Hello airport CEO, and a warm welcome to the 128th development blog! We’re delivering this to you on a Friday (almost like back in the days for those who remember…) due to a lot of work overhead but thankful that is a good thing and we have some important progress to share with you. The internal testing branch is currently more crowded than it has ever been with the second phase of multiple floor being tested together with catering and soon the new localization system and de-icing turnaround service. Therefore, time is of the essence and we must immediately get into it…

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Multiple floor: Phase two

Last week we went into the development of multiple floor support and how we had to adapt several aspects of the game and the path finding system in order to properly execute the total feature implementation. Well, the results of the past two week’s work were deployed earlier this week on the internal branch for testing, i.e. the first version of the multi floor (and soon to be multi terminal) path finding and person behavior adaptations to the overall multi floor feature. We’re essentially now at the point where a CEO can freely build and design multiple story airports and have passengers and staff interact with objects on various floors and path find across the airport; this also includes all vehicles and baggage. As of yesterday and today we have been working on bug fixing for the internal branch and have rolled out another update and will keep doing so throughout the coming week as our main ambition now is to stabilize the systems enough for us to continue into the third and final phase of the multiple floor feature development. So, what’s still left to do is to squash the many bugs that have been introduced as a result of this huge system change in a series of new updates for the internal branch and from that point on, when it’s stable enough, to carry on with the last leg of the feature update which includes visual work on how to represent the different levels and how to represent passengers and employees moving on stairs and escalators. Since we’re right now focusing on system work and not visual work there’s not a lot to show, however once we’re getting closer to something we feel is worth showing you’ll be the first to see it here as per usual.

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Not multiple floor but... multiple catering!

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Catering: Testing in progress

The first of the three new upcoming turnaround services, catering, is currently being tested on the internal branch. The overall system is more or less completed and only a few development tasks are remaining to consider the feature complete, excluding balancing efforts and additional UI work. Since it’s now getting so crowded on the stands we decided to a long side catering, implement a new service vehicle path movement system which is tethered to the aircraft type, meaning for example different configurations for where baggage is transitioned, where the catering truck parks for the galley door and so forth (we’ve tried to be as realistic as possible with some limitations depending on the aircraft model). With catering now out and about being tested thoroughly, we will continue by wrapping up the last tasks and then carrying on with de-icing and eventually cleaning.

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It's getting reeeeeal cramped around the medium stands now... time for an upgrade.

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Localization: A done deal

As we also mentioned in the previous dev blog, we’ve now completed the implementation of the localization system and the game will initially be professionally translated to German (not by Google Translate…) next week. And while the system is completed, as we get the translated text back, we will have to do a lot of UI testing to make sure strings are correctly represented throughout the user interface. We’ve gotten a lot of response from German players who want to help out with testing so once we’re confident in the system’s functionality in relation to the UI it will be merged into the current internal version and tested along with multiple floors and the new turnaround services.

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A little preview of the upcoming de-icing truck...

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Reboot Develop Blue 2019 post-mortem

Oh, yes! As you may have seen via our Instagram feed, Alexander and Olof spent a few days the previous week in Dubrovnik attending a game development conference called Reboot Develop Blue. It’s hosted at a hotel just outside the city in a beautiful area called Mlini and is in short a quite small and friendly conference that focuses a lot of fairly short, tangible talks of various disciplines within the industry and leaves a lot of time over for networking. We spent the days going to several talks, mainly oriented around tech but also a few design and industry talks, with a few coding sessions in between, and spent the evenings attending the go-to conference party for networking. We also checked out some of the indie games that were up for display and was thoroughly impressed by the collective talent and creativity on display, the game’s industry truly is an industry like no other in that regard. We met several wonderful game developers and had a blast learning from them and sharing our insights with Airport CEO over the time it’s been developed and the journey we’ve had.

All in all, we had a great time at Reboot and would highly recommend it to anyone thinking of going. It’s a small scale and intimate conference with big names, really the best of two worlds. If you want to check out how it all went down we’ve saved the best bits in an Instagram story called “Reboot Develop Blue 2019” found here.

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In other news

… it’s mostly business as usual around the studio. We’re focusing a lot of our time on core development of the new features but did however release a new default version as of yesterday: Alpha 30.1-9. It features a few minor bug fixes and important logging features for certain subsystems, but nothing more revolutionizing than that. Once we’re done with the, in this dev blog mentioned large features, we’ll again revert back to a more serious bug fixing session.

… even though catering is currently in a testing phase, we’ve already made significant progress on de-icing, as you can see above. While the de-icing service is something we’ll deep dive into next dev blog, we’re delighted to share that the de-icing truck has been implemented a long with an improved weather simulation system (overall just better value generation and more realistic). Up for next week is the de-icing stands, further work on weather and the de-icing order system itself.

… we’re preparing for Nordic Game Conference 2019! It’s hosted right here In Malmö in the middle of May which is awesome because it means no travel and easy access to the office for post-conference-day coding. Let us know if you’ll be here!

That’s it for this week! Fly safe.