What a week this was…
As you might have guessed, we still have no release date for the Steam version. Apparently we’re stuck in some special review process that takes (even) longer than usual.
So we had to make a call on what to do next: Originally, we wanted the relaunch of Yeager to coincide with the Steam release. But with no fixed date for that and the (scheduled) relaunch of Junkers approaching, we didn’t want to wait any longer, otherwise too many things would have to happen at once. At the same time, we really wanted to get that geo data patch out the door so we could finally close that chapter and transition to a more continuous and robust data research and release process.
Thinking ahead
So while @lenana was busy with final prep for both the data patch and the Yeager relaunch, I took some time out of my schedule to think about things to come for a bit. In the future, I’ll give a more in-depth explanation of where we (myself, simulogics and AirlineSim) currently stand and for what reasons. But in a nutshell, the idea is that I will focus 100% on AirlineSim for the time being, improving and extending it incrementally rather than through huge, months-long projects that happen behind the scenes
Since everything about current-generation is in one way or another outdated and/or ripe for an overhaul, it’s really tough to decide where to start, though. So that’s why I installed a topic voting plugin for the forums and set up the Feature Roadmap category, the idea being that I will list anything on there that has a realistic chance of being implemented and the letting the community discuss and vote on the features to get an idea of what to tackle next. The current list of features is far from comprehensive and very much influences by the ASTD design document. But I’ll obviously add more things over time. So please keep your ideas coming!
(data) patch woes
The release of the new version, including a completely new mechanism to roll out data changes, actually went fairly well. But we rather quickly noticed a few of issues:
- Most importantly, the corrected coordinates of almost all airports that we worked into the data patch started to cause trouble for players due to changed flight times. We anticipated this, to an extend. The assumption was that, since it only affects flights that are added or changed, it would be an acceptable inconvenience. But after receiving some troubling reports from players, especially such that had their hubs at airports with relatively pronounced locations changes and/or that had flight numbers spread across a lot of aircraft, I realised that my assumption might have been a tad optimistic. So my current idea is to replace speed overrides with fixed arrival times, which would mean that flight times would never change due to data changes. It also allows us to “rescue” any potentially affected flights that haven’t been touched yet, because internally AirlineSim stores the actual arrival time of a flight assignment. Unless you touch the flight, this time remains intact. So my recommendation: Unless you have to do not change any existing flights until this enhancement is rolled out. And expect a more detailed report on next week’s devlog…
- The new maps, now available to all players, seemed to be causing random browser crashes. Chrome and mobile browsers seemed to stand out. It took me quite some time to reproduce it, but I didn’t actually figure out why it happens. At the end of the day, I decided to switch out the rendering technology used for the maps from SVG to Canvas and that seems to have alleviated the issue. Let me know if you still run into any issues.
- Players were a bit sad that many airports would still not allow transfer connections even after the comprehensive data update we applied. Since the transfer capability is directly tied to airport size and the airport size isn’t changed in existing game world, this wasn’t technically a bug, but a feature. That said, the “fix” for this was so straight forward, that I just went ahead and separated transfer capability into a dedicated flag in our data which AirlineSim now respects (at least on second try).
So that’s that. Pretty sure I missed a few things, but this is already enough text as it is. It’s a holiday here in Germany today, but I’ll still look into the arrival time change…it’s sort of an urgent matter 
