DevLog 76: Steam Direct Update, New Connections and Business Design Contest Winners

Get it while it’s still hot off the press!

https://www.airportceo.com/devlog-76-steam-direct-update-new-connections-business-design-contest-winners/

Zzzzz…

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Nice work guys
And Congrats Fredrik

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yes i made it here early

Can’t wait to read it!

congrats Fredrick on your engagement and it looks great cant wait to see Airport CEO on coming soon in the steam store

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Nice devlog, looks like a productive week! Congrats Fredrik :grinning:

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Great work again! Hoping for a release date next week😍 and ofcourse congratulations to Fredrick!

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Looking good guys! Congratulations Frederik! :smile:

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Congratulations Fredrick. Wish you all the happiness of married life, and a little bit of the sadness as well. Because life is all about the ups and downs. Every down will make you realise the value and cherish the ups in life.

Love the additional micromanagement features. Baggage is such a higly discussed topic and rightly so. One of the major design areas in an airport. More power in the hands of the player is wonderful.
I am sure this will open up more wonderful :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: path finding problems. Eg. If you have 2 baggage bays and they are assigned to different stands and different check in desks. The passenger checks in at a desk assigned to one of the bays and the plane on landing taxis to a stand assigned to the other bay.

I’m sure you guys are on top of this, but thought that I would point it out

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First congratulations to Fredrick. :smile:

i do like the idea of giving the player control over the baggage system as you have done. I’m not keen on the lines showing the links - in the last image it looks lit it could get congested and confusing. Could you instead just have the linked object highlighted. For example, clicking on the baggage bay highlights the baggage bay in green, but also highlights the stands and checkin desks that are connected to it (maybe in red, or blue, or another obvious colour that works)? I think this might be nicer visually, and easier to see which objects are linked.

Given the checkin desk is linked to a baggage bay and the baggage bay is linked to a stand, then the checkin desk must also be linked to stands too (via the baggage bay) - that is passengers then must go to one of the linked stands for their flight. Is there value and ability to show the stand a checkin desk is linked to when clicked on, same with a stand - not only show the baggage bay but also the checkin desks?

Can gate desks be assigned to stands in a similar way, so we can assign more than one gate desk to a stand- for larger flights this would speed boarding. It’s pretty common in airports to have this. Also for small stands with small planes, sometimes only have one gate desk for two or three gates.

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I’m thrilled to see Swiftly join the party in the game :grin: One of my favourite airlines from the design contest, and I was gutted that it was pipped to the post (not that the three winners weren’t brilliant and well deserving of inclusion, of course). The design contest winners are all brilliant and looking really good.

I’m pleased to see that you appear to have fixed what appears to have been a small black hole in the game too! :joy: I’m hoping the heights, weights and ages are a bit more realistic than what we’ve seen in the trailers; there’s a much wider range than is legal, practical, or as in this case physically possible.

Looking forward to playing with the baggage system; as we saw in the last video multiple desks will be needed so having this at launch is good.

A big week all in all, and my congratulations to Fredrik on his upcoming hitching!

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I thought the devs said they needed 20 restaurant logos…

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In the full game, which doesnt mean right now :slight_smile:

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Great job as always, and congrats @Fredrik, but I noticed a couple of grammatical/spelling errors in the devlog:
Fromts (first line of second paragraph)
playabilitt (first line of new connections)

These are all what I found, I know you didn’t mean them and don’t detract from the content but may be worth it to correct these @Olof

Anyway, keep up the great content!! :grinning:

Congratulations to Fredrik.
Part of me is, I can’t wait to play this game and the other part of me is luckily airportCEO is not yet out I need to finish my ethics paper. :wink:

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Hello! Congratulations to the winners of the business design contest and also to Swify Airlines
I hope my logo was there. I have a question,Is the winners in the business design contest final or you may add some more soon?

Is looking nice guys, looking like relase is more and more just the wait for the end of that 30 day period :slight_smile: I think we all are very excited and looking forward to being able to get our hands on it. And congrats Fredrik :smiley:

That can’t really occur since the link between the stand and the baggage bay really only is relevant in an offload situation. We need to keep the systems as fluid as possible and therefore the link between the check-in desk and the baggage bay is only relevant when loading since the baggage truck can drive to any stand from that point on, i.e. we don’t want to lock ourselves to any specific stand if there’s no point in doing it.

In an unloading situation however you’ll link the stand to the baggage bay and then that baggage bay in return must be connected to a baggage claim, or several. Before attempts are made at simulating unloading, this chain is verified to avoid simulation through a broken link.

As you can see, this new system allows for an aircraft to only unload baggage and not load, or the other way around, which perhaps is unrealistic but is a lot more fluid and decoupled.

I agree, the UI part is as we wrote not finished. We are developing in an agile way which means that we first construct the basic UI required for us to test it and then when it’s working we iterate on the UI aspect over time. Good tips for highlighting the relevant links! Will keep them in the back of my head as we iterate on the design.

This kinda tangents the situation I described to vikhattangady. Yes, they are “linked”, but the link between the baggage bay and the stand is way looser and not really existent in the same way that the stand and baggage bay are linked in an unloading situation. In a loading situation, any stand is able to receive a loading from any cargo bay as we don’t want to bolt that down since it doesn’t really serve a purpose. Thus, clicking a stand and in turn highlighting the check-in desk is impossible as we might not know what check-in desk or baggage bay the stand is receiving it’s baggage from, at least not until a certain flight is at that stand.

In an unloading situation, the stand is very much dependent on a specific cargo bay to unload its baggage to as that baggage bay must then be linked with a receiving baggage claim area. When it is loaded from a cargo bay, the link doesn’t matter as the bags don’t travel by belt anymore but by car.

People might find that confusing which is why it would be good from a UI perspective to enable arrowing showing the direction of the baggage.

This is done automatically right now. Cheap and small flights require one desk, medium flights require two desks and large flights require three check-in desks. I guess you could link check-in desks with stands, but then we are back to that difficult with bolting down connections. We could probably build something smart that would adapt the linking but… we’ll have to think about that. For now we want to keep the coupling as weak as possible.

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Congratulations to Frederik! The game is looking absolutely beautiful, and can’t wait to get my hands on it (like everyone else haha- here’s hoping you don’t crash steam :stuck_out_tongue: )

Couple of quick questions- firstly, I think the new baggage system is a much nicer way to get the player involved. Weirdly I also quite like the UI lines but that could just be me. I was wondering how it works connecting multiple baggage bays to a single length of baggage belt. So lets say you have 20 check in desks, all joined to a single belt, is there a piece which acts as a sorter and luggage is directed into the correct bay as it runs past? On the gameplay video I think it looked like it all went to one bay.

also unrelated, but I was wondering if you’ve managed to add in any choice in the airside vehicles. Using a big fuelling truck for GA might be a bit of an expensive choice so was wondering if you also had the option of getting smaller less capacity etc etc. Choice in vehicles I think would actually add quite a lot for (I guess) very little development time. Also long term- second hand market?!

Good luck for everything!

One way connections between stands and cargo bays. Beautiful.
You guys are always 2 steps ahead of what I am thinking about.

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