Dev Log Week 2024-43: Small Victories

As hoped/planned, things are starting to normalise as we settle in at the new place.

I finally wrapped up a technical change to our performance editor that’s been dragging on for weeks now since I was only able to work on it during short gaps whenever I was not moving my household…

Said change is the basic requirement to turn the respective proof-of-concept into an actual tool for our (data) team. As a reminder: Off and on this year, I have been fiddling with new aircraft performance formulas for the game. One recurring challenge in aircraft data research - no matter wether for new or old formulas - is reading the respective parameters from publicly available performance charts and testing whether they make sense. The former is a manual and error-prone process, the latter currently has a ridiculously long feedback loop as any new value first needs to be loaded into a test game world where one has to then use the in-game performance tool to see whether the values are “correct”.

The performance editor is intended to solve both of these issues. Firstly, it allows to load the actual performance charts into the tool and then select the values using a graphical interface. Secondly, it allows to evaluate the performance “live”, since it has the formulas implemented and will allow to simulate missions and/or to compare different types right in the editor. Once complete, it should be a huge improvement over how things are done today and will hopefully help to actually get the new formulas into the game once they are ready…as that will require a whole lot of new data research.

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