Hey there you future CEO! It’s time for the weekly development update report. This week has, sadly, been overburden with school work as we’ve begun writing our final thesis. But when time allows we’re crunching code (basically every night) and so we’ve still of course made a lot of progress.

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Shadows

With the release of the teaser trailer, a lot of you pointed out that we should implement shadows. This was in the pipeline but we had no idea that it was of such popular demand and for that reason we’ve put effort into building a shadow system that really gives the world a sense of depth and expanded realism. When aircrafts land and take off, their shadows grow and shrink as you’d expect. Their size and rotation is not only controlled by the size, distance and rotation of its parent object, but will also depend on the time of day as the sun travels across the sky. This will add further ambiance as we simulate day and night cycles and combined with weather we’ll be able to create a vivid world for you to build your airport in. Check out the results so far (the resolution is a bit choppy and not representative of what it really looks like). Tell us what you think!

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Core Mechanics

We’ve nagged a lot about the building system and we can finally happily say that it’s completed. It’s been designed with your opinions in mind and you’ll truly be able to create custom terminals from the shape of its foundation to the placement of every door, every check-in desk to every plant and trashcan. We should mention that as of now, everything you build is instant. While simulating the build process is in the pipeline and, hopefully, will be a part of the first alpha release, we need more time to figure out how to do it properly. ACEO (as the reddit community calls it) features pretty insane size-spans, designing a system that allows for one-tile placement of a small plant as well as building an entire, realistically sized runway, is not an easy task. Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out, but in the upcoming gameplay video everything will be instantly built as of now.

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As for building the terminal, it’ll be best displayed in the video. In other news, we’ve killed a lot of bugs, implemented a few new placeable items (gate seatings, cart stations, boarding desks, etc.), given the passengers an improved time perception and have started to merge the simulation of objets (passengers, employees, aircrafts) with the building system (i.e. the terminal that you build) and the operations you take as a CEO (the management panel). We’re taking big steps towards the gameplay video and it’s all coming together nicely.

Don’t forget to check out  this awesome reddit post featuring some great ideas on ATC simulation.