This isn’t really a development topic, but I need to get it off my chest anyway: This week, our hosting provider dramatically increased the prices for cloud hosting. I am not talking about increase of 10% or 20%. No…some VM instances doubled or even tripled in price. The good news: It only affects new instances and “rescales” (so when we update an existing VM to a larger variant). The bad news: Any new instance we start will incur drastically higher costs. Which probably won’t be a massive issue for the occasional public game world (regular future price increases will smooth this out). But it might require a review of the pricing for exclusive game worlds eventually, which hasn’t changed once since we (officially) introduced them in 2018. Again, this shouldn’t affect existing worlds, but for new ones, it might start to make sense to introduce different tiers based on usage (large VMs got particularly expensive).
Of course, this is all due to the massive vacuum the AI bubble is causing in the memory market. As every manufacturer is switching their production to AI hardware, regular RAM for servers is getting scarce and expensive. On top of that, I think that we (as in: AirlineSim) are directly affected by the impact the AI boom has on data centers as well: In my perception, we’re seeing a lot more performance warnings in our monitoring over the past few months, which I attribute to higher loads on the shared servers our game worlds are hosted on. And this is - with little doubt - caused by everyone and their dog running models in the cloud. It’s going to be “interesting” to see where this leads…
Anyway, as planned, I spent my week working on the new gen-3 UI frame again. The new header is “feature complete” and looks like this now:
Visually, it’s not a huge difference to the version I showed in week 22 (please ignore the broken message bubble…WIP), but it has all the content and functionality required to actually use it. Which means I’ll move on to making it responsive now (so it works on mobile devices/small screens) and after that, I’ll have a quick look at the design in the light and classic theme. Although as announced in the Q1 dev update I don’t plan to go over board with design adjustments for the classic theme.
That said, and as discussed last week, I am considering a quick break from UI work to prepare ITRs for a potential new game world. Not 100% about that yet, though. I really want to get this UI-thing behind me…