Good afternoon airport CEO and welcome to yet another blog post on the development progression of Airport CEO and the forthcoming updates. Speaking of updates, this dev blog was slightly delayed as we’ve had our hands full with the experimental release and stabilization of Alpha 33 and… the big bird update! It’s been a few intense days but with each deployment we’re getting more and more stable but we’re getting ahead of ourselves here a bit so… you know… let’s just jump into it!

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Experimental testing of Alpha 33

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After around two weeks of intense internal testing, this last Friday we finally deployed Alpha 33 and the big bird update to the experimental branch. Reviewing the bug flow after the initial release and the amount of work we’ve had to put in to patch broken stuff we can easily say that this has been one of the more stable, large, releases we’ve ever done with Airport CEO, especially when comparing it to such previous releases as Alpha 29 (the performance update) and Alpha 32 (the multiple floor update). This is in part thanks to the very extensive internal testing done by our wonderful focus group but perhaps also because with each new major feature release we also put in time to solve general bugs and improve behavior that doesn’t have anything to do specifically with the new large feature. This is a marathon process that with each release ensure a more stable future and is something we’re starting to see now. Looking at the state of the experimental branch right now as of Alpha 33.3-0 and considering that we’ll have at least one or two notable bug fixing updates for this branch, and comparing it to the current default version, we’re confident that we’ll be looking at a default deployment for Alpha 33 sometime next week, granted that nothing changes and that the health of the builds keep increasing. You can follow the development progress either via the public Trello board or via the official Forum topic where you’ll always find the latest patch notes for the experimental branch. Keep watching our feeds and you’ll be the first to know when the big birds drop on the default branch, we promise to make a big fuzz about it.

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… what then?

Work on Alpha 34 has since long already begun and will, as we’ve hinted at before, like all the other Airport CEO update it seems bring very large changes to the game… but specifically this time, especially the game. We’ve talked about this before, but we really do think that in a way, logically, Airport CEO becomes a worse game with the Alpha 33 update. More content with less direction, it’s impossible for new players to know how to build a well-functioning airport when you can start out right away by dropping large stands and parking lots all over the place. Such actions will be reserved for sandbox and creativity modes but for those who want the real Airport CEO experience as we’ve originally intended… Alpha 34 will be for you. And already in our Alpha 34 repository, passengers and staff are living in an alternate reality. Where everything is not available from the start without any effort. Where the old procurement system is since long gone and replaced by a more realistic, more in-depth, more simulated, more interesting way of accessing objects in the game over time. Where you have executive power and can make concentrated, strategic decisions that boost your airport and have an impact in the long run. Where things matter, where you cannot anymore just let baggage pass through without any consequences, where GA pilots and airlines won’t care about your insane infrastructure and consumable pricing, where passengers become upset with your ridiculous bathroom pricing. And of course, much more.

Once the dust from the default release of Alpha 33 settles, we’ll let you in on more concrete details.

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In other news

… the airport logo contest has wrapped up and we have a set of winners! As you maybe know by now, Alpha 33 features a new custom and moddable airport logo system where the logos are rendered on vehicles (and soon objects). But of course, we need a set of great logos to offer to new aspiring airport CEOs and there was where the ACEO community came in. The contest ended this past Sunday and the following airport CEOs can consider themselves lucky winners: twocflyer, pikaste, zthomas, Michaelbrown1995, bootsie123, ethurstin, SolarCola, aapk76 and _18Mangoes! Once we've collected all of the logotypes we'll make sure to include them in a dev blog so that you can see what they all look like side to side. We want to extend a huge thanks to the winning CEOs, and to everyone else who participated, for your excellent work and contribution to this community.

… we’ve done some slight changes to our Jira platform in order to make life easier for ourselves and in order to slightly increase our workflow speed when it comes to processing bugs. If you only use the public Trello board to track our development, which 99,9% of you do, absolutely nothing will change. If you however belong to the 0,01% that occasionally checks up on the Jira issues directly we want to let you know that you’ll from now on not be able to view the issues until after they’ve been released as part of an update. This is because keeping those Jira issues public during the time we’re working with them makes it difficult to easily edit and change their values, however since we’re mirroring everything to the public Trello board you’ll still see the exact same values there.

… the Forum migration mentioned the last dev blog went through without a hitch! It was so fantastically uneventful, including a few images that went missing but then returned, that it feels like the perfect sleeping pill to end the dev blog on.

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So that’s it for this week, now we really need to get back to work. Keep a look out on our feeds for the upcoming default version of Alpha 33 and the big bird update (we’ll definitely make a buzz about it) and we’ll see you soon… fly safe!