Hi everyone! So how does it feel to start off the week with a brand new Airport CEO development blog issue? We hope it feels good, this way we’ll hopefully never have anymore delays as it fits our development cycles way better. Today is the 1st of August and that brings back memories. We started developing Airport CEO almost one year ago. Our official anniversary is on the 20th of August but we will start celebrate a bit sooner. We don’t think anyone of us would have thought we could make such progress and come this far in one year (since it is currently only the two of us hacking away) and it’s been a lot of work and many late evenings and nights staring at code. But the support we’ve gotten from you, the best development buddies we could have, It’s all worth it and we are determined to take this game all the way, to create the airport game of our dreams. To kick of the celebration we have decided to release some footage the upcoming weeks of the very, very early versions of Airport CEO, which we have never dared show to anyone. Stay tuned!
Now, let’s get to business. Initially we had this idea that you zone areas in order to create shops, restaurants, bathrooms and so forth, however, it was not super clear since we also implemented zoning of the secure perimeter as well as staff areas and the priority areas. These types of objects, a room and a zone, are quite different from one another so we decided to divide the both in to separate objects, making it much clearer to the players of what is what. Now, you basically drag out zones to seal of areas just like before (where the secure zones are, where staff is supposed to be, stuff like that) but shops, restaurants and bathrooms are now built a bit different (the change is 95% under the hood as we needed to restructure the build system to allow for placement of rooms). The rooms have a minimum size but are not restricted to any wall so you could build a room in the middle of the hall to allow for cafes and bars in the center of the terminal. The renters might also require different items in the room and the location of the room is one factor that determines the rent you can expect, for example a room near the security is more attractive as more passenger will walk by. You will also be able to change renters over the time as you would like to make sure to have the ones that pay the most at the most lucrative spots, just like in real life *cough Starbucks*. We’ve talked about franchises, businesses and so forth before and this is just a tip of what we’re planning to implement.
The testing and building of the baggage system continues and so we’ve recently added baggage belts that allows for luggage to travel underground. It is not a “fully” underground system as of now, since we will not try to implement multi-level terminal before the first release. The underground belts will allow you to transport the luggage between structures or, well, anywhere you’d like. In our test airport below, we’ve separated the terminal structure from the baggage sorting facility and used and underground belt to safely transport the luggage for scanning.
Of course, as always, no textures are final and there is still a lot of work to do!
This is not directly related to the development process but since our subreddit has grown to a staggering 850 future CEOs (and currently is the largest platform for following the ACEO development on) we decided to tighten up the activity around there. We gave it a small facelift with a new banner, some fresh buttons and less text for the rules. Yes. The rules. They are important to follow and especially now since we’ve updated them. We absolutely love all the ideas and topics you share there but from now on its important to title them correctly. In order to further improve the subreddit we welcome any ideas or tips on how people more freely and less spammy can discuss ideas and such. In a not so distant future we’ll also probably start looking for people to help us out with modding the community so if that is something you’re interested in keep a lookout here and something might come up.
What more? Progress, in terms of stuff added and simulations implemented, has not been that great this week, hence the lack of photos. We’ve been doing a lot of boring code restructuring, fixing and bug hunting. We have also continued to work on the serialization system in order make sure that everything loads and saves correctly, while we still got stuff like passengers, employees and various data objects (like contracts, emails, stuff like that) to finish off we pretty much enable save and load support for something new each week.
That’s it for this (well, the previous) week. Looking forward to brining you a lot new content and progress for next Monday. And don’t forget to keep track of the Twitter account, something just might come up!
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