Steam support is not…uhm…all too proactive. We’re still waiting to hear back from them on some pretty fundamental stuff, and without those answers we can’t release. As such, I wrapped up the final bits that need to be in place for the Steam release (like a little disclaimer shown to users opening AirlineSim on Steam for the first time, letting them know that AS is not, in fact, a new game :D) and decided to make good use of the waiting time.
After fixing a long-standing annoyance in our payment system that would block users from using a voucher code when they didn’t complete a transaction with that code before, I returned to work for a small upcoming patch. This stuff was put on hold for a while now, but I want to get it off the list.
Part 1: Maps
Well, that bit wasn’t on hold recently, but last week I managed to wrap up everything that was part of my “static maps” milestone, namely replacing all occurrences of static maps throughout the game.
I also threw in a little gimmick for airport maps: They show dimmed markers for all airports within the ground network now.
It’s not super useful as it would be too crowded for labels but I don’t want to zoom in further to maintain spatial context. Might revisit this later.
The biggest visible effect of the new maps is likely on airline route network maps due to the now quite larger size:
Obviously, there are infinite possibilities for improvement (like label placement on crowded maps, highlights on hover, etc). But I’ll wait with most of that until I get started on “dynamic maps” again.
Part 2: Geo data patch preparations
It’s a bit sad how long this has been cooking. We’ve had great contributions from volunteers, adding lots of new and updated airport data, especially in terms of current traffic figures. But we’ve spent a lot of time working on internal tooling and processes on our end to arrive at a more stable data pipeline. Meaning those updates have only reached new game worlds so far.
I am now in the process of finally getting this patch ready for all game worlds. An important part of that was removing active removal of flights violating the so-called “bar-sum rules” (see devlog 2024-14 for reference), so the updated demand figures don’t throw airlines in jeopardy that suddenly aren’t allowed to fly certain relations anymore.
I’ve also spent several hours preparing the actual update mechanism. The one we had before was quite fragile and required awkward tooling. Now the data updates happen as soon as a patch is applied to a game world and a new data version has been specific (also meaning we can actually specify very specific versions, thereby not risking to have incomplete data land in production game worlds by accident).
I’ll continue on more technical topics around this, in hopes that the new maps and geo data can be rolled out asap. That’s assuming we don’t have do implement some last minute adjustments to get AS on Steam…
