Well hello there, airport CEO! Hope you've had a great holiday, long time no see but we’re finally back in full force after a few weeks of low productivity due to the holiday and its associated breaks. It’s been great to have a few days truly off and recover but it’s also equally great to begin the new decade by diving back into the code and the remainder of the Airport CEO development. This is going to be a somewhat shorter dev blog than usual since we’ve moslt been preoccupied by getting back to work, but since we did just get back to it Alpha 34 has been both deployed to and updated a few times on the experimental branch which for sure deserves its own headline... so let’s get into it!

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Experimental testing of Alpha 34 and the R&D update

This past Friday we finally deployed Alpha 34 and the R&D update to the experimental branch and it seems as if you all have really enjoyed testing it and playing around with all of the new features so far. Since then we’ve deployed three bug fixing updates, one just this evening, and will continue to do so throughout the rest of the working week. Initially we’ve targeted the most pressing problems with Alpha 34 which as per usual despite extensive internal testing by our brilliant focus group had a few child diseases that needed curing. We’ve as of today moved on to include more general bug fixing as a result of the reports we’ve gotten over the holiday period and will continue to include that focus throughout the week. If you haven’t read up on everything that’s packed into this update we highly recommend a thorough read of the previous dev blog where we went through its details.

While we’ve still got some additional balancing to do for the new features in Alpha 34, including everything from research times for R&D projects to the economy and rating system, our ambition is to deploy Alpha 34 to the default branch late next week. There are a few things that this ambition is contingent on since Alpha 34 is a sort of tricky update in the sense that it needs a lot of play time for us to fully assess the balancing but hopefully it’ll all come together in time.

In the meantime, you can follow the development in realtime either via the public Trello board or via the official forum topic.

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The road ahead and Alpha 35

Of course, development on Alpha 35 has already started. The penultimate major update for Airport CEO, Alpha 35, is centered around expanding features within the terminal. While there’s a wide array of “minor” features included in this update such as elevators, walkalators, one-way doors and various passenger behavior related improvements the two most major changes in this update will be the addition of support for proper multiple terminals and passport immigration. Just like with the multiple floors update this will be another major change to how you can and should construct terminals and passenger flow in Airport CEO. The initial building blocks for these new systems are currently being laid and we’ll make sure to keep you updated as work progresses.

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In other news

... there are new strings to translate on Localizor! Alpha 34 today makes out 15% of the text content in Airport CEO which is quite a large chunk considering it was developed over just a few weeks. Now we need your help localizing that text into the language of your choice.

... on Monday the 20th we’ll most likely spend the day moving offices... again. Not to worry, it’ll most likely just be a quick move since we’re switching to the room next door. Once the move is done and we’ve finally found our permanent workplace for the foreseeable future will snap a few shots and show you the environment in which ACEO is brewed.

... we’re working on a very small, unrelated to the base game, surprise that most likely will drop within the next two weeks. Nothing big but something fun for sure, so keep a look out for a little news flash on the various ACEO channels!

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So that's it for this week, a bit shorter than usual but it's time spent on code instead. See you next time and fly safe!

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