We’re almost halfway through September and its time for the 38th edition of the Airport CEO development blog! But first, we’d like to give a shoutout to the Airport CEO Forum which just reached a 100 members! Amazing! We’ll celebrate this with a bunch of new images below…

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Upgrade System

We’ve started working on the upgrade system for taxiways, runways and stands. The first steps of this system have been implemented so that you will be able to upgrade your simple grass field into a modern concrete or asphalt airport. The functionally has been assembled as of now and the next step will be to integrate the upgrading process into the gameplay. This is where we will utilize some form of R&D combined with the internal purchasing system. If you join our forum you can participate in the discussion regarding how such a system could work! We should mention that the upgrade system only supports upgrading between stands and taxiways of the same size, the game has two different sizes of stands and taxiways and naturally if you would want to “upgrade” these in terms of size you would have to do it “manually” (i.e. demolish and rebuild).

As a treat, we want to share some photos of the upgradeable runway, taxiway and stands. There is still some final tweaking that needs to be done such as connecting taxiway lines to the stands and such, but we’ll get there.

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Taxiway and Runway

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Stands

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The Management Panel

As a continuation of last weeks UI overhaul, we’ve moved on to start complete the initial design and functionality of the management panel. While we really haven’t really talked a lot about the management panel and what its purpose is, at least I don’t think we have, you have seen some of it in the gameplay trailer and not to mention this week’s .gif tweet.

The management panel is your hub to accessing managerial data and functions in the game. It acts as a personal HUD, or tablet if you will, and will serve the purpose of delivering the intelligence and global actions you’ll need in order to operate your airport. It’s been designed so that it slides out from the left part of the screen and takes up 50% of the screen, this to accommodate effective management while overlooking the airport processes. Some panels however, due to the sheer complexity of it, will however have to take up more space. An example of this is the flight management panel, which we’ll show later down the road once it’s finished. The reason to why we really don’t want to cross the 50% mark is due to the fact that you get a better sense of remaining “in the game” when the UI and the game world shares the same view spectra.

Anyway, we’re working our way through the development of the management panel “top-down”, with a few exceptions, starting with the e-mail panel, which’s functionalities has now been completed. The exceptions are the dashboard panel, a panel that has a few simple apps attached to it to give you a quick view of the current status of the airport (like weather, e-mails, ongoing activities or incidents and cash flow), which will be completed once all the other panels have been completed. The data panel will also have to wait, we want to integrate a variety of different diagrams (line, circle, heat maps, stuff like that) in order to really utilize all that interesting data we collect from the game’s simulated processes, and instead of developing these ourselves, which would take a lot of time, we want to cut a corners here and acquire something instead. There are already a lot of great solutions out there and there is no point in reinventing the wheel on this one, but until we have the necessary funds we’ll have to wait.

Anyway, through the e-mail panel you’ll interact with airlines, suppliers, companies, the government and your executives. While the functionality of the interface is completed, the complete e-mail system is of course not as we have yet to implement other systems that’ll send messages. Also, the design might see additional revisions, but the overall idea has now been bolted down.

As you can see, e-mails can be flagged, opened, saved, trashed, marked as unread and there’s also a search function that’ll filter messages based on subject or sender.

Some people have pointed out that there should be spam filter to buy – there is! We’ve already started implementing the economy panel containing stuff like budget, fees, contracts and loans and salaries, this should be completed by next Monday! We’ll share the process on Twitter as work progresses…

So that is it for this week, be sure to join the forum and follow us on Twitter in order to see the latest .gifs! Have a great week and fly safe.