#Rework the range and efficiency scaling

144 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

harsh dew
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No reported ranges change. Just their calcs behind the scenes. The A220 will still have 307 km reported range, the A350-900 ULR will still have 694 km reported range but the way that range is measured changes.
Instead of range being the range of the aircraft at 100% throttle, 0 Altitude, it would be 100% throttle at maximum altitude.
That means you would have half the range at sea level instead of double it at service ceiling. Also, this won't change your ability to pick jobs. You can still pick a job that is at 200% your max range (this is to encourage stopovers). Also, to not kneecap fighters and other low range (or other aircraft intended to cross the map), you could omit fighters, SEs, ULs, Boats, and blimps from this change (Or just double their reported range)

This has a couple of functions:

  1. Long Range aircraft matter more. The extra range will actually be a factor for picking jobs. Stuff like the A350-900ULR, 777-200LR, and A340-500 will actually have some use as the few planes that can fly across the map.
  2. The game will be slightly more challenging and range management will actually matter at higher levels. The current system means that once you get to around the A300 or 757, range stops being any meaningful factor. You can basically cross the entire map with little effort. The only aircraft that HAVE to stop are planes like the Fokker 100, CRJs, etc. Which is absurd. With this change, you will actually have to care about your range and trying to maximize the range will be emphasized.
  3. It reinforces the roles of aircraft. A regional jet will have a hard time crossing an entire ocean or continent. A 737 will struggle to get to Udyana from Anhedral. etc. This also means that each aircraft will become more distinct, as a regional jet will want to chain harder.
    (1/?)
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  1. Ranges will be easier to decipher for new players. Thats your maximum range. You can try to go beyond it, but unless you have some serious hypermiling skills you will likely have to stop. This also makes hypermiling more of an achievement, rather than a "Congrats, you can start actually utilizing your aircraft now"
    If you wanted to be fun, you could actually have flying at service ceiling give a small 10% or so boost to range to encourage hypermiling (and make it slightly easier).
arctic burrow
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range v. thrust charts:
#trello-and-database message

harsh dew
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I mean sure but what about all the people not in the discord?

dark magnet
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Everyone already flies widebody aircraft so I dont get why making narrowbodies worse is good?

median storm
arctic burrow
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also, airliners already earn next to 0 compared to the top meta grinding methods
no need to make things even worse for narrowbodies

dark magnet
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Range idea does not work also because all are calculated at sea level in aero, and range changes per power level and altitude

harsh dew
median storm
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Just calculate it at service ceiling though

harsh dew
dark magnet
arctic burrow
harsh dew
arctic burrow
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  1. cross-mapping in a subsonic is always boring
  2. no point in comparing airliners when they roughly earn the same and are generally outclassed by other grinding methods
dark magnet
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So true

harsh dew
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Number 2 is arguably is own issue tho

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That can’t be fixed without the community pitching a fit

arctic burrow
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you can, no one's gonna say no to buffing subsonic airliner income by a little

harsh dew
dark magnet
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Thats called economics Skrolled Something the game does well

arctic burrow
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by a little
airliners earn about 25-30% of what the top meta grinding methods
I highly doubt buffing them to earn 40% of meta grinding income would break the economy

harsh dew
dark magnet
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Yes, the game performs like a real economy

harsh dew
arctic burrow
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from 600+ hours of data collection, you can double airliner income and it's still gonna be worse than recon and hypermach chains

dark magnet
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Yeah, but it would still have some effect on the economy

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Cost would of course go up

arctic burrow
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anyway, back to the suggestion
I don't think reworking range is a good idea when you're effectively nerfing one of the worst income methods

leaden trout
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How the fuel consumption works is weird, like the fuel drains less when going high altitude

sure it exists irl but it's a different thing, planes fly high to gain more speed and receive less drag to save more fuel

harsh dew
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I omitted fighters, I didn’t omit the T-4 or SR-71

arctic burrow
dark magnet
harsh dew
dark magnet
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Its never going to be accurate since aero is an arcade style economy game

arctic burrow
dark magnet
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I think people tend to forget that aero is an arcade economy game with planes and boats, thats not meant to be totally realistic

harsh dew
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Technically IRL is more similar to my suggestion.

