Woah, summer is now officially over in Sweden! We hope you’ve had a great summer and that you’ve enjoyed following the development progress. We’ve come a great way these past three months but now it is time for Fredrik to start working and for Olof to back to school. But don’t worry, Airport CEO will continue to be developed in a steady pace. We’ll sleep when we’re dead.

‍

The Release Date

However, sadly and as you might have expected, we will need start this development blog to deal with the elephant in the room and deliver some less positive news. We’ve changed the estimated early access release date timeframe to Q1 of 2017. This is due to a number of reasons and the main one is actually thanks to you guys.

Don’t worry, we mean this in the best possible way.

When we first started developing Airport CEO we had a much smaller and less complex game in mind. Something similar to the scope of previous airport tycoon titles but with terminal construction and agent simulation. As a result of  the amazing engagement from the community this past year, you people who are helping us develop the game, the scope of ACEO as grown. A lot. This means that a lot of this summer’s development time, initially planned to contain crucial activities such as testing, bug hunting and UI polishing, was spent on expanding the codebase in order to support the ideas and ambitions of the community.

As the game and the code base grew, we had to do some serious revisions of some of the game’s core mechanics, stuff like building and construction as well as simulation of vehicles, persons and baggage. These systems relied heavily on physics based calculations and when the scope grew, we suddenly got a lot more data to crunch which was the main incentive for rebuilding these parts, ultimately making the game mechanics more robust, faster and smarter. This finally meant that we ended up with less and less time for optimization and balancing in order to prepare the game for release, while at the same time we got more ideas and requests from the community.

Even though the core features are now implemented, free of any nasty physics library eating up your CPU and allowing us to render hundreds of passengers roaming around in the terminal complaining about smelly bathrooms or cold pizza, we must now stay true to the effort that we have put in preparing for a bigger game. The extra time will allow us to do this, as well as give us time to perfect the game in its released state, making it playable and really enjoyable from the start. We know that this might be disappointing for some of our most excited fans, but as you understand we are doing this for your own best interest. We have seen many games getting slaughtered as a result of poor gameplay, crashy bugs or failing to deliver on promised features, and we would hate to see Airport CEO fall into that category.

Now, as a compensation for this we will soon release a new video featuring several minutes of realtime end-to-end gameplay so that we can fully show you what has happened during the summer. If we continue to convince you that ACEO is developed with the same care to details and with the community’s ambition in mind, you’ll be happy to know that an opportunity to back the development process and secure a piece of ACEO will open up in the earlier stages of Q4 2016.

‍

Updated Queueing

As mentioned, all queueing that previously relied on physics and ray casting has now been altered so that it instead utilizes the game’s node system and checks for occupied nodes. While it indeed freed up a lot of memory it also resulted in the neat “queue delay effect” which you see and experience in real life, something that was not implemented in the previous system as it had a much more direct and quicker response. A nice surprise to say the least! The dynamic queueing system works similarly to this, except that the queue path is generated and not something controlled by the user. We’ll give you a better understanding of this next week when we bring you a big room update!

Taxiway Lines

During the previous development blog we talked about graphical improvements to the game and when we basically decided to remove black borders around objects so to get a cleaner look and feel for the game. Well, we were a bit too hasty and did a mistake by removing the black outline of the yellow taxiway lines. This caught the attention of several sharp-eyed fans from the community, as they friendly noted that the taxiway lines in the majority of cases features a black outline. We swiftly restored the taxiway lines to the correct look as seen in this screenshot, and once again thank the community for pointing out what’s wrong.

‍

‍

That’ll wrap up this weeks devlog. A short one in terms of images, but that’s to leave room for more important information. Work progresses, and we hope that you’ll stay with us during the coming months as well. Thanks for your continued support.

See ya soon!