What?
Offer an API for AirlineSim game worlds that allows to read data and potentially issue commands in a structured format.
Why?
This has been requested many times over the course of AS’ history, but there are several reasons why this is slowly becoming an essential feature:
- As we plan to lock down (exclusive) game worlds a bit more (hiding what’s going on to anyone who isn’t an active player) a separate interface for external tools (like AS Routemap) makes it easier to grant access without sharing regular authentication details.
- The planned UI refresh will almost certainly come with a more modern architecture that separates the (interactive) frontend and the server, hence requiring an interface to load its data and trigger actions.
- An API generally makes the life of tool-developers easier as they don’t have to parse data from regular pages in a structure that might change at any time without notice.
When?
Technically, and as stated above, this will likely arrive as a side-effect of the UI refresh. Whether and how it will be made (easily) accessible to all users is a slightly different story, but there wouldn’t really be a reason to not allow it (as clever players will figure out how to do it anyway…).