My plan was and is to check the final remaining (technical) items off the to-do lists for Individual Travel Requests (ITRs) and Location-based Demand (LBD). This is easier said than done:
One key remaining task regarding ITRs was adjusting rating displays for service profiles and cabin configurations, as well as for rating overviews for flight numbers and booked-in flights. As mentioned in the week 4 devlog, this is surprisingly complex, because the old ORS and the new ITRs compute ratings quite differently, but both need to work in parallel so I can switch back and forth between the two based on configuration alone. Therefore I decided to more or less keep the current structure as is, resulting in a view like this:
From a UX perspective, it quickly became clear that people are confused by this…why doesn’t the value change depending on distance? While it makes perfect sense logically - ITR passengers rate the product of a flight/connection at booking time, so a service profile as no “absolute rating” - it’s unintuitive to players. So at the very least, I’ll have to add a little info icon here about why the “rating” is constant. I probably won’t invest any polish beyond that…for the same reasons I push a lot of UI/polish topics into the future right now: The UI refresh is coming up and both cabin configs and service profiles should get a refresh eventually, too. Especially service profiles…
Regarding LBD I sat down for a chat with @koenc86 to brainstorm how to go ahead here. We are facing some challenges, especially regarding tourism and cargo, and need to find solutions to those that strike a balance between (research) effort required and (player) value provided. As a first outcome of this discussion, I revisited the code that computes point-2-point for LBD, fixing a couple of bugs in the process and adding some additional reporting to aid us in balancing this feature.
Generally speaking, ITRs are shaping up quite nicely so I definitely see them going into production with a regular game world sometime over the coming months. LBD is a bit speculative at this point. While it generally works, especially the cargo issue needs to be addressed before we can roll this out (beyond Wright).