I would love to continue fiddling with Individual Travel Request Generation (and I will), but there’s an elephant in the room that needs to be asked to leave: The overdue refresh of AirlineSim’s UI.
While this almost certainly isn’t at the top of most people’s wish list, it’s a huge blocker on our internal one. I have probably mentioned this before (like…in the roadmap item post linked above), but let me re-iterate why it is so important:
- Looks do matter: As much as we’d love to believe otherwise, many if not most people make split-second decisions based on how a game looks. Be that when checking out screenshots on Steam or opening the game for the first time. It’s hard to tell how many potential players we lose this way, but I am certain the number is high.
- UI redesigns increase in cost the later you do them. Simply because any new (user-facing) change you make before the redesign needs to be touched again after the redesign. This is especially true for complex things, like a reworked ORS/DS search interface or anything related to the upcoming fares and booking classes features.
- AirlineSim carries a lot of technical debt from eras long gone. These parts of the game need to be brought up to current technical standards. See item 2 for why having a new UI in place for this makes sense
- Requirements have changed and with AirlineSim being playable on Steam (and maybe other app stores some day), the UI needs to look and feel different to how it would in a pure browser-based game.
Long story short: I certainly don’t like design work. I would much rather spend this time on aircraft performance, booking systems or other fun stuff. But there’s no way around it…this project needs to be tackled.
So that’s what I started on in week 43: First steps were learning new tools (can’t do UI design in my IDE, sadly) and sitting down to collect inspiration. We’ve done the latter plenty of times in the past, so this was more of a recollection of what we really like. I also took some time to re-evaluate the (extensive) work that’s gone into the UI design for a potential “AirlineSim 2” as part of the AirlineSim Technology Demonstrator". While this project was scrapped, I plan on re-using at least some of the elements the designers came up with. Although, sadly, I am not too happy with the overall result, so it remains to be seen how much I can actually utilise.
In case you’re wondering what said designs looked like: Someone recently dug up a case study by the agency who came up with them that even I wasn’t aware of. When looking at these designs, keep in mind that most if not all the content in the screenshots consists of placeholders the designers came up with. No weather reports showing up in AirlineSim anytime soon 
After the inspiration part I got started on collecting the actual content that will make up the navigation structure, as the navigation is arguably the most important and most visible part of the UI. This needs to take into account all the current features plus anything that’s planned for implementation over the next few years.
So in short, nothing visible just yet. And this project is going to take many weeks just to get the design ready. Implementation is going to take much longer. The most precise estimate for a completion date I can provide is probably “2026” 
On a final note: Just in case you have missed it, we have picked a date and location for the first real-world AirlineSim meeting in a long time. Check out the details and sign up on this thread.