Hi there! As we move into July it’s time for this month’s first development blog, after a few days of vacations and interruptions we’ve had a really great week and made some great advancements. This development blog contains a lot of pictures and .gifs and we just want to remind you that everything is captured in the Unity Editor meaning that any jitter, lag or poor resolution is related to this and not representative of the performance in a dedicated build.

As a result of the feedback we got from the pre-alpha trailer we’ve revamped the road building system (roads, taxiways, service roads), partly because we needed more nodes in order to implement better traffic rules, more fluidity in the building process so that player’s don’t get annoyed by size and snapping restrictions, more flexibility in order to open up for more complex road configurations in the future (one-way streets, multiple files, stuff like that) but also because we’re going to replace the way that runways are built. Currently they’re built as one single item which is not very convenient or fun, this will instead be a process where you drag it out similar to how roads are built. This gives you even more control as to how customized your airport is, the width and length of the runway as well as the material used for constructing it defines the runway’s class.

Here’s a .gif of the new road building system and once we’ve finished the runway building system we’ll show you that as well.

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Another pretty fun improvement as to how custom things can be in ACEO is the implementation of the Color Picker. Almost every object in ACEO will have some feature or features that can be individually colored. The Color Picker supports a number of different ways that you can color your items, by right clicking the object you are presented with the panel where you can adjust the color, save color to presets and so forth. You can view the item being changed in the world as well as a bigger preview against a concrete background within the panel. If you right click an object button in the build panel you set the color for each new instance of that item and the panel also supports multiple coloring via multiple selection.

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Lastly, as promised, we’ve finished implementing the very first version of a store. There is still a lot of work to be done here but the current goal is to include and simulate a basic version of all passenger activities taking place inside the terminal and then over time iterate and improve. The work has mostly consisted of implementing businesses as a concept and the integrating them with the contract system and preparing for a bigger zone management tool, meaning that the visual part has not been prioritized as of now. Consider the items on the shelves as placeholders, we have a lot planned for how the shops will work (as we got a lot of great feedback from last week’s devlog) and it’s likely that we’ll probably present this in a video or something instead of writing a massive post. Next week it’s time for restaurants and cafes!

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So that’s it for this week. Not a whole lot of text but more content instead. We’re steaming ahead and therefor we’ll see you later the coming week. And oh, regarding the delayed blog posts, we might change the day to Monday instead as it turns out that it sucks to code all Friday, prepare for the weekend and then go “oh shit we need to update the followers”. If we do change it we’ll let you know. Have a chill Sunday!