Dev Blog 93: Vehicle Pack 1 & The Airline Design Contest Finally Vote

November 21, 2017

Good evening airport CEO and welcome to this week’s executive briefing on the latest and greatest of Airport CEO development! We have a lot to talk about and not a lot of time so let’s just jump straight into it.

Last Week

Last week was the first week of full-time development! As we mentioned in the last development blog we are now both 100 percent dedicated to Airport CEO. It is fair to say that the first weeks has been very productive and we have also had time to finally catch up with some administrative stuff which has previously been put aside. Apart from implementing a new vehicle pack, more on that below, we have spent a lot of time on improving rendering of exterior objects. We know the game struggled with very noticeable FPS drops during night time which was a direct cause of the real-time lightning (which is always performance heavy). It is hard to go into all the fixes and details but in short we have gone through all the objects and slightly improved the rendering mainly by painstaking debugging each draw call. It is hard to say exactly how much the impact will be on a typical save but we are of course interested in any feedback we get from you. We have also continued to improve our sprite atlases with smarter packing.  On top of this we have also started planning the three major aspects that we wish to improve in the near future: the UI, the flight planner and path finding. These are major epics (a term for a larger set of development activities) and not done over a week so we will refrain from setting any deadlines as to when these changes will arrive but at least you now know that we are laying the groundwork. We plan to sit down and thoroughly work on these to make sure we really get it right and since we have received a lot of valuable feedback when it comes to the UI and flight planner we already have a lot to take into consideration. The coming week we will focus on implementing the first furniture pack but… more on that next week!

The Airline Design Contest Finally Vote

This week we also closed the second airline design contest with over 100 submissions! Once again the community delivered fantastic designs and it was immensely difficult to choose the 25 finalists and in that process having to discard almost 80 percent of all submissions. The voting is still ongoing and will close on Wednesday the 22nd of November 23:59 (GMT+1). By that time we will see which 10 airlines that will eventually be featured in the game. Haven’t voted yet? No worries, just click here (and register if you’re not already a member and start voting!

Vehicle Pack 1

23.3 has now been deployed on the experimental branch, including the first vehicle pack update and that means that we are now ready to reveal its contents! A grand total of 15 different vehicles have been implemented where some are replacements, some are additions in terms of appearance variations and some are completely new additions!

There are now three variations on the service truck (far left), a push back truck, two variations on the small fuel truck and two variations on the trailer fuel truck (any version can contain either Avgas 100 LL or Jet A1 bringing it to a total of eight different fuel truck types), three variations on the person car and a new bus and a new delivery truck. There are still two completely new vehicle types waiting to be implemented but these will come in later additions. All vehicles have been designed by our, as previously mentioned, newly joined artist Mitchell Jetten.

The new variations do not only look different but behave differently, old or smaller models are usually a lot slower than more modern versions so make sure to check out the specs when browsing for new vehicles to buy. Also, the trailer fuel truck will hold twice as much fuel as the small fuel truck.

An important note about the push back truck: As you can see there’s been a slight change to the look of the small stand as small stands will not require the service of a push back truck, however, all flights parked at medium stands will require a push back truck to be able to depart! Pressing “Dismiss Aircraft” will dismiss the aircraft without the use of a push back truck. Go to the economy panel and then the procurement tab and buy a few push back trucks to be able to fully service your medium stands.

An important note about 23.3: The implementation of a push back truck requirement is quite a large change so we expect the experimental branch to contain a few conditional bugs. We will monitor the stability of 23.3 through out the rest of the week and deploy hot fixes as needed.

Here’s a few quick screens of the changes in 23.3:

That’s it for now! As we said, focus now is on the furniture pack to be implemented on Monday as well as hot fixing any major stability issues with 23.3. On top of this we continue to work with the regular bug fixing in our Jira workload list. Most likely, the interior of Airport CEO will look quite different next Monday. See you throughout the week and don’t forget to vote for your favorite airlines! Fly safe.

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