Is the game planning to leverage true connecting passengers (ex. Someone traveling Los Angeles to New York and open to connecting across multiple cities to get there)? By this I mean, will planes be full of passengers who are both traveling to a connecting city AND passengers who are traveling to their final destinations, or will it only leverage point to point traffic?
The plan is to support at least 2-legged flights. With the goal being 3-legged. 3 or more legs may require GPU-Compute, manual SIMD tuning, or an accelerator add on card. (The latter would cost a few hundred bucks, so it might just be limited to persistent online games.) We also might run into ram issues.
Currently, I have a 2-legged system implemented, but it is not fully optimized. Thus, I am using 1-leg (point to point) for the time being to develop the rest of the game.
Once I get the rest of the game built up enough, I'll re-enable 2-legged flights and optimize the process to work reasonable well with just CPU processing. I'll come back to 3-leggs and more toward the end of the game's development.
There is a saying in programming, "Premature Optimization is the root of all evil."
Assuming I don't do GPU Compute, hand written SIMD, or acceleration cards, I may make the number of legs the game processes customizable. Core counts jumped from quad cores to 64-cores in GearCity's development time (2 Cores to 16+ Cores for most prosumers in that time frame). I suspect core counts will continue to increase over the next decade or two even though I am trying to make the game work well on my 8-core machine. The processing seems to scale linearly with core counts.
^Note, when I say leg I'm talking about a departure and an arrival, not a technical stop.