While the title is actually about next week, the devlog is of course about the previous one 
Let’s talk week 39 first:
On Wednesday I finally managed to roll out a pretty large maintenance patch to all game worlds. This was more or less ready to go the week before, but as mentioned, I decided to push the release into week 39. That also allowed me to get in one more change, namely implementing the more recent “formula-based aircraft pricing formulas” into code rather than pre-computing the values in spreadsheets to then feed them into the data pipeline.
This change in turn was motivated by the long-awaited A321XLR that was part of the patch and that most (if not all) exclusive game worlds wanted to have as well. Not going into detail here, but having the formulas in code made adding the type there a lot easier
Once patch day was over I turned my attention to a non-AirlineSim topic. I think I’ve touched on it before, but as a refresher: Our other game Prosperous Universe has been on Steam quite a bit longer than AS. In fact, the experience we gained with it motivated us to put AirlineSim on Steam as well. As a side-effect, AirlineSim has a much more modern Steam wrapper than PU does. So last week I finally got around to updating the PU wrapper to the same level as AS’. Just as with AS, we decided to drop support for Linux for the moment because we just couldn’t get it to work in a satisfactory way. We’re very sad about that, but we just don’t have the time to look into this any further. I am sure we’ll revisit the subject in the future.
The tiny remainder of the week was spent on brainstorming: With the preview game world live and the core parts of individual travel requests functional and waiting for mature test data, I need to figure out what to do next. As mentioned on the travel request overview thread, a logical next step for this feature would be implementing better analytics, both for players and for myself (to help with fine-tuning). And I plan on experimenting with that soon.
But the elephant in the room is UI design: It’s a huge topic and one I am not particularly qualified for. But so many things in the near and far future depend on this, so I really ought to get started on it. Design aspects, that is. Some of the technical groundwork has already been taken care of. So after my brief vacation, I’ll slowly but surely start to work on a design refresh for “AirlineSim Gen-3”.
Speaking of vacation: This coming Friday I’ll fly to Greece for a week-long trip with friends. I’ll pass through Athens twice, once on the 3rd of October and once on the 12th. I doubt I’ll have a lot of time to spare, but since I know that we used to have quite a few players from Greece, I just wanted to mention it here and if you happen to be in the area, maybe we can meet up for a drink or something. Just contact me here or on Discord!