It’s not entirely that jets are more efficient at altitude (though they are) it’s also that they are REALLY inefficient at low altitudes and speeds

leaden trout
dark magnet
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Because each plane in aero does have a proper range calculation

harsh dew
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Like the landing gear often isn’t actually properly designed

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See TU-244

dark magnet
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Its funny Skrolled

harsh dew
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Yknow, I wonder how this would’ve been received if this suggestion was just how Range was from the start.

arctic burrow
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Here's a spreadsheet of my incomes
On the A35K page, you can see how I'm currently maintaining over 100k WP/h on the most recent chains with a different method of chaining compared to previously, but your average recon job is just going to be better. There's also the fact that I'm optimising my flights my abusing the buffer between top speed and actually overspeeding, while I'm not sweating at all with recon jobs.

Buffing airliner income by 10% isn't going to do much to change the economy; airliner users are going to earn a little faster but still gonna be slower than your average recon job
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QcYArxaxl-Ygzoi19u-5-dlq8R2JILNoR0Adpm83IYI/edit?usp=sharing

Google Docs
Skill Issue Airlines Operation Information
harsh dew
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Again, issue still isn’t that airliners are weak relative to recon

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It’s that recon is really really strong

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Buffing airliners is a bandaid on a bandaid

arctic burrow
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I just don't agree with nerfing Shrug

harsh dew
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That would cause sweeping inflation

arctic burrow
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I'd prefer buffing things rather than nerfing

harsh dew
dark magnet
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There are sometimes when you can earn a lot with airlines, just depends on rarity of the job

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I have really enjoyed the delivery jobs and I think the new jobs they are adding are interesting

arctic burrow
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a good airliner chain depends on a dice roll

harsh dew
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Yeah but that pales in comparison to 40k per job that Recon can pull

harsh dew
harsh dew
arctic burrow
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if you look at my spreadsheet you can see how my most few recent chains vary significantly

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ignoring the 2 outliers (chain got cut off by the game selecting the wrong job), you can see there's a rather large spread

image.png
harsh dew
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Again, that’s more reason to nerf recon because it’s too powerful for how reliable it is

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Though you could do both

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Buff airliners and nerf recon

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Make the riskier option better while the more reliable option makes less

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though obviously the recon shouldn’t be nerfed into making less per job than an airliner

arctic burrow
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I just think that keeping recon as it is and buffing airliners would cause a less drastic change in the economy, since airliners don't earn that much in the first place and giving them a small buff is going to affect the economy on a smaller scale than nerfing recon jobs

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for example buffing airliners from 50k WP/h to 60k WP/h is going to affect the economy less than nerfing Recon jobs from 180k WP/h to 150k WP/h

bleak vector
arctic burrow
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the only method that consistently gives me over 100k WP/h in an airliner is to follow an SST route to build up to at least 3x asap and then start flying long hauls, preferably ones with airport modifiers

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and that depends on a dice roll

bleak vector
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I rarely do recons nor hypermach chains (which I've sold the plane off already) since my economy is rather sustainable now to only rely on regular planes

scenic coyote
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I agree with the long range aspect but feel like it's not doable because of the short range ones... where do you draw the line between what gets affected by this recalculation and what doesn't?

dark magnet
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Basically nerf the range of all narrowbodies and kill all interest in people flying them

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Bring in a age where everyone is flying widebodies

arctic burrow
bleak vector
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it's actually insane ngl

dark magnet
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You get paid more because the jobs are usually longer + require more user input/planning

arctic burrow
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my best chain I've had so far with an airliner (A35K) is 143.5k WP/h over the course of 4.3 hours, in which I had been blessed by multiple airport modifiers, and that's still worse than my worst recon job which I took an extra refuel

dark magnet
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This is why I dont play the game and instead when I need WP just sell liveries

arctic burrow
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an extra refuel really hurts your WP/h

