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01-29-2017, 06:34 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-29-2017, 06:36 PM by Unknown98.)
Right now, the game calculates flight time as a simple Distance/Speed. The issue with this is it assumes the aircraft is at cruising speed for 100% of the distance of the flight, which depending on the length of the flight leads to inaccurate flight times. For example IAH-DFW is ~60 minute flight in real life, however in-game it is a 26 minute flight. JFK-CLT is ~2 hrs, however in-game it is 1 hr 2 mins.
I need to come up with some type of formula that calculates a lower speed for the beginning and end of the flight to account for takeoff and landing. I could do something like 1/2 the aircraft speed for the first 50 miles and last 50 miles of the flight, and then for the middle portion of the flight it would be cruise speed. I don't know how accurate that would really be though. And then you have the issue of flights that are less than 100 miles.
Additionally I could also add a few miles to the flight distance to account for turns and such to line up for landing. It's never a straight shot from takeoff to landing.
Any ideas?
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Possibly adding a set number of miles to each flight, and also decreasing speed? A mixture of both?
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You could always just add 10 minutes on each end for "taxi time"
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Yeah that's true... for now I've just added 20 minutes for "taxi time" and 15 minutes for "extra time" to account for takeoff/landing repositioning, etc. This seems to result in more accurate flight times. It's not perfect but it's probably good enough for now.
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Keep in mind that wind speeds and directions, weather in general and lord knows what else can shorten or lengthen flight times anyway. With that in mind perhaps ad a random +/-X% to the flight time?
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I'd agree with that, I was planning on adding slight randomness to each flight anyway with regards to flight time, passengers, etc.
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On the passanger side how will you handle the overbooking many airlines due because an small percentage always tends to be a now show (but still pay so yay free money!)?
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To be honest I wasn't even going to get into it. Lol. Seems like something that would be complicated to implement unless you have an idea as to how it could work.
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Could just be a fun RNG choice:
No overbooking:
Passenger count 50 to 98%
Minor overbooking: Passenger count 60 to 100% with risk of additional costs to rebook passengers and reputation hits.
etc etc
It be a risk reward situation, you can say no risk, but than you never get the full rewards. The real risk is not so much the money, but reputation if you constantly overbook it will hurt you fast specially when we talk about the social media age.
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Ah... I see. I was over-thinking the implementation of it lol. I tend to do that a lot...
Seems like something that would be fun to do, I'll put it on the list. Probably won't implement it until public beta is open though.