Route Management

[luizdom]

   
A suggestion, I do not know if it's complicated, I think so ...
But having such a screen with the flights would be cool
these are AVB flights from the 19th

[Unknown98]

Yeah... I wouldn't even know where to begin to program something like that. I agree it would be cool. But it's beyond my skill level.

[Frenchie]

Might I go for the middle ground here since an interactive time-table for the route system would be an insanely difficult to code.

A couple suggestions that come to mind which would make the route management process more organic:

1) Perhaps if you could display bellow the abbreviated route (AEP-BHI-AEP- etc.) a time of arrival at each leg, making it easier to plan for future routes. (AEP-BHI (13:04)-AEP (15:32)-BHI (17:08) etc.)

2)  A more ambitious proposal would be to follow the initial route creation page (departure airport and departure time) with a merging of the airport-selection and time selection pages into one. As such, you would be able to dynamically add or retract an extra leg depending on a dynamic calculation of the arrival time for the aircraft's last leg. It would make it much more condensed and clear for planning.

[Unknown98]

1) The system doesn't actually store the arrival times or ready times in the database, they're calculated upon route scheduling. It only stores departure times. Although I suppose I could start storing them... Only issue is what if you change your aircraft's turnaround time. The arrival times will no longer be correct.

2) I don't know how to do that, unfortunately . It would require a lot of jQuery and perhaps Ajax which I have very limited knowledge of. Same reason why the departure times for each leg are not autofilled to match the ready times. I'd love to do that but I just don't know how. I could spend some time learning those languages and trying to make it work but right now I think my time is better spent in other areas that I am confident I know how to do.

Something that may help is when I create the ability to view/edit a route. It'd allow you to view the route in the final step, and all the departure times would be filled out so you could edit them. You'd also be able to change the aircraft assigned to the route. It's just a lot of work to do that which is why I haven't started on it yet.

[Frenchie]

Something that may help is when I create the ability to view/edit a route. It'd allow you to view the route in the final step, and all the departure times would be filled out so you could edit them. You'd also be able to change the aircraft assigned to the route. It's just a lot of work to do that which is why I haven't started on it yet.

The possibility of editing a route would be very useful in my opinion, if you have more time to implement this. Otherwise one could settle for a link to the 'detailed' route page with all the flight times.

I would add two more suggestions if I may, for I do think this is a crucial aspect of the game and if the route creation system is too clunky or limited it might deter players from sticking around.

1) In my opinion, a good balance between realism and feasibility is necessary. Given the 'ready times' are not dynamically changeable, the only way to create realistic departure times (so unit times such as 7:10, or 7:15 instead of 7:08) is to add the extra differential in time to each subsequent leg. Perhaps we could force the calculation process to give the nearest subsequent departure time in unit? This would mean that a flight calculated to be ready at 7:08 would then be converted to 7:10 automatically, all numbers either ending in a 0 or 5. I wonder if this would be possible to implement?

2) The second suggestion would be to allow for planes to fly the routes certain 'days' of the week. This is a very important issue given certain routes (such as Buenos Aires to Madrid) are too long for the aircraft to perform the leg each day. Because there is a need for two aircrafts to perform the leg every other day, a very good feature would be to specify which days both aircraft operate the route (Buenos Aires to Madrid). Thus, aircraft A would fly the route Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays and aircraft B would fly the route Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

[Unknown98]

1) That might work... I'll have to look into it. I think I would rather have the ready times change dynamically though, if I can figure out how to do that.

2) That's certainly possible, and something that I'm hoping to implement somewhat soon.

[Frenchie]

That sounds great! With the possibility of editing routes and those two features the route system will be quite complete!