Globetrotter 2 Travel Cheat Sheet

Link to the cheat sheet.

This project involved creating an optimized travel cheat sheet for the game by extracting and analyzing in-game data.

As it turns out, the prices of travelling (and travel time) between locations is not coded directly into the game. Instead, each location has a world coordinate, and the cost (in both time and money) for travelling between a pair of locations is a linear function on the distance between those locations. Each mode of transport (Airplane, Boat, Train and Bus) has its own unique cost and time functions, thus accounting for the difference in cost and travel times between the various modes of transport.

The road graph is given by the included travel planner, which lists the adjacency matrix for the different modes of transport.

To build the cheat sheet, I:

• Extracted game data, including location coordinates from the game files and transport routes from the travel planner.
• Determined the time and cost functions using regression analysis on data colleced by noting travel times and costs while playing the game.
• Modeled the travel network as a weighted graph, where locations are nodes and travel routes are edges with weights representing time or cost.
• Computed the pairwise cheapest and fastest paths and rendering it to HTML.

The result is a square matrix that lists the optimal routes between all pairs of locations.

Browse the source code here..