Good afternoon and welcome back to Airport CEO and this week’s edition of the development blog. The Airport CEO Dev Team has relocated in the southern parts of Spain as we’ve managed to get out of the coding basement to go on a short vacation which is not only great for body and soul but for ACEO as well. We’ve managed to collect a lot of great reference material and discovered that it’s sort of weird to visit a real world airport when your time is 100 percent consumed by a digital one. We’ve gotten a lot of great ideas and we’ve been able to study passenger behavior as well as turnaround processes.

Since we’re on vacation, development has not progressed as rapidly as it usually does throughout the week. However, we have made some. We have four components driving the setting and surroundings of the game world: Time (game time), weather (simulated game weather), light (sun, lightning flashes, etcetera) and environment (grass, patches, trees, rocks, bushes, stuff like that). Each of these components have a controlling class (a code blueprint for how they are supposed to behave) and these have been greatly improved this week. We’ve now completely integrated time with the sun and so the game is now cycling between morning, day, afternoon, evening and night time. In addition to this we’ve hooked in the weather controller and made it immensely smarter, the game now generates logical weather cycles and takes previous weather, time of day and stuff like that in order to generate realistic weather with variables such as temperature, wind speed, wind direction, precipitation and more. We’ve also started implementing the actual simulation of different weather states.

This is a good step towards the kind of relationship we want to have between the weather and its effects on airport operations but we still, of course, have some way to go  before a thunderstorm could hit the airport and you would see everything being delayed. Still, with dynamically simulated weather and a day-night time cycle the ACEO world environment has really come to life.

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Another thing we want to highlight this week is the Airport CEO Steam Greenlight Concept page! With your amazing support it looks very good so far with a 99% up-vote rate on around 700 visits with around 200 votes. This is not to be mistaken for the ACEO Steam Greenlight campaign as the game, according to Steam’s guidelines, is still in concept mode. Once we are really close to start distributing the game we’ll put it up on Greenlight and then we’ll also really need your support to pull that off. But until then, please help out by giving us a vote in order to make sure that we stay on the top of the page!

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Now it’s time to hit the pool, see you later next week with more and new content!