As planned, I started this week right where I left off in week 8, namely with adding the slightly revised formula for takeoff and landing distances to the game code. I then moved on to some cleanup to remove data structures that have become obsolete due to the introduction of “performance profiles”. Sadly, this caused changes in more places than I had expected (as usual), so it took a tad longer than planned. The inevitable cost of abstraction and configurability 
This slight setback didn’t keep me from moving on, though. As the aircraft data team is starting to look into large-scale research of the required parameters for the new performance formulas, I have mostly left the topic of aircraft performance behind me to return to other things. Quote from last week:
So on Wednesday I sat down and looked at the options:
- From a strategic perspective, getting started on the UI refresh and all the things it entails would make a lot of sense. It’s a large project and therefore will take a lot of time, but it’s also something that should be tackled as soon as possible as it affects more or less anything that comes after.
- The Distribution System-ORS Hybrid, and more specifically bulk generation of Individual Travel Requests, is already in the pipeline, with a lot of the required code already written, so it would make a lot of sense to wrap this up or at least get the request generation bit finished and released.
- The current favorite by votes for a single roadmap item is Auto-Ops / Aircraft Pools, which also is a prerequisite for a lot of future features.
- From an operational point of view, working on more internal support tools and things like admin features for exclusive game world owners would be nice to have.
So all in all, a tough call. After considering the pros and cons, I settled on the following:
While the UI project is crucial, I am simply not ready to take it on yet as I still need to do a lot of planning and might require external help to get the design guidelines and technical requirements sorted out. I will take care of that in parallel to other work and get started once I’ve got all my ducks in a row.
Auto-Ops is a promising and often requested feature, but right now it is mostly a stand-alone feature that would benefit the most from things coming afterwards, so at first it would be a very fancy way of achieving “two-week schedules for long-haul routes”, which doesn’t justify the effort right now. At the same time it is something that will have to come with a lot of new and complex UI, so I’d rather start work on this once the design groundwork has been taken care of.
While useful to both myself and game world owners, admin and moderation tools have little visible effect for the majority of players and I’d like to get something finished in Q2 that players can actually benefit from. At the same time, I have a lot of private distractions coming up over the next couple of months as my family and myself will move again…if everything goes according to plan and hopefully for the last time in a long while. As such, I expect to have quite irregular work schedules that will lend themselves well to squeeze in a small admin feature here or a helper function there in between stacking boxes or painting walls.
So that leaves the request generation feature: It’s already done in large parts, it is something that can realistically be rolled out by itself in the near future, it promises to introduce some interesting changes to the game (at least in new game worlds, initially) and it also serves as the foundation for a lot of things to come (anything that benefits from fine-grained passenger preferences). My hopes are that I can complete most of this before chaos hits in late March/early April.
Follow this devlog to see how it’ll go 
