots per each 5 minute period. One thing I want to avoid is extreme micromanagement. It works fine in a web-game, but they'll have to be scaled back in a stand alone game which is made to play at a much faster pace. (Relative speaking of course, our type of games are quite slow to most other PC games! )

Expanding the airport increases runway length grade, or quality grade, or increase number of flights, or terminal space... etc.

That's just ideas, actual numbers may be implemented.

a) There are enough airports in a country but not enough demand, for example Papua New Guines.

I actually ran a profitable airline in Papua New Guinea my first game there.

Personally I was in favor of just every international airport, however some people want much more. So what will probably be implemented is much like what's coming to GC in v1.22. We're going to let you pick how many airports you want to play with!

From a coding perspective, it's just data entry, much like GC.

5) Easy way to mod, at least names of aircraft and airports:

I guess you want to use phantasy names for the game. That is fine, as long as the names can be changed easy and fast. If there is an editor it should be possible to change a manufacturer name as it is, for example "Loolheat" to "Lockheed" without changing every single of their 80 aircraft models. Or at least in a format that easily supports "change all"-options...

I actually like the easy text files Paradox uses for their games.

It'll be set up just like GC in that everything will be in XML files that you can edit with a text editor or with mod tools that we will release.

So, however, those are some of my ideas and I, as a new guy here around, won't spam too much. If there's interest as well in my suggestions as in the game project itself (ref: http://www.ventdev.com/forums/showthread...85#pid7385 ) , I would be happy to contribute more. Here or in a more private environment.
That of course includes my offer for testing and things, I did (and still do) this for other games, too. Some say I'm just a cheesy bastard always playing on the edge, I call it bug and exploit finding.

More than welcome to post whenever and whatever, just be warned, these forums cycles a bit. It'll be slow for a few weeks, then busy, then slow. Also AM is still in per-production. Nothing is set in stone, even my comments on the subject. I was a dictator with GC, but AM is going to be more developed with more than just my thoughts. (So we can avoid some silly things that plague GC)