Greetings fellow members!

I've had a longstanding issue finding a free but reliable image hosting service whereby I can upload transparent PNG images (usually logos) without having an automatic white background associated with the rendered image.

As of now I use a french website called hostingpics, but it's not too reliable and there can be some nasty pop up ads with malware from time to time. I tried using flickr, however there was still a white background associated to my transparent PNG images.

Are there any good suggestions I could possibly try?

While it's not really needed for an application like this, since the type of personal data Airline Enterprise collects is limited to essentially only email addresses, I've gone ahead and implemented SSL encryption on both the main game as well as these forums.

So far the only downside I see to this is that if you have an animated gif posted somewhere (Carde, your signature for example) it will not work, because the proxy that is used to cache the images and re-display them through a secured connection does not currently support animated images. It will still display the image, it just won't be animated. 

To fix that, simply make sure the URL of the image you are linking to includes https:// rather than http:// (as long as the website the image is hosted on supports https://). Hosting sites like Imgur support SSL, but it is not used by default so you have to manually change the URL if you want to display an image through a secured connection.

Images uploaded directly to Airline Enterprise (such as avatars) will work. Thus why my cat avatar is still dancing loud and proud 

I've setup a route research page so you can select origin & departure airports and see the demand for any particular route. You can also input a custom ticket price (at this time for economy class only) and see how that affects demand, as well as input a custom reputation percentage and see how that affects demand. 

For now it just tells you the total passengers and not the passengers per class. Soon I'll implement individual demand formulas for each class of passengers, so once that is done it will be reflected on this research page.

This could also be a good tool to use to test changes to the demand formula prior to actually implementing changes into the game.

I made a simple page to display your financial transactions. Basically this is the same as the Ledger that CA had. For now this will probably work, but later on of course I want to go all out with financial reports and charts/graphs, etc. 

edit: I know the records are out of order, that'll be fixed. I forgot to sort them by date

Made a flight history page to track your flights, look at profits and reputation, pax info etc. The date is local departure date, and all times are local as well. 

And yes some of the times do not make sense, i.e. departing at 3am and arriving at 12am. That's because I changed the times in the DB to make the flight land quicker for testing


Eventually I will create a financial report/statement page that will list all your transactions, but I have a few more things to do before I work on that. The system is set up to track all the finances, I just need to design the page to display them.

I've implemented reputation into the flight functionality, although it's rather simple and will most likely change. Something we can test out during public beta.

Reputation is gained on a per flight basis. Reputation = flight distance/30000.

Obviously as we introduce things like IFE and IFS, those will have an impact on reputation as well.

Additionally, if you happen to land at an airport where all your gates are in-use, the reputation penalty will be 1.5 times what you would have otherwise earned. Again, subject to change, but for now that's what it is.

Reputation is a percent out of 100, so the maximum reputation you can have is 100%.

I've implemented a simple ticket price function, where you can change your base fare for all routes at once. Later on, I'll implement individual prices per route, so that you can make custom changes to individual routes if you'd like.

I know this is very far off from being even thought of, but its in my head now so I figured I'd put down whats in my mind before I lose it. If I am not mistaken, this game will have more freedom to run an airline how you want it to be run. Has there been any thought into allowing an airline contract out their planes to fly for another airline? Like Air Wisconsin flying for American. Again nothing to concentrate on now, but just an idea that popped into my head.

As you can see by my so elegantly edited screenshot, I've implemented (albeit a rather simple) demand formula. So now flights can actually have passengers, revenues and costs associated with them. 

So how does it work? (warning - long read)

1. Airports are "ranked" by their passenger numbers, much like they were in CA, except in this game it's based off real-world data. As it stands ATL is ranked #1.
2. The ranks are converted into percentages based on total # of airports. So for example, ATL would be 100%. An airport with half as many passengers as ATL would be 50%. 

Then we have what I call "factors". These are things that affect the final number of passengers each flight will receive. The first and most important is the "rank factor".

3. Rank Factor takes into account the respective ranks of the origin and destination airports. The formula is [(rank1+rank2)/2]*min(rank1,rank2)

So wtf does that mean? It takes the average of the two ranks, and then multiplies that average by the smaller of the two ranks. What that does, is put emphasis on the smaller rank, so that you cannot simply fly from a major airport into a tiny airport and still get hundreds of passengers. It minimizes the skew that the larger airport puts on the formula. 

I believe this in itself is already better than what CA provided us 

4. Base passengers. This is rather simple, and subject to change. This is the "base" amount of passengers that your route starts out with. It is then modified (passengers added & subtracted) by the other various "factors" that I will discuss below. The formula is (500*rank factor)

That can be translated to 500 passengers, multiplied by the rank factor. The rank factor will always be < 100% if you do the math. Even if you fly from airport ranked #1 to airport ranked #2, the rank factor will be somewhere around 99.7% - give or take. That would lead to ~ 499 "base" passengers. 

5. Reputation factor. This will take into account your airline's reputation. Any reputation under 100% will cause you to lose passengers, but the closer you are to 100% reputation the less passengers you lose. The sensitivity for this factor is 0.65. 

The formula for pax lost from reputation is [(base pax*reputation)-base pax]*sensitivity

Keep in mind reputation is a percentage, so for example a reputation of 88.46% would be represented in decimal form as 0.8846.

6. Ticket price factor. This will take into account your ticket price compared to 1; the average ticket price for that route among competing airlines, and 2; the "base" ticket price the game calculates. This will prevent cooperation among airlines to raise the average price to an unreasonable amount. The sensitivity for this factor is 0.65.

For now, this factor does NOT account for average ticket prices among the competition (as there is no way to accurately gauge competition without active players). 

The "base" ticket price is calculated by the game as follows: $50+(distance*$0.11)

That's distance in miles. It then ranks your ticket price compared to the base ticket price like so: price rank = base price/your price

The price factor is then calculated: price factor = price rank^1.5

The formula for pax gained/lost from ticket price is: [(base pax*price factor)-base pax]*sensitivity


The following factors are not yet implemented into the formula in-game, but will be eventually. All of these factors will modify the passengers previously calculated in the "base passengers" step. Because I am still working on implementing these factors I do not have formulas for them yet.


7. Competition factor. This will take into account competition on the route. The more airlines that have flown the route recently, the less passengers will be available to your airline. 

8. Time of day factor. This will take into account local departure/arrival times. If you are taking off or landing in the middle of the night, you will get less passengers than if you operate during "normal" hours. This won't be a huge factor, because obviously there is a demand for flights throughout the entire day. But if you don't plan well for a long-haul flight for example, and you depart at 3am and arrive at 2am, then you can expect a negative impact. 

9. IFS factor. If you have a better in-flight service package, you will attract passengers. A poor IFS package (or lack of one) will deter passengers.

10. IFE factor. If you have good in-flight entertainment options, it will attract passengers. A poor IFE will deter passengers.

11. Random factor. This adds a random +/- 5% to the total amount of passengers at the end of the calculation. For example if the game calculates a total of 100 passengers after all the factors are accounted for, you could actually end up with anywhere from 95-105 passengers. 

Will alliances be implemented in-game? If so, in my opinion a CA-like system would be good, but as passenger demand is being simulated much more in-depth, a demand bonus could be created an airports that partner/alliance member airlines fly to? 

Also, will WLF be making a comeback?