City based demand
swiftus27:
Sami the Benevolent finally changed it?
That's a great thing to hear!!!
I am more for authenticity than I am for fun. I'd love to see this stuff.
However, I should be able to fly internationally from Reagan instead of Dulles in a City Based Demand model. That will be interesting.
Seattle:
Except that there is the Perimeter rule, so you cant fly more than 2500 miles, exculding SEA and LAX. So Canada, Mexico, and the carribean would be fine, but transatlantic is more doubtful.
JumboShrimp:
Quote from: Seattle on September 03, 2010, 06:36:15 PM
I feel that connections will be just as complicated... especially for players.
Well, it would make for a much deeper simulation, and it would introduce something sorely lacking (IMO) - competition between players. The competition is very limited, as is. Ok, there may be more than one player starting from the same base, as you, but eventually (with exception of slot limited airports), one player will become dominant, and from that point on, we are pretty much playing solitaire.
The bases added some competition, but with the 70 plane limit, you can't really challenge a larger player at his home turf. You can challenge a smaller player at a second tier city, and that's about it.
The current demand system is based on existing hubs. Meaning that if a guy is flying from Buffalo, NY to, LHR via JFK, he is built into the LAX LHR demand. If there is a dominant player at LHR (and of course there are no slots), and a dominant player at JFK, no-one can compete for this passenger, and the demand is misplaced anyway, because it is represented as JFK-LHR demand, rather than BUF-LHR demand.
With the connection feature, anybody (or their team-mate) who happens to fly to BUF and LHR can compete for this passenger's business, not just JFK and LHR incumbents. So there would be a lot of indirect competition.
Quote from: Seattle on September 03, 2010, 06:36:15 PM
Anyway, city based demand opens up many more possibilities in the game, especially when it comes to allowing people greater choices in basing.
I guess there may be many interpretations of what a city based demand really is. It can be:
1. just a way to figure out inherent airport (demand originating from airport's surrounding ares, not from connecting flights). This would be my preference to get things off the ground quicker. Under this scenario, each airport would be allocated some demand based on the population surrounding the airport. For example, JFK would get some allocated, as well as LGA and EWR. The ratio would stay constant throughout the game. All the action would be in building connecting flights.
2. City would have a certain demand, and airports serving the same city can steal traffic from each other from overlapping areas. Demand would really be tracked not on airport to airport bases (2755 of them) but on the land squares, some 40,000 of them, and even those square were too big according to some. So multiply 40,000 x 4 if you want each square to really be divided into 4 sub-squares.
And what does it buy for us? Not a whole lot, because of the 6,000 pax demand between JFK and LHR (in current ATB), maybe 2,000 live withing the squares of JFK and LHR, and the remaining 4000 are transferring from places such as Buffalo, New York, Scranton Pennsylvania, Glasgow, Scottland.
IMO, multiple airports with overlapping coverage is just an ugliness of the real world that threatens to bog down the beauty of the simulation that Sami is building, with little to no improvements to playability.
As far as flexibility in player basing, we are talking about a handful of cities with these "issues" needing flexibility. But the LHR problem would be greatly diminished. If you take current AWS demand allocated to LHR, in the new version of demand (whatever it turns out to be) LHR demand will be cut down to probably no more than 25% of its current demand. The demand will be distributed throughout the other UK and continental airports that LHR is serving (connecting). And suddenly, LHR slot problem disappears. It is no longer crucial to be based at LHR, to have slots at LHR, since the action is in the connecting flights, and the hub connecting these flights can be anywhere.
sami:
I've worked on this feature a bit too .. The population data globally is almost complete now. But this feature will eventually require a huge deal of manual work.
So far I know roughly the borders of countries, location of cities and their populations (and historical populations). In other words the information where people live has been now established, and also it has been distributed into the 'square model' I talked earlier (the model will not consider individual cities, but assigns each city into square and each airport will access the population data of the nearby squares to determine the demand).
But I know nothing about what happens in each city (or "square area"..); in other words is the city a famous tourist location, central of large business life .. etc. This data needs to be manually inserted for each country and is a big task, and will require community help eventually.
But for now I will continue to make small-scale experiments on how to proceed further. But the first step towards this feature (= base data) is almost done, the next step (= detailed data) and further steps (= forming the demand demand & airports accessing them) are much more complicated than this mere data collection.
(edit: there are some 50 000 'squares' in the world, but according to present data about 9000 of them have some sort of city or village. But seems that the data still has gaps in rural areas.)
Shubinine:
What about we do the city demand like a sum of the demands by all the airports serving that city, and make it grow according to historical passengers of both airports?
For example, Bucharest has 2 airports, Baneasa(mainly low-cost) and Otopeni.
Bucharest's total demand would look like this:
Year Baneasa Otopeni Total2005 385,759 3,031,719 3,417,4782006 673,000 3,513,576 4,186,5762007 970,000 4,978,587 5,948,5872008 1,768,000 5,064,230 6,832,2302009 2,005,694 4,483,661 6,489,355
I'm not saying that you should make it look like the exact numbers, but like make it a sum of the airports serving that city, and when you plan the route to have like a drop-down box where you select at which airport you wanna make that route to... This way we can implement the"profitable" low cost airline aswell :P
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