Any News on the ASTD?

So it has been some time since the last information update and I just wanted to ask if there is anything you could tell us about. Also it was planned to move into the open development phase in the middle of 2022. How is it looking on this side?

Technically, everything’s ready for “open development”, there just isn’t much to see yet. I took two months of parental leave in mid-summer which weren’t part of the original project plan and we’re pausing the project during October to work on pressing other things, which adds up to a a total delay of around 3 months. So expect to see the first (publicly accessible) bits in November/December.

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Even though I didn’t make any promises in our ASTD status update post from early December, I still wanted to let everyone - or rather those reading along on the forums - know, that while development has continued, I have been sick on and off again ever since said post came out, catching pretty much every virus the kids bring home. Consequently, progress hasn’t been what it’s supposed to be and I’ll have some catching-up to do over January. Will keep you posted…

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Yikes, time flies. I feel like I owe an update here and a proper one will hopefully follow over the next weeks, once we actually have something to show.

Quick round-up of what has been and is happening:

  • Timing-wise, my low availability throughout this winter (see previous post) has lead to the unfortunate (or fortunate?) situation that the new UI, developed by an external agency, is far closer to an initial release than planned for the given phase of the project. Therefore, we decided to continue our focus on backend tasks instead of going for an early preview release, because the latter would have used our own coder-art UI and there now isn’t any point in investing resources in that.
  • To absolutely nobody’s surprise, we are behind schedule and need to be extremely cautious to invest the limited development time into the most crucial development tasks, meaning we need to get the integration of the core Distribution System feature wrapped up as quickly as possible. To that end, we might skip features that are optional to a prototype (like directory pages) or fall back to abstractions (scheduling and selling flights without owning a single aircraft? No problem!).
  • The early preview for premium players is still very much planned and will hopefully become available over the coming weeks, once the new UI is ready for prime time.

I’ll do my best to keep you posted on a more regular basis!

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Thank you for the update Martin - I look forward to the preview :slight_smile:

Some might have noticed it already, but I have set up a new ASTD category on the forums: https://forums.airlinesim.aero/c/as-technology-demonstrator/120

This category is only visible to players with “premium status”, meaning anyone who has ever paid for credits. This happens to be the same restriction that will apply to the preview once it goes live.

If you have premium status but cannot see the new category, you might have to log out of the forums and back in again for the permissions to be synchronised.

More infos about and content for the new category to come soon!