It was a week of a lot of private distractions, but I continued where I left off last week and wrapped up the first maintenance patch of the year. I had to face my old nemesis “perfection” again as the flight day formatting I was working on involved a lot of timezone juggling. And that code is (naturally) among the oldest in the entire codebase and as such reflects my skill level (or rather its absence) from 20ish years ago. The temptation was huge to clean some of that up, but after wasting a few hours on this, reason kicked in an I focused on actually getting this patch out and switching over to more pressing issues 
Speaking of which… If you’re active in the community - be it Discord or here on the forums - you might have noticed that Lena has been absent for a while. An official announcement will follow over the coming days, but spoiler alert: She won’t be coming back 
As such we’re once again faced with some difficult decisions. Namely how and whether we’re going to start looking for a successor to Lena. Part to the solution will likely be to “simply” reduce the support workload that needs to be handled, like making support processes more efficient, especially around in-game (cheating) reports, or watering down some of the rules and guidelines around airline names and logos. But we’ll have to sit down and evaluate the trade-offs…I’d rather spend my precious dev time on actual features than moderation tools. But if I have to spend that same time (or more) on actual support duties, at least for some period of time, it would make sense at some point to “automate” as much as possible.
Anyway, we’re in the process of figuring all that out. So in the meantime, I am going to actively pick a fight with my aforementioned nemesis and spend the week on getting as much work on a “Performance System 1.5” churned out as possible. Regular readers of the devlog will know that I’ve been spending considerable time on a new, physics-based performance system. Despite the time spent so far, the outcome is still somewhat speculative. The system will also work quite differently from what we have right now, so chances are we won’t be able to roll it out (in full) to existing game worlds. Given that our current system is heavily flawed, though, and that fixing the formulas alone won’t get the job done to improve it (since we’ve bent a lot of the parameters in our aircraft data for the broken formulas to make at least some sense), I decided that having an intermediate “version 1.5” makes sense: Our data team can research new data without having to fear that it’ll break stuff. Players will get still simplified but more sensible aircraft performance. And I get some breathing room to either spend more time on the proper “version 2.0” or to temporarily switch focus to something more urgent.