We want to start off this week by acknowledge our followers on Twitter, currently 520 future CEOs who simply just raced past the 500 mark. Super nice to have you with us on the ride and always fun to get those instant likes. Now, let’s jump right in to the 37th edition of the Airport CEO development blog.
We finished off the previous week by launching the forum. This marks another important milestone in the fostering of the Airport CEO community and the overall development as we now have another medium to utilize for discussion, idea sharing and eventually when the time comes, bug reporting and technical support.
We chose Discourse as our forum engine and based our decision on the suggestions we received from you when we requested your help on this matter a few weeks ago. Its clean design on both desktop and mobile and its powerful backend allows focus to be put on the discussion and while it proved a bit difficult to get it up and running on our server (some hacking was required) it has proven to be stable and reliable as already 72 CEOs have joined and started creating topics. We will continuously monitor its performance and are of course thankful for any input we can get regarding any issues you might experience using it.
Check out (and join!) the forum here, we’re already seeing a lot of activity so don’t hesitate to get in and join the conversation!
While the UI never has had the privilege of receiving our fullest attention, this is something we continuously revisit as the weeks go by. This weekend included fixing a bug with the tag searching system, finalizing the bottom panel (added a rounded edge and buttons for toggling zones and rooms), improving the design and layout of buttons of the top panel and some minor adjustments to the management panel. We still have a lot of work left to do on the management panel and will probably overhaul the overall design of all panels later down the road as focus right now is on cleanliness and usability rather than design and style but its always nice to work with something that feels a little bit complete than completely temporary.
Please not that the quality is not representative as this was captured in a testing environment.
From left to right: Time and date, time control buttons (and exit button), total funds (green since this was captured exactly when some funds were added to the bank, lol), hourly wager (our test airport is very unprofitable), notifications history button (clicking the small v will bring down a history panel) and then empty space for notifications text. The cloud is the button for the weather forecast panel which slides down, the aircraft is the button for the arrival and departures panel and lastly an icon showing how many unread e-mails there are in your inbox.
The UI is something will continuously iterate on, so don’t expect any of this to be final!
Earlier the previous week we released a .gif (on Twitter) of the current fuel reloading procedure for fuel trucks with depleted tanks, this is what it looked like.
But time passes quickly around here and we’ve made further advancements. Fuel Depots are now expandable with a fixed number of tanks, a basic fuel depot can be expanded with four additional tanks and an advanced fuel depot can serve six tanks. Our test airport has been fitted with two tanks in order to cope with the air traffic, we’ve also laid out some tarmac below for safety reasons. The construction is shown in the following .gif (please not that the construction simulation is disabled here for obvious testing purposes):
The yellow fuel lines represent the flow of fuel between the facilities, they alter speed and color depending on what kind of transaction is being made. In the .gif below an aviation fuel supply truck comes to the airport in order to deliver fuel (yeah, it’s a standard fuel truck painted yellow, consider it placeholder) and since the main tank is full, fuel is getting transmitted over to the attached fuel tank.
Subsequently, when a fuel truck comes to restock, fuel within the facility is again transmitted between the different entities.
A lot of this weeks development time was consumed by getting the forum up and running properly, this week will continue as usual and while development time from day to day vary as we have other stuff to do as well (school and work) we always try put down the necessary hours in order to move forward.
We’ll end this weeks devlog with an in-game screen over the fuel depots at night, almost looks cozy, right?
Se ya’ll next week! Fly safe!
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