Hi there and “glad fredag”! This week marks one of the most productive yet as we’ve spent roughly nine to ten hours per day coding and developing the game (the weather is really shitty in southern Sweden right now so it’s not difficult to stay in). This also means that we’ve made a lot of progress and have achieved som overall very good improvements.

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Taxiways & Runway Builder

Just like we revamped the road builder last week we have now moved on to perfecting the way taxiways are built. Previously we had big single tiles that you had to place and match with each stand, now they are dragged just as everything else in order to allow for more a more complex and freely built taxiway infrastructure. The re-design was also necessary for us in order to integrate with the new upcoming runway building system. This element is not yet complete and we will continue to work on that next week so if all goes well it will be included and shown in the next devlog!

The Café

As promised we have completed the first version of a food zone in ACEO. Once again we would like to point out that focus has not been on the visual aspects and that they will be polished over time. Focus has been on setting up the “backend” of it, the code generating the simulation aspects from accepting a contract to passengers and employees interacting with the environment. We try to develop code that is sustainable over time and, rather than go guns blaizing on the first iteration, develop a firm foundation on top of which we then later can add more functionality and refine existing ones. At 37000 lines of code spanning over 250 classes we think its safe to say that we are heading down a path that is, from an architectural point of view, very good and one which will also allow us to over time increase the development speed. An example of this is our overall building system for items and structures, its now super easy for us to create new items and add them into the game engine and with attention to writing generic and reusable code we can easily integrate those items with the passengers and their world.

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Anyway, there will be three different types of food places in ACEO: Cafés, restaurant and bars. Given what we show you in the .gif below, things we are going to improve is, for example, randomly generated items in the fridges (similar to how commodities are generated for shop zones), animations of passengers grabbing a cup or some food and eating it, animations of employees dashing away on the cash registers, employees interacting with gear on the counters, etcetera, etcetera, stuff like that.

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A nice touch to the café counter is the dynamic queue that is generate in the game in real time as one of the most difficult aspects of passenger behavior is simulating queues. In ACEO, as we’ve mentioned, there’s two different types of queues, static ones that you build and dynamic ones that appear from “human” behavior. This is the fourth iteration and its starting to work very well, they’re almost as good at queueing as your generic Swede on a cold winter day waiting for the bus. Almost.

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Other Stuff

We have also done multiple improvements and some general code refactoring (which is the process of structuring code for the better) in order to, as we’ve mentioned, more easily add new content and functionality on top of existing code. Next week we will work apart as Olof will head to the mosquito infested northern part of Sweden and Fredrik will stay in the “sunny” south, however that doesn’t mean that we’ll slow down. We’re currently stress testing the game with full airport simulation with several take-offs and landings each in-game hour, in order to see how well the game’s systems perform over time integrated with the departing passengers full life cycle and so that we can exterminate any remaining bugs.

Oh, and as a last treat, we added sunset and sunrise, this is the result (sped up for easy viewing, real time simulation of day light changes last over several in-game hours (real life minutes))… aaand we’ve also added some very basic and initial traffic:

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See you next week and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for the latest thoughts and pictures!