The predominant theme of week 6 was: administration. Around a month into the new year, a lot of paperwork to wrap up the previous one had accumulated. So I set out to get as much of that out of the way as possible in a single go.
Batching work was quite literally also the goal of a small interface I built for exclusive game worlds this week: As mentioned before, I am doing all of the (official) AirlineSim support by myself right now, so optimising and automating tasks is fairly high on my list of priorities. Exclusive game worlds do cause quite a bit of support work (hence their price point), but usually it’s a slow trickle that I can deal with fairly easily. But every now and then, literal batches of changes need to be taken care of, like wiring money to a dozen airlines or generating new used aircraft for the market. Doing this by hand, step by step, is tedious and takes a lot of time. As such, I added a little feature that allows to collect such tasks in a simple spreadsheet, then execute all of them at once. In the long-term, there should and likely will be proper UIs for game world owners to self-manage such things. But for now, this feature remains internal, as neither the UI nor the required authentication infrastructure is in place yet and I always have to keep an eye on the “spend time now to automate vs. spend time in the long run to do it manually” trade-off.
Speaking of management UIs: As part of my work on wrapping up the development part of the 1.5 performance system (see roadmap and previous devlogs), I added some options to select the performance system version to run in a given game worlds as well as to configure the maximum deviation from standard cruise speed as well as a “penalty factor” for said deviation. This is also mostly for myself (to be able to feature-flag and test the new formulas), but my plan is to eventually make such options available to game world owners for customisation without requiring my help.
Last but not least, said performance system and some of the more visible parts of it (like the reworked performance charts) made their way into all game worlds on Friday as part of a maintenance patch. This means, all game worlds actually have the new formulas, but are still configured to use the old ones. My hopes are that full-on research of 1.5 performance data can start soon so we can actually make use of the new formulas. Once enough data is ready, we’ll flip the switch (at least it new game worlds) to enable the new formulas.