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and that means there is actually an optimal range for recon jobs depending on what plane you fly

bleak vector
dark magnet
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I enjoy the SR-71 and the E-767

arctic burrow
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T-4 Sotka
Relay
SR-71

somber fiber
sturdy prism
sturdy prism
sturdy prism
obsidian shell
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How would ssts be affected by this? Most of their fuel is sorta spent climbing and i dont think anyone wants to suffer pre buff 2707 again

tough marlin
young jolt
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range and everything is always going to be a little fucked with how weird airspeed calculations are

hidden ether
arctic burrow
late bison
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or trilox

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who made a remodel

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anyway i kinda like the idea behind this suggestion
right now any airliner with 250+ km range can do cross map flights with no issues

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however, this would be an issue for :

  • small aircraft
  • fighters
  • SSTs
  • literally anything that's not an airliner
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so i don't think it's very viable as an addition

sacred flint
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im not sure halving ranges across the board would be such a good idea

harsh dew
obsidian shell
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It errr

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Got forgotten lmao

scenic coyote
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I keep thinking the best way to deal with this is to add at least one more map

arctic burrow
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assuming the map is currently 300x300 nm, is it possible to expand it to 400x400 or something?

scenic coyote
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Expanding is no good because of floating point

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but adding an extra map to the side, with teleports in-between

harsh dew
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Got VEHEMENTLY rebuffed by the scenery devs

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From what they told me, its absolutely possible, its just a massive pain in the ass.

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I think its because trying to keep everything located relative to each other becomes more difficult when its 2 seperate studio builds.

Though technically you could make the general layout of the map in one studio and then split it into a different studio to add the details

sacred flint
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i dont see it being worth

harsh dew
# sacred flint i dont see it being worth

Yeah its also very janky.

The best option currently is to do a CA and build the game to move the map around the player like how KSP, Juno, From The Depths, and a handful of other sandboxes do it. But thats like....... a full ground up rewrite of every single piece of movement and map code in the game.

It would technically be possible, and if you were only changing the map to move around the player while retaining the same scale and model detail then it could be good, but not scaling it up is wasting the systems potential (because otherwise flights would take over an hour if you maxed out the map size).

You could do something halfway inbetween the two, though (at least I think.). You could let the player move around the map until a certain radius, then adjust the map around the player to add a bit more size to the map. But I have no clue if thats feasible.

sacred flint
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ok im going to put a pin in that and put that claim to rest

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all this referencing of CA and how it is supposedly going to do it

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that is not how it works nor has it been proven on an actual map of size and complexity

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so, no

harsh dew
# sacred flint that is not how it works nor has it been proven on an actual map of size and com...

Fair.
I don't know of any game that moves the map around the player while using Lua.
And the ones I listed have purposefully empty maps and/or extreme LOD culling.
So really this is just down to Roblox's engine being really really old so it physically can't handle a map like ETS2 where it is 1:20 scale and just leverages the engine to avoid floating point.

Though, I could be wrong an SCS could be using some unknown wizardry to allow for the large map without dying to floating point. Might be worth asking them and seeing what they say.

There's also Minecraft but Im almost 99% sure there is no feasible way to add chunkloading to Roblox's engine without the mountain of caveats that minecraft has.

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ACtually, I just thought of an example of this system:
As far as I'm aware, MSFS2020 and 2024 (and Asobo's earlier game Fuel) move the map around the player and then get around moving hundreds of parts/meshes by instead just procedurally generating things on the fly.

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But anyways Im getting off track from the original suggestion

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Though I think the consensus on it is pretty clear

ocean raptor
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halving ranges is based

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it is shrimply too easy to fly across the map in most jets

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most people see 3 airports 90% of the time

scenic coyote
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I guess there could be some complicated formula that gives a reduction proportional to range, so short range ones hardly get affected

ocean raptor
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yeah you might be right

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on the other hand early mid game aircraft can easily do trans continental crossings with enough patience without refueling

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which is kinda weird to me because the way trainings are set up it seems that oconia is suppose to be the islands where you learn the ropes

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and then once you get to jet aircraft you can actually start going places

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i had to learn that the hard way by flying to cantaloa in a multi engine and then having to teleport back to get my jet license 💀

sturdy prism
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i tried to fly a quest kodiak across avalon in 2021

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some dude felt so bad he gave me a free c130

somber fiber
ocean raptor
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nah