Time of day demand

[Unknown98]

 

I'm not entirely sure how, but I've managed to implement somewhat of a time-of-day demand. In basic terms, it decreases demand during the overnight hours. Specifically between 1am and 5am. 

If your flight departs or arrives between those times (local times at each airport of course) you will experience a drop in demand. How much, well it depends. Essentially, 3am is the no-go zone. You will lose significant passengers if you depart/arrive near 3am. The farther away from 3am you are (towards either 1am or 5am) the less you will be affected by this. A flight departing at 4:50am, or landing at 1:10am, (or vice versa, etc) would be almost entirely unaffected. 

It does take both departure and arrival into consideration when calculating this. For example if you take off at 2am, but land at 6am, you wouldn't lose quite as many passengers than if you were to take off at 2am and land at 4am, for instance.

I would explain the specifics of how it works but it's basically just a bunch of witchcraft. It involves subtracting times, converting to hours, then converting hours into a representation of a percentage over a course of time... I'm not even entirely sure I'd be able to explain it in a way that made sense lol

And just like everything else, it works in conjunction with all the other parts of the demand formula. Even if you manage to somehow depart AND arrive at 3am exactly, it's still possible to recover some passengers by performing well in other areas. A good reputation perhaps, or low prices. Once IFE/IFS is implemented those would affect it as well. 

Now, I might disable this for public beta, and for one reason: I have not implemented routes yet. So you have to fly aircraft manually. Obviously this disadvantages you if you operate flights halfway across the world. But once you are able to schedule flights locally, it won't be an issue.

This is only half of what I want to do with this factor. Eventually I'd love to implement this into the competition part of the formula. It would compare the times of your flights to the times of your competitors flights. This would allow for a very dynamic system, where flights during different times of the day would have different demands based upon how many airlines are flying a particular route during that time of the day.

[Frenchie]

This is truly terrific unk! It really is going to add a 'competition' dimension, where you're not only aware of other airline presences but you have to adapt and take them into consideration, a very good idea!

[chaitanya]

This is great!!! It makes it more realistic and hard. Great work Unk! I think as everyone starts to play the game, there will be someone who will get the gist of it and explain it guess.

[chaitanya]

Just as a reminder people... this thing is dangerous! lol

[Ryan97]

Did that not work out for you lol!!

[chaitanya]

Did that not work out for you lol!!

I forget about this everytime.   I always forget the 3 am rule.

[Unknown98]

Perhaps i need to disable this until I get routes working lol

[chaitanya]

Perhaps I need to disable this until I get routes working lol

It is fun, though! Though one question... these flights were negative revenue but I still earned positive reputation. So does this mean reputation system right now is only dependent on distance covered?

[Unknown98]

Currently reputation is dependent on distance as well as number of passengers.

PHP Code:

// Calculate reputation to add to the airline
$reputation = $distance/30000*(1+($final_pax_count/1000)); 


Reputation is essentially a representation of the experience that passengers had on your airline. A good experience will lead to positive reputation and a bad experience will lead to negative reputation. Passengers don't generally care if you make a profit or not, so I didn't put that into the formula.

When I add IFE and IFS that will also have an effect on reputation. Cramped long haul flights on small aircraft could maybe lead to poor reputation, and so on.

[chaitanya]

The reputation formula looks great! And I like it not being dependent on the revenue. Thanks.