Flight Schedule

Flight Schedule | Add flight | Request flight | RSS | All flights




The flight schedule is a 'tool' to announce, find and request space flights and flight services. It's located on the wiki: Flight_Schedule.

But as you can see above there's also an automatically updated forum view availble.

More info in post #3. Any questions, suggestions, criticism more than welcome.

 

Please have a look, try as you want and give feedback. Feedback is badly needed in order to produce something that meets potential user's needs.

There it is: http://www.entropiaplanets.com/wiki/Flight_Schedule

* several views available, fx board and table
* flights editable with a form with dropdown fields, predefined values, etc
* flight schedules can be integrated in forums, not only EP - every forum can have it
* flights will also appear on planet-specific pages, Space Guides (fx Basic Space Guide, Space), Vehicle pages, etc. -> high exposure
* flight schedule will be available as RSS Feed, so theoretically it can go anywhere
* individual "spacelines" pages available, fx Skywalker Spacelines
* individual "spacelines" will have their very own RSS feed, fx Skywalker Spacelines RSS Feed
* "spacelines" can have their own logo displayed (currently manually, will be automated the next few days)
* Each Mothership can have its individual page
* your flights can be displayed on your wiki userpage too
* MS and "Spacelines" pages can have formatted text, images, image galleries, youtube video galleries, tables, lists, RSS feeds, etc
* Missing vehicle pages will be added, existing ones will be improved
* Also yet to come: little icons for "place of arrival", "time of departue", etc
* moar stuff to come

 

Right.

I'm undecided how that could be done. I'm not sure whether a unique form for creating a flight service would be really helpful.

So maybe just like that:

1. Create a wiki page representing a flight service.

So the page could just contain plain text copied from anywhere else, or just a link to somewhere else or all the wiki magic with images, videos, tables, etc.
Well, yes, people think wiki editing is too complicated. There would be a field for adding the name of the service and a Create Service button which takes you to a large free text field (aka the regular wiki editing mode, but just don't tell anyone ;) )

2. Add the wiki page to Category: Flight Services

We'll probably have a gadget called HotCat enabled for every user by default later this month (right now everyone has to enable it in MyPreferences"). Which means adding categories will be: click a button, choose a Category from a autocomplete/dropdown field, click OK. So that should not be an accessibility issue anymore.

I think that could be enough for a start.

Well, I just don't know if anyone would use this service at all. Feedback is meager, lol. So... if someone is thinking this is complete nonsense and will never ever be used by anyone, please just tell me. That might save me a lot of time. :)

Preview of a possible RSS feed: Flight Schedule RSS Feed

 

Thanks for trying.

Everything ok. I can see it. Try "Refresh" in the "Menu" bar.

I'm almost done re-structuring the form.

 

Hm, I saw and see it there too. Did you hit refresh on the timeline page? Because all those views are actually individual pages. Can't think of anything else right now.

The 'issue' with that refresh is actually not an issue. Caching pages is wanted because that increases performance. Just not really convenient with automatically updated pages. I'll try to find out whether that could be improved.

 

Cool. And I'm done with the form to start with if no requests for changes occur.

Next I'll add those little tooltip-questionmarks-with-popup-bubbles to almost everywhere I can think of. They are my new toy.

And then I wonder whether it would be helpful to have a simplified form for people to request flights. Not sure how and where to show them but that might be interesting for pilots to look at.

 

And worth mentioning: Automatically updated Flight Schedule will also be available in the post #1 of a forum thread in which flights can be discussed, fx "I'd go with flight xxx Calypso-NI if pirates policy is changed to Flee"

Preview (Note: Preview):

 

Which of course also means each pilot or 'spaceline' a very own thread an individual automatically updated flight schedule.

Of course we can also do that per planet.

When actually does someone start to like this feature? ;)

 

Thanks for the feedback! :)

I will add that.

Maybe a dropdown labeled "Boarding" in which you can select 15, 30, 45, 60, ... minutes before departure?

 

Forum view is now a little it more designed: Still needs work fo course but you can already image what it could look like.

Btw, theoretically this is not limited to EP, other forums can show that too. Every planet forum could have a flight schedule showing only flights to its planet.

Preview:

 

Forum View almost finished.

And of course each forum can have it's own design & content. If needed we can make adjustments on the wiki.

 

Form added to request flights.

Offers appear on the schedule in a green frame with a light green background and the 'spaceline' logo or default image.

Requests appear on the schedule in a yellow frame with a light yellow background and the tag "Request" instead of the 'spaceline' logo or default image. Further differentiation needed an in development.

Generally the development of the flight schedule is a little bit on hold in favour of Project Teleporters because Teleporters will serve as an input (dropdown autocomplete) in the flight forms. But definitely will be finished by the end of the week!

 

A few improvements.

All different views now available as RSS items.