This really isn’t an idea for the immediate release of the game, but something I noticed in the videos is that the airlines destinations seem fairly randomised.
Take for example the airline maple (which has an amazingly beautiful design). I’m fairly sure this is meant to be a Canadian airline, so it flying EU-EU routes doesn’t make so much sense, right? Now, I have no idea at all on how the game is coded so this could not even be feasible, but it would be nice if routes were hardcoded to a degree for each airline – for example Maple would always have flights that go to or arrive from canada to your airport. Or of course, if the airport is in canada, to pretty much anywhere!
I believe that it was said somewhere that it would be possible to use json files or something when modding in airlines, perhaps there could be an option for originating locations/destinations to be specified in that file?
But as I said, this should obviously not matter right now – I believe the number of airlines at release will be very small, so it may be a little restrictive initially.
This whole thing was inspired by this youtube video which is well worth a watch. His channel has quite a few other interesting aviation videos too.
You’re right. For the moment we only have a few airlines, and there is the assumption of universal seventh freedom rights. I think that’s appropriate for now.
I’d agree that it would be great to see airlines based in a country and focussed on serving that country, but we would need many (hundreds) more airlines for this to work (at least one per country). Otherwise there would be a strategic advantage in picking countries that have a based airline, as you can be assured of more flights. The good news is that we have a very creative community so filling the gaps will be easy
The other complexity comes with relaxation of the rules. For example here in the EU any airline can fly between any two EU airports. This is in part how easyJet and Ryanair have operations throughout the continent and can expand without hinderence. It would be good to see situations like this where the rules are relaxed. There are indeed flights that use fifth and seventh freedoms.
Presumably, but we also want them to look good. If you haven’t done so already, look at the airline design contest entries. Loads of talent on display from the members of the community.
Not everyone likes to mod their games though, I don’t think it’s right for the devs to just push an unrealistic game out and hope that modders will take care of it for them. Not to mention that there won’t be mod support on initial release.
Knowing how @Olof and @Fredrik works, I’m sure they’ll take care of this before release.
Well, the initial idea was to have airlines not related to any country, but I guess Maple slipped in as an exception. Creating country specific airlines is a lot of work and not to mention generate realistic routes. We discussed this on discord and we explained that you would require extremely sophisticated and complex data to configure each airline with all the possible destinations. I don’t see this as being realistic for us to spend time on right now, the plan is to have somewhat country-neutral airlines so that they can work all around the world.
