It’s Monday and time for another development blog fresh out of the Apoapsis Studios headquarters. We’ve had a pretty productive week and even managed to get together and work this Sunday, although our “other lives” are as busy as ever with a thesis and job project coming to and end, we’ve managed to make some notable progress. Time is money, and we’ve got none of it so without further ado…

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Adding the Winning Airline Designs

This weekend we started working on adding the winning airline designed to the game. We are not 100 percent complete yet as there are multiple aircrafts we need to reproduce the designs for, but we’ve made some important progress and hope that you agree with us that it looks really sweet. Check out the newest bae belowe.

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We think they look pretty gorgeous and can’t wait until all aircrafts have their liveries implemented!

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New Screenshots

We are currently, as you now, putting a lot of effort into testing everything we’ve built, trying to find as many simulation and gameplay bugs as possible. Yesterday we advanced the testing program from out small domestic airport to a larger one supporting international flights which will be used for large scale testing as well as a star in the Steam Greenlight video. We thought we share a few screens from it…

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Performance Tweaking

Even though we are still in pre-alpha mode, performance is very important to us. ACEO is a detailed oriented game simulated in an environment that is made up of thousands and thousands of different objects. It is indeed difficult to efficiently crunch and render this many stuff, a lot of small scale objects in a large scale world, and we want to try and get off on the right foot as well as possible. We won’t go into details on exactly what we’re doing as we’re nowadays building proprietary stuff and would like to keep it proprietary for at least some time ahead, but we’d just like you to know out thoughts on this and that we’ve made several important improvements. One implementation gave us roughly another extra 20 FPS at high load, which is a really good win, and we’ve more stuff to do ahead of course. Just though we’d let you know.

This Week’s Changelog

Aviation:

• Added liveries for Maple, Air Strada & SkyLink
• Fixed some sound

Economy and Business:

• Improved contracts by adding a rating system and made way for some fun gameplay aspects ahead

Building:

• Jetway position is now serialized
• Highly improved rendering by implementing some special optimization code (roughly 20 FPS gain)
• Performed a lot of valuable testing, but the building and construction simulation aspects are pretty solid and ready to be shipped
• Made some small changes to contractor contracts

Simulation:

• Fixed an issue with franchise staff not going correctly through security and therefore posed a security threat (lol)
• Solved a critical issue on passenger deserialization in queues
• Completed re-implementation of improved passenger activity simulation code such as shopping and eating
• Improved code related to the baggage claim activity and also added fallback functionality for broken baggage systems (they’ll get angry if you can’t deliver the baggage…)
• Added some error handling code for disabling the baggage handling system if not all required objects are built
• Solved a few bugs related to deserialization and baggage handling processes
• Fixed an issue with rouge franchise staff claiming other staffers job (they were almost acting drunk)
• Implemented franchise staffing shift simulation (franchise staff works for six hours then leave and gets replaced by colleagues)
• Implemented some fixes for how to handle shift changes with queueing passengers
• Solved a bug that caused impossible combinations of baggage to be generated
• Adjusted needs simulation and how it calculates the overall passenger satisfaction
• Many hours of testing
• Identified a nasty bug and figured out how to solve it (sorry, a but vague maybe but it took so much time that we felt it was worth posting here)
• Probably a lot more…

UI and Other:

• Fixed an issue with arrival and departing flights not sorting in correct order in flight schedule window
• Fixed bugs related to the baggage claim area panel and the baggage bay panel
• Fixed an issue with wrong airline logos appearing on passenger boarding cards

What else… well, at this stage there is not a lot to talk about. We are in the process of shooting the Steam Greenlight video, once that’s done we’ll need your help to make this game releasable via Steam, we’ll let you know when you can vote. The company creation is also in process, right now we are more or less only waiting for the bank and then we need to submit the final registration. Coding is going well with a lot of heavy testing to detect, and then fix, anything that is could be game breaking. The third gameplay video is currently on hold, as we’ve said earlier, but once the Greenlight campaign is up and running, that’ll be our next priority!

Thank you for staying with us and reading this. Can’t wait to show you what’s up ahead!