The Wright game world is the first one to feature an experimental first draft of location-based demand.
In this post, I want to document the current state of development, near-term plans, known issues and anything else one should be aware of when playing with this preview.
State of development
As of 2025-12-23
- Passengers/cargo travel between locations rather than airports.
- Each location is connected to one or more airports, which merely serve as gateways but have no travel demand of their own.
- Locations are based on real-world cities and towns, but those have been “aggregated” to reduce their number. For details on the data pre-processing, check out the respective devlog.
- At this time, traffic numbers are based on (historic) population numbers and country-level “trips for capita” (not historic).
- Relative demand (“where to people want to fly?”) uses the exact same dataset as all other game worlds, so it is not historic.
- The game status page shows the next ten locations (rather than airports) pending traffic distribution.
- The airport info page shows no traffic distribution time anymore.
- Airport “demand bars” (both on the info page as well as in lists and other locations) are computed dynamically based on the total demand of all connected locations . The amount of “bars” is determined based on global percentiles.
- ORS search results will not show any ground segments anymore as airports are connected to locations but not to each other.
- Connections generated by the ORS for demand distribution will always have an inbound and outbound ground segment from and to a location, so connections can have up to 5 legs in total.
Upcoming enhancements/changes
- All parameters will continue to be tweaked, including the overall dataset of locations and ground connections.
- The computation of point-to-point traffic will be revised to stay closer to the actual absolute demand at the respective source locations.
- Where applicable, locations will be shown instead of airports, like airport ground networks or global connection statistics.
- The currently hard-coded “trips per capita” will be replaced by a formula-based implementation that allows to influence country-level demand levels based on any logic we like or find interesting, possibly different per game world.
- I want to make the new demand generation compatible with the DS and roll it out to Paine (and other game worlds that might be running with the DS) eventually.
Known Issues/Limitations
- This feature is more or less unbalanced right now. Demand values will almost certainly not be close to realistic values.
- There’s a good chance that flight rating formulas will require some adjustments to work with two mandatory ground segments.
- Global connection statistics on airport level do not work at the moment.
- Airport demand levels are based on the sum of all connected locations in the airport’s network, so the values will be fairly high and disregarding any potential competition from other airports in the same network.
- It is almost impossible to see right now when an airport will receive demand distribution as locations have no own information page in the game (yet). Might add this info to the ground network tab once it is modified to list locations rather than airports.
- Right now, this feature has no concept of islands and generates ground networks strictly within country borders, so traffic near (open) borders and between islands will be off. Both issues will be addressed eventually.
- Not so much specific to location-based demand but historic game worlds in general:
- AirlineSim has no proper way of closing/moving airports. So in Wright, you’ll find Hong Kong Kai Tak with a fake IATA code of XYH. This can’t be helped at the moment and we are looking into ways to make this work better in the future.
- Similarly, many airports in AS lack proper opening/closing dates, so airport availability will be inconsistent, as will be geo data in general (there were two Germanys at the time this game world runs…).
