Dev Log Week 2025-27: Agents

English Boards
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With the Spring Migration mostly out of the way I was finally able to focus on other things again.

Obviously, the next such thing is getting Yeager relaunched as soon as possible. As said, my migration work isn’t the only reason for the hold-up. I also wanted to get in a tweak to how the official AirlineSim aircraft trader offers aircraft on the market. Or rather, at which initial prices. So this is what I focused on in week 27. In a nutshell, this is what I implemented so far:

  • Generally speaking, older second-hand aircraft will be offered at considerably higher initial prices.
  • Rather than just a single trading company, there will be more of them (just like old game worlds).
  • Each such company follows a slightly different “personality” in how they price their offers (some might lower prices quickly, some might change them erratically, others might follow a seasonal pattern).
  • Critical parameters of the aircraft trader logic have been made configurable so we can tweak things during and after initial roll-out.
  • Official AS companies are “data-driven”, so in theory, they could be adjusted per game world (in number, naming, personality etc.)

The latter wasn’t strictly necessary, but since I want to employ more NPCs in the future to make AS more dynamic, I found it a good time to get this done.

All these changes will find their way into all game worlds with the launch of Yeager or possibly earlier, depending on when I decide to release the Spring Migration update to production.

Since I found the names of the current aircraft trading companies a bit boring - in legacy game worlds they are just called “AS Aircraft X” with X being a region of the world - I asked our new AI overlords for a few ideas. And they delivered…but they do feel a bit generic. So some folks on Discord suggested to “crowd-source” the naming process. So if you have any good ideas, feel free to append them to this Google sheet and/or discuss them on our Discord server.

Note that at this point, we’re merely looking to rename the existing companies which are based in FRA, NBO, GRU, DEL, SYD and RUH, respectively. Those locations have no impact on how the agents behave in AirlineSim (yet). So while we want to add more agents in the future that also differ in other aspects rather than just their sale pricing logic, we aren’t working on that just yet. So if you want to partake in the ideation process, please focus on those handful of companies/locations :slight_smile:

3 Likes
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I know its probably not possible, but in older game worlds, could you have NPC airlines in countries that rarely have anybody play in them ?

If someone sets up in that country and commits to it that NPC airline could be folded into the new player airline after a month to give people more of an incentive to play in these niche countries?

Give the world a bit more of a realistic feeling than having whole countries like Uruguay, Bangladesh, Nepal etc with no airlines ever

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These NPCs will not act as airlines. They are just trading in aircraft. And in the future they might offer ground services etc.

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I am going to keep the final list of aircraft trader names open until the end of the week (likely Friday morning), at which point I’ll pick a selection of whatever people have suggested at that point.

Obviously, you can continue collecting ideas for future use after that.

So keep your ideas coming :slight_smile:

6

When do you think work might start on the most voted features in the roadmap? I’ve been a player of this game for 12+ years and I love it but haven’t played in a long time as the game desperately needs changes. Thanks.

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Thanks for sticking around :slight_smile:

It actually has :slight_smile:

I have been caught up with a lot of private stuff earlier this year and the past few weeks’ work went into a long overdue technical overhaul which was sorely needed after many years of neglect (no other way to put this). But feature-wise, you can find a list of the things that are currently being worked on here. Yes, not all of these have high vote counts, but to be fair, the Aircraft Performance 1.5 item was split off the 2.0 one and the DS-ORS hybrid item is a technical one that is a prerequisite for a lot of advanced features planned for the DS. I wrote a somewhat elaborate status update on these two items on the blog a while ago.

That said, there’s of course a caveat: Votes on roadmap items are a great indicator, but at the end of the day, I need to make a call that also takes into account the business perspective, leading to things being worked on that might not be players’ favorites, but simply required to keep things going. In the near future, such topics are the look and feel of the game, onboarding new players and similar things that help to get more players into the game.

Hope this makes sense. Feel free to ask if not :slight_smile: