City based demand
sami:
Yes that's a problem with it still ...
Each airport will have a radius of influence and all cities under it will be served by that airport. But as you pointed out there are very close-by airports, even at the same city .. So dealing this may be complicated and haven't yet found a proper solution. Calculating demand individually for each city & village isn't really an option as the city database has over 100 000 locations.
Sigma:
Close airports and the changes you could have there over the current system, are one of the best potential features of having the city-based demand. So I wouldnt call it a "problem", I'd call it almost the entire reason why we need the feature in the first place.
On of the best parts of having the feature is that you could either Bratislava or Vienna, or DFW or Love, or JFK or LaGuardia or Newark (to pick 3 in close proximity), to become to dominate airport in the region in our world, regardless of what reality has dictated. Airport size and runway length would still be 'realistic' and would create a limiting factor, but one of the defining 'needs' for the feature, are that you should have to worry about a start-up coming to the airport across town and flying to your destinations and stealing your pax. As it is now, an airport 10 miles away can't steal one iota of your demand to a destination city, whereas in real-life airlines do this constantly. Southwest Airlines' entire business model for example is based off the idea.
If a solution can't be found to the problem, it takes away a good 90% of the value of the feature in my mind. It still would lend itself to regional demand variations, which would be a plus, but it would still be a significant hindrance on the 'realism' of the game, as it would still leave us in an environment that is simply a mirror of the reality we know with little ability to change it (which, I suppose, mirroring reality is "realistic" in its own right, but not "realistic" as a business sim of sorts).
sami:
Yes, I know the benefits and I'd like to have the city system too, I just described the biggest problem what I am having with the planning right now .. All clever ideas welcome ;)
Sigma:
Well, my post was in regards to Samo's calling it a "problem" of city-based demand -- in my opinion it's not the problem, it's the reason. The problem is trying to make it work.
I would have to think it would be fairly easy (and I use the term loosely) to have airports within Xkm be, essentially, the 'same' airport as far as the pax demand was concerned. You would see the same demand graphs (and associated flights so you'd need a header for airport at the bottom so it was clear where the competition was flying from) from either airport.
However, that would be a very big "band-aid". Why, for example, would it be 100km and not 200km or 50km? And what if you're 2km based the 'border'? You don't have to worry at all anymore.
In a perfect world, the further an airport got from another, the less demand it would 'share'. But that becomes exceedingly difficult to both program as well as display on a demand chart. If you're 100km away and half the demand for your airport is willing to drive to a further one to grab a flight, how do you put that on a graph? You can't show the flight capacity like we do now for sure. And how do you show the passengers that aren't as willing to travel. And then you have to put a travel function in the preference model -- at what price are they willing to drive Xkm to a different airport?
It certainly gets difficult.
Samo:
Problem is that it doesn't exits now and it will not exist if it will compare just airports in one city :)
But, yes, same problem is that we don't have any solution... I was thinking lot about it and I didn't found nothing...
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