Hi there, airport CEO, and welcome to this week’s executive briefing. For once we are on schedule and the devlog has departed as expected. However, the flight is a bit smaller than usual due to heavy workload on several fronts and with such a fully fleshed out devlog as of last week we feel that we can all spare us some time by just focusing on what’s important…
… and what’s perhaps most important is last week’s development achievements and missed targets. As mentioned in last week’s devlog we expected to deploy a new update to the default branch but due to a larger overhaul of core aspects of the pathfinding system, more testing than what was originally expected was required. Issues arose that made the experimental branch to unstable to transfer into the default branch and we have throughout this week spent a lot of time on stabilizing the experimental branch. A few hours ago, we deployed another version to the experimental branch, 0.22.3.7 which is expected to mitigate most pathfinding issues and also give a notable performance boost to your airport. It is not completely stable yet as of a few bugs with the building system (which can be temporarily bypassed by disabling building via F10) but with no further development changes going into the pathfinding system as of the next default deployment we expect to stabilize 0.22.3.7 and transition it to default during tomorrow or Wednesday.
On top of pathfinding performance improvements, several bugs have been squashed, two new aircraft types and a new skin for the service truck and baggage cart have been added as well as an initial and first take on a job task and employee overview panel. The full list of changes will be published when the default version goes live but for now you can follow the experimental development via this forum thread.
While this is really boring news we just quickly want to flag for upcoming workflow changes. As you’ve probably noticed given the above text the version numbering have been given an additional number. This was implemented as several CEOs requested a better way to track the swift updates to the experimental branch and as of now the version number layout and definition is as follows:
A.B.C.D where…
A: Major build number indicating the completeness of the Alpha state.
B: Minor build number which is incremented on large deployments to the default branch.
C: Release number which is incremented on minor deployments to the default branch.
D: Build number which is incremented on deployments to the experimental branch.
Yes, the current setup is a bit complicated and difficult to track and during this week we will adjust our Jira workflow process to better support minor releases integrated in major releases with an X.Y.Z format which should make things a bit easier to track from a consumer perspective and not too difficult for us to track from a development perspective. The updated workflow and version numbering format will be defined and announced once it goes live later this week.
Last week we talked a lot about the general route ahead for Airport CEO and this week we wowed to give you a somewhat more detailed and concrete perspective of that. But instead of yammering on here, why don’t you briefly head over to the updated Roadmap and check it out? Don’t forget to come back.
Are you back? OK, good. What you’ve just seen is an initial and quite vague updated roadmap that serves the purpose of outlining what we as developers believe to be the core components of the Alpha and Beta stage of Airport CEO but in a timeline format. You probably noticed that there are no time estimates yet as to when these major milestones on the roadmap will be deployed and that is partly because some of them have already begun (graphical overhaul, content adding as well as performance improvements) and will span across the duration of the Alpha state but mainly because we, as an organization, is still in a startup phase and have not yet reached full development speed and would like to refrain from estimates until we have everything in place to reach them. We expect to achieve full development speed, at the latest by the end of November but hopefully earlier (i.e. when we both are able to dedicate ourselves to this full time). We can however happily announce that we’ve today ordered new hardware which should be delivered and fully assembled by the start of next week. This will remove a significant bottleneck in the current development process and enable us to really dig into problem solving with some of the larger airport structures.
As Apoapsis Studios is established and stabilized, the roadmap will be updated with time estimates and we will move forward with enabling the public Trello board for feature voting. You can already now submit ideas on improvements and new features via the Apoapsis Studios Jira platform, the submitted ideas will serve as a foundation for what can be voted on via Trello once it’s live. We would also like to mention that the roadmap can be heavily revised based on community input.
And speaking of new content and graphical overhauls, our newly on boarded and extremely talented artist Jettuh has been hard at work polishing some existing ACEO item implementations as well as breathing life into new ones. We managed to sneak out a preview image but somehow it got a bit blurred and darkened during post processing, how unfortunate…
Sad. But we know that you are expert guessers so who’s up for a new round? We expect the above items to be implemented within the coming weeks as a defined pack update. Announcements will be made prior to release.
A few new service vehicles have been added as well. Some would say that the image we managed to get looks equal to, or worse, than last week’s teaser image but we’d say that its better given the fact that there has been a few (to say the least) new additions made. More information on the upcoming New Service Vehicles Pack will be made at a later stage.
We’ll keep it at that for this week. As mentioned, the upcoming changes to the default branch can be seen in this forum thread. As of now we will focus on stabilizing the experimental branch, continued bug squashing and the implementation of a vehicle management panel as well as the workflow change. As per usual, if you have any questions you can find us on any of the standard channels.
Fly safe!
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