Hey everyone! Glad to have you with us, today’s episode of the weekly Airport CEO development blog is presented by Hard Work and a Great Community. Let’s get into it.

‍

A Short Comment on Last Week’s Date Change

As you read in our latest development blog, we decided to postpone our intended Early Access release date to the first quarter of 2017. Naturally, we expected a certain degree of negative response regarding this news but overall the majority of our fans responded positively and were very understanding of our decision. This is something that we of course are very grateful for and it is very important for us that you know why we decided to postponed it which is why we took a lot of time to answer the questions regarding this throughout all the different channels. We are not going to discuss this much more now, but instead mention that we also decided to skip coding for a couple of hours last week and focused on some necessary planning and management of the project. For those of you who are wondering, we use Kanban as our main planning tool since we feel that it really suits our development style. It’s been gone through it thoroughly and prioritized all of the tasks we wish to complete before any upcoming release, all to help progress the development and enable more time to be allocated where needed.

‍

Improved ATC

Up until now the ground ATC (air traffic control) has been quite basic and aircrafts have been given paths to their destination without concern for other traffic. This has led to some dead locks and collisions as taxiways does not have a right or left lane like normal roads, which means that without a human or something human like to guide them to through the airport: Incidents will happen. This week has been a lot about improving this system, making it smarter and to simulate something at least a bit closer to a real ATC guiding the traffic. From a code perspective this means that each taxiway node (which is used for pathfinding) has been fitted with a priority list of the traffic that wants to pass this node. If an aircraft wishes to go pass a node it must check if it has priority or if another aircraft has requested the path in beforehand. By implementing specific rules, the aircraft can get instructions to either continue taxi or hold for prioritized traffic. This system will be expanded over time so the simulated ATC can keep track of how busy a specific path is and therefor automatically can redirect in order to improve efficiency. So what’s the CEO’s task in this? Since the system is generic and works with the asset that has been built, the CEO will indirectly increase the efficiency of the taxiway network by designing a sophisticated such, as free as possible from bottlenecks in order to handle arriving and departing flights. Also, since the ATC tower requires a number of employees to operate, the skill of the people operating the ATC will be reflected in how well the simulated ATC system optimizes paths and gives out priority.

‍

Fuel Simulation & Fuel Depots

This week has also been a lot about the implementation of fuel depots, fuel simulation, fuel transit and aviation fuel supplier contracts. This means that our test airport is now currently fully simulating the turnaround subprocess of re-fueling flights. The first step to achieving this is to close a deal with an aviation fuel supplier via contract, these can be found in the contracts panel and are offered as you’ve built your first fuel depot. The company is either one of three different size classes, the bigger it is the more deliveries they offer, the higher quantity per delivery they’ll bring and therefore they subsequently offer a lower price tag per liter (since we’re Swedes and since we’re currently working close to the numbers and tweaking the simulation, we’re using metric values for the fuel as of now).

When you have signed a contract, a truck will be dispatch to refuel your depot. Fuel quantity is simulated in real time so when your depot has fuel, your newly bought fuel trucks will go there to fill up their tanks and thereby siphoning the depot’s tanks. When flights arrive to your airport and if your deal with the airline company includes a turnaround process with refueling, your trucks will be sent out to take care of that. We simulate fuel transfers down to each liter meaning that whatever leaves your fuel truck, enters the aircraft. If a fuel truck runs out of fuel while refueling an aircraft, no problem, the fuel truck will try to grab some more from the depot or another one will come and finish the job (it depends on how many trucks you own). However, if the depot is depleted as well: You have a problem. Luckily, the fuel supplier will be on stand by for any incidents regarding low fuel levels and so you can request an instant extra delivery of fuel, of course at a higher rate.

This is an initial version of the current fuel depot panel, belonging to a just freshly constructed fuel depit. Fuel depots will be expandable with a set number of tanks (depends on if it’s a basic or an advanced fuel depot), this feature has not been visually added yet but is simulated in order to test the system. Most of the development time has gone into compelting the simulation aspects so the panel is definitely to be considered as subject to change and improvements over time.

‍

‍

Instead of bombing you with .gifs now, we’ll be releasing a number of .gifs on our Twitter account showcasing the refueling processes over the week so stay tuned!

‍

A Quick Comment on The Forum

Due to issues with our SMTP provider the forum has been delayed. The forum engine we’re running requires us to be able to send out confirmation registration links and until our SMTP provider has resolved our issues we won’t be able to progress work any further. We have an ongoing ticket and as soon as it has been fixed and the forum is up and running we’ll share the news with you.

In other news, we’ve done some small tweaks to the website (adding a loading bar, fixing some css issues) and have of course, as always, fixed a number of different bugs and made improvements to the game as the work progresses.

See you during the week!