Goooooood evening ya’ll future CEO’s and welcome to the 56th edition of the Airport CEO development blog! First of all we want to apologize for the late devlog, both of us were coding waaay into the night, preparing for the first true gameplay video and we got a bit carried away as usual. But that’s how it is sometimes, especially when you’re managing other aspects of life, what’s important is that progress is being made as usual. We have been doing a lot of planning and are now fully focused on executing series upon series of small fixes as well as preparing aspects of binding the game together.

We’re honestly working on so many different fronts that it is difficult to keep track of what we’ve accomplished. It’s ranging from really minor fixes where an agent wasn’t properly reset after being picked back up by the object pooler, to adding ambiance and functionality of the game launch screen. We’ll try to summarize it somewhat in the changelog below…

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Smarter Persons

We spoke last week about vehicle error handling and making agents smart enough to recover them selves and act in an ever changing environment. These aspects have now been adapted into employees and contractors which means that they react to objects being built infront of them, they adapt to situations where they are unable to pass certain security areas and they prioritize behaviors based on the previous task’s success. They also react to objects they are attempting to interact with in the event of deletion or such. As we move on, passengers will see the adoption of similar systems and over time more improved AI in terms of selecting what items and rooms to interact with.

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Maiden Flight

The BAe, as voted by our wonderful community, has now been fully implemented to the game and is roaming the skies together with the rest of the fleet. If we were not fully focused on preparing for the video, we’d upload the typical ACEO landing .gif but we couldn’t make it for this devlog. It might, however, pop up over at our Twitter account (and then retroactively here and on the forums) sometime during this week.

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This Week’s Changelog

Grid System:

• Improved algorithms (mostly speed and lowering GC impact) for finding specific nodes
• Solved an issue where objects with varying types of grid layers (walkable, un-walkable, zone) updated its entire placement area to the topmost layer
• Improved vehicle node occupancy (the space they take up on the road) to better simulate vehicle congestion

Building System:

• Added code to verify aircraft stand connection with taxiway and boarding desk
• Revamped the entire game startup sequence in order to improve launch control, solved issues with data objects writing over themselves (real schizo stuff)

Simulation:

• Solved a number of issues related to construction simulation
• Reduced several dependencies between objects such as aircraft, flight and passenger
• Made employees and contractors a lot smarter

UI and Sprites:

• Revamped major parts of the starting screen and brought it back to life
• Reimplemented the employee card panel and filled it with new life in terms of data provided as well as different coloring schemes based on the employee type
• Added various sound and ambiance fixes for the start screen
• Implemented a new aircraft!

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… Action?

We’ve now set an internal date for the release of the next video. First of all, we’ve decided that instead of one really long video, we’ll do three “shorter” ones instead (not sure what their lengths are going to be). But don’t worry, they will be released incrementally and will cover the following three aspects:

• Cut the Frist Sod: Airport Creation and Construction
• First Day on the Job: Initial Airport Operations
• Running the Airport: Receiving and sending off the First Flights

Each video will pick up exactly where the last one ended and the first video will be about constructing, we’ll also narrate the whole thing. When will it hit? We believe it’s more fun for everyone if it just drops from the sky one day. Could be next week, or the week after that. What we will say is that it will, compared to the current development lifetime, be very soon.

That’s it for this week. We’d like to point out that the comment section below has been deactivated partly due to it not being a very popular way to comment, partly due to all the other good ways you can contact us by and partly due to an increasing commenting interest from various shoe salesmen, viagra consultants and other amazing sales robots that want to make us some really cool offers. They’ll sadly have to resort to other places from now on.

Lastly, to the peeps over at the forum and all of you sending us e-mails with kind words: Thank you so much! Fly safe.