Hello and welcome to this week’s (last week’s?) edition of the Airport CEO development blog. We are moving into darker times and the winter now has a firm grip on all of Scandinavia but do not fear, as long as it’s warm inside we’ll keep developing…

Last week Fredrik begun moving to a new apartment, well actually he begun renovating the new place before they can move over there, meaning that his development computer is packed into a box awaiting departure to the new flat. This means that development has been somewhat crippled, but hopefully he’ll be able to devote a few hours to development this week as well.

Yesterday we posted a photo over att @AirportCEO as Olof went on a small field trip to ARN (Arlanda) and found himself in an unexpected situation, performing testing of serializing turnaround procedures next to a real life turnaround procedure.

Found ourselves in an unexpectedly meta situation! #arlanda #indiegame #gamedev #aviation #gameart #indiegames #madewithunity #unity3d #fly pic.twitter.com/LOFkli1Hjr

— AirportCEO (@AirportCEO) November 6, 2016

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More Serialization

We’ve put even more time into serialization and made some great progress. In comparison to the Kanban sheet we posted a few weeks ago…

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Essentially, six items have been moved to the “Done” column, serialization of assets and vehicles is almost complete and we are carefully still focusing on testing passengers and employees. Why was bags renamed to assets? As explained in this forum post, we’ve implemented a simulated agent named “Asset” which now includes bags, tools, shop products and perhaps later, packages and other freight objects… it was a necessary step to make in order to achieve proper deserialization of bags and it is a lot more powerful than our previous bag (asset) system.

All in all, what does this mean? It means that we are not far from a fully functional saving and loading system with all data and all simulated agents included.

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A Quick Update on The Baggage System

This has been brought up a few times, but this time it is for real. Since we removed the physics library this summer, a lot of effort has been put into fixing and repairing (well honestly more like enhancing) things that relied on physics. One of these things was the bags, previously propelled, scanned and sorted using extremely inefficient methods but now refurbished with the same low-impact code used for simulating passengers. This means that the entire system for building the baggage belt has needed to be rebuilt and that we’ve had to go over and fix each item that uses baggage belts, which has had some of the attention this previous week, and which we’ve now finally made some progress with.

While we still have a long way to go, we are now working on something that is a lot more sustainable in the long run and that will allow us to simulate a lot of bags without worrying about the FPS…

We actually have no idea how many bags there are on this belt (a few hundred?), what we do now is that it would have destroyed your CPU if we were using physics calcs. When they finally stopped spawning we took another short overlooking gif (sorry, it’s pretty huge):

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That’s it for this week. As you know, we are focused on finishing the serialization for now meaning that the amount of new content we push out will be limited for some more time. However, bringing the baggage system back up to speed will allow us to finish the baggage loading and baggage train simulation as well as baggage claim and customs… so there’s still a lot of goodies ahead. Until next week: Fly safe!