Update 72

One of the aspects which has been missing from the game is an overview of the statistics for the human routes. This has now been implemented, so it is possible to see some statistics for filling degree, market share and passenger type. It has also been implemented so it is possible to see some flight specific statistics to compare against opponents operating the same route.

On the AI side I have tried to optimize the way the CPU airlines buys its aircrafts and also tried to add a more intelligent way of selecting its destinations. I hope it is noticeable in the next release which is still planned for the end of this month.

As the last part of this weeks blog I can tell that we now has the first piece of ingame music 🙂 Thanks to picoo000 who provided the music for the start menu, so please check that out.

Update 71

Two weeks have past since the latest blog update, which is primarily due to my computer being broke the most of last week. But now it is up and running again, so this week have been spend on the game.

I have finished the first test version of the new version with the updated demand model and we have tested the version internally. Those tests showed some things which needs to be updated/changed/fixed, which I am currently working on. After those things have been fixed we still have some data collecting to do before we are ready with the next release.

One of the things which had been an issue from a coding point of view was the graphs and the way those were calculated. The code was very “heavy” and hard to maintain, so I have replaced the graphs with another framework, which is easier to work with.

For the AI we have started optimizing it so the AI airliness becomes more competitive, but that is an ongoing task which will not be finished in the upcoming release.

The last thing for this week is that we have decided to change the naming of the versions from prealpha to alpha, since we feel that the game is becoming more and more stable, and we think that we have fixed all the reported bugs.

Update 70

This have been a week where I haven’t been able to do a lot of work on the game. My main focus have been on my real work, but I have still managed to do a little work on the game.

Currently we are still working on the huge task of changing the way demand is calculated. We have added the formula and also recreated the airport demand page.

As you see the demand is no longer shown in exact numbers, and the passenger demand is also splitted in to both business passengers and tourists. The last thing we have implemented for this is seasons, where we will have different demand depending on the time of year.

One of the things we are still missing is the correct demand to be able to calculate the demand, but that will be implemented over time.

The last thing I have worked on this week is to fix the issue with loading of saved game and with saving of an already saved game. So now that should work correctly

Update 69

First of all I hope that everybody had a very nice new year.

Once again it is nice to see all the input in the forum, and I hope to be able to implement all wishes over time. Some of them will be included in the upcoming release and some will be planned for later releases.

Because I had a couple of days of from work I have managed to do a lot of work on the game. We have released a new patch and now it seems like we only have a couple of issues with routeplanning left, which will be fixed very soon. I am not sure that we will do a new patch for that fix.

The next huge task we are looking into is a new and better way of calculating the demand between airports. We have planned how to do it, so now we “just” need to implement it and ensure that it doesn’t effect the performance of the game.

One new thing we already have implemented is scenarios, so now it is possible to play some very simple scenarios. This will of course get further functionalities in the future, but for now it is possible to play a scenario where you need to recreate the success of Southwest Airlines or a scenario where you need to save Malaysia Airlines.

We will try to implement more scenarios and also implement more parameters for success/failure of a scenario.

 

Update 68

First of all happy new year to everybody out there. It has been an year where we finally managed to release the first prealphas of version 2, and also moving towards a stable version. I hope to be able to continue the work in 2018.

Since the last blog update we have released a new version and also a couple of patches for that version. The patches are primarily focusing on bug fixes. I am still planning on another patch before new year, since we still have a couple of issues.

The main issues we are still fixing are some issues when creating a route plan, economics and performance on start of new game. The last one should be optimized but it still needs some testing and the first one still needs to be looked at.

We have also looked at many of the airline logos and changed around 50 of them to a better quality.

When the next patch has been released I hope that we are able to look at the next release, and currently the roadmap looks like this:

• Seasons + seasonal scheduling
• Optimizing of demand
• Economics which are not working 100%
• Scenarios

Later we also have planned the following features: Research and Technologies, Charter Flights, Random events, Marketing and Operating flights.

Besides those planned things we have recieved a lot of inputs which of course also will be implemented when it makes sense.

 

Update 67

This week I have finished loading and saving, and we are currently testing it, so if everything goes as planned the next release will be out early next week.

While doing the testing I have fixed the cargo airliner on a passenger route mentioned last week. I have also found some further bugs which caused the game to crash when a new year started. One of the bugs was that the game couldn’t calculate taxes for some specific countries. Another one was that the id for an airliner was the tailnumber, and in some cases the tailnumber ended up being used on two different airliners. These bugs have also been fixed.

For the airline information view I have done a little rearrangement, so the airline destinations have been moved to the airline routes view.

 

Update 66

This week I have only worked on one thing this week, and that is loading/saving of games. As written last week I finished the first take on saving of games, and now I have also finished loading of a saved game again. It has been done in many iterations since I need to make sure, that everything is loaded in the correct order. So far I have tested on a game with 5 opponents, but I will have to do some more testing to ensure that everything are ok.

One of the things still missing from this, is that at the moment it is not possible to name to saved game, so you can only have one saved game. Another thing still not implemented is loading of the game from inside of a game, since currently it can only be loaded from the main menu. This is of course things I will look at later, but the highest priority is to make sure that it is stable.

In the old versions it took very long time to save a game, and the file also ended up over 100 MB. This doesn’t look like the case for this version, since the test saved game took around 15 seconds and uses 3 MB.

While doing the loading and saving I noticed a huge bug where it is possible for the AI to add a cargo airliner to a passenger route, which causes the game to crash. At first I thought it was because of something I did in the loading, but it has turned out to be a general issue, which also needs to be fixed before next release.

And speaking of next release then I am planning on releasing it at around the beginning of December when the mentioned issues have been fixed.

Update 65

This week I got time to focus more time on the game than the previous couple of months. This means that I have managed to implement a lot of minor stuff.

I have done some more updates for the cargo, so for now I think this is finished. I have also changed a few things on the manufacturer page, so the airliners are now grouped by their types.

On the airports page I have added an advanced search functionality, so it is possible to select an airliner and an airport and then search for every airports in range of those selections.

Since we are also looking into some further implementations for airports and demand, I have added open border agreeement. At the moment they have no functionality, but it will be used for later.

The last thing I have been working on is a rather large task. I have started on implementing saving of games. So far it is possible to save a game, but it is not possible to load it again. That will of course be a task for next week 🙂 So far it looks like the saving will be a lot faster than the previous releases (before TAPv2), and I should be more in control, so it should also be more stable

Update 64

Since I have been away for some business related stuff and have had some family birthdays this week, I haven’t had much time for the game. What I have focused on have been on the cargo, since it wasn’t working as it should.

Some of the issues I have fixed are cargo demand between airports, the possibility of using passenger airliners on cargo route and vice versa, not showing filling degree, editing the cargo prices and selecting cargo only airlines at the beginning not working. None of the issues were game crashing issues but they were something which caused the game to not function as intended.

The last minor thing fixed this week is that clearing time table wasn’t working.

Update 63

With the latest release being over 14 days ago and not many reported issues I have started implemented some minor tasks.

The first thing implemented was actually a bug, since a lot of AI airlines created routes but they never started them. This has been fixed and I have also tweaked the AI so it creates more routes.

Of another minor bugs we have looked at was a bug when doing route scheduling, where it was possible for an airliner to have overlapping routes.

I have also reimplemented different game speeds but I am not sure that the different speed “levels” are 100% correct. This can of course be changed later no.

As I wrote last time we have implemented a form of airport notification. This has been tested and further developed on, and we have also added it for manufacturers as well. This means that you don’t have to receive notification from all manufacturers.

The last thing I have optimized is the maps, so now we are able to zoom on the maps as well as get the routes shown on the map.