Good evening and welcome to the 75th version of the Airport CEO development blog. With another productive week in the bag we have made a lot of progress from a testing and polishing aspect which sort of means that we don’t really have that much to say this week. But hey, per usual we’ll probably get along just fine anyway so here we go…

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The Release Pipeline

We promised to continuously give you the latest news on the Steam Direct process and so here it is, be warned because it gets a bit techy but if you’re interested in game development or development in general it could be an interesting read. Since we last week were given access to Steam’s “backend” as a part of our Steam Direct application process, this week has in several aspects been consumed by setting up and configuring the game’s release pipe. As you know, we strive to work as agile as possible and thus we have now set up two fully automated release pipelines for the game, one for each initially supported operating system. This is an important step towards the launch of the title and as our Steam Direct incubation period progresses we’ll already at this stage start pushing builds towards Steam and consequently start practice and optimize our development and release train procedures.

It takes about three to five minutes to compile a build and push it to Steam and the process is, as mentioned, fully automated. While the time it takes does not affect your as a player, the size of the build does and we are actively working with reducing it before the launch. It’s not too big right now but the outputted assembly contains a lot of development resources not intended for a playable build, so what the starter disk size for the game will be as well as hardware requirements will be revealed at a later stage.

Since Airport CEO initially will be shipped as Early Access, we’ll offer two branches as we patch the game. The default, stable, branch and an experimental branch for those who want to test early features. We’ll provide more information on this as the game is released.

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Testing and Polishing

Naturally we have also this week continued to polish and test the game in several aspects. We’ve worked a lot on testing to detect bugs, worked a lot on removing those bugs and then worked a lot on testing to make sure that the identified bug was removed. There’s really not anything to mention here that we haven’t mentioned before so… instead we’ll just save some time on writing this and reference the below changelog.

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This Week’s Changelog

Aviation:

• Added sound effect when aircraft is parked

Economy and Business:

• Improved the delivery system by consolidating smaller deliveries into existing ones

Building:

• Added option to set runway mode for either commercial, GA or both
• Fixed an issue with incorrect rotation of runway approach lights
• Added the option to extend runway in a single direction at a time (lol, should be done months ago)
• Fixed an issue with selection canvas layer on stand

Simulation:

• Increased headlight intensity on vehicles
• Trailers are now deserialized with correct lighting material
• Trailer simulation is partially improved (snake effect reduced)
• Door animations sped up
• Resolved several minor ramp agent and baggage loading bugs
• Made the person wander method a lot CPU cheaper
• Improved the simulation granularity of the ramp agent baggage loading
• Ramp agents can now carry three bags at once
• A lot of code improvement and refactoring

UI and Other:

• Added imperial unit selector as an option for our US friends
• Added 12 hour AM/PM time format as an option
• UI panels are now constrained within the screen
• Added option to freeze passenger and employee panels on the screen
• Camera height now correctly saved on load
• Local save folder paths are now correctly set based on OS
• 16:9 ratio enforced across all screen sizes
• Completely revamped the design for the procurement panel and finalized the procurement system to make it compatible with saving and loading

We’re gonna keep it at that for this week. The Steam Direct process hold is in effect and during this time we continue to, as we’ve said, work with testing and improvements in various forms. Now it’s back to the code. Fly safe!

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