Heyoo! Welcome to this weeks episode of the Airport CEO development blog. Let’s cut the chitchat and get into it directly!

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Graphical Improvements

Since we first announced the game we have always stated that none of the graphics are final and that we are still trying to find our own style throughout the development process. This seems to be the industry standard within indie titles and its really super comfortable saying “it’s not final”, “we’re not ready” as it postpones difficult decisions. This week we took an important decision to redefine the overall look of the game art and that we’re now going to call it “pretty much final” (lol). We’ve decided to move towards a more clean and flat look rather than the previous ambition which was to keep it “cartoony but realistic”. A lot of textures has previously had a black border around it, defining its shape, which has now been removed. The results can be seen below (with a before and after picture (the after picture is a bit less sharp, has nothing to do with the graphics, please ignore) and we think the changes really lifts the current graphics to a new level and that it creates a different feel to the game, a better sense of depth and a bit more realistic. Of course, we as the developers look at these graphics 24 hours per day obsessing over each nick so we really want your input on this. What do you think?

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As a fun treat to celebrate the upcoming anniversary, here’s an image from a VERY early build.

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We’ve come a pretty long way, right? … but will still have some ground to cover, after all we’re only pretty much final.

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UI

This week included a lot of polishing on the UI. The UI subject was brought up in this reddit post earlier this week and coincidentally this has been one of the major focuses this week. We have revisited a lot of the games panels such as the aircraft UI panel which now shows a lot of juicy information about the flight when you click on it (arriving pax, departure time (if there is one), current fuel levels and stuff like that). Other panels have been revived as well but especially the build panel. We’ve added some very nice clicking sounds when you roam around it and added an information panel that pops when you hover on it. We also implemented a system which allows for variations of an object to be selected such as different floor types, different baggage scanners and stuff like that. This can be used as a grouping function and will reduce the number of icons in the build menus in order to make it more accessible.

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Also, don’t forget, in excess of the variations panel we also have the search function which allows you to search for objects by relevant tags (it gets smarter every week).

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Even More Performance Talk

We talked a bit about this in the last DevLog and we will briefly mention it again as it is something we’re always working on. This week we took a couple of important design decisions and decided to completely revamp a number of different systems that depended on calculating physics (by use of colliders and physics bodies). The bad news is that we’ve had to do just that, revamp stuff, which required a lot of development time in order to bring back functionality that originally worked well but relied on physics and therefore stopped to work. The good news is that we went from dealing with strained FPS at around 100 to 200 passengers (which was unacceptable and sparked the decision) to around a 1000 passengers queueing for the same bathroom at an acceptable frame rate (really bad news for that bathroom though, and especially for the janitor having to clean it afterwards). Improving code, reducing calculations and keeping FPS at a minimum is an ongoing task and while we yet do not know how many passengers we can simulate at once, including all subsystems and keeping a playable FPS, its looking pretty good. We still have a lot of areas where we can reduce the code’s impact but overall this week was a really important step towards being able to create a big international airport.

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Community Management

When we’re taking a break from coding we are trying to catch up on all your questions and great discussions over at the subreddit. A lot of you have shown interest in moving to a dedicated ACEO forum and we’ve got a lot of great suggestions from you as a result of last weeks devlog. Thanks!!!!! Amazing to have so much knowledge packed in one dedicated community! We’re currently testing out a few different solutions and when we feel that it meets yours and our standards we will invite you to join in.

Not a lot of imaged based content this week sadly but hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading this anyway, we’ll try to include more graphics in the next issue. We also want to thank you for the great feedback on the construction system, we’ve read all of your comments and got a lot of great ideas on how balance it and how to progress. Thanks as always for your amazing support, see you next week!