2.2.0 International
Doing a slightly quiet initial launch because I expect with so many changes to have some work to do to make it work well.
2.2.x represents a shift from my mod being designed with vanilla airlines in mind to being designed with real airlines as provided by mods in mind. That doesn’t mean that I’ll be making play with vanilla airlines worse, but more that I’m getting into improvements where I personally would prefer to fully use them by adding real world airlines to my mix.
The big new feature in 2.2.x is that airlines will respect their nationality by operating from their home country. This means that your airports location heavily impacts the airlines you will serve and what types of aircraft airlines will be flying in with.
With this change, I also completely re-wrote route generation. In theory it is much smarter now. There is a risk of it being “too smart” and not offering sufficient route/aircraft variety. Given that location matters so much now (both because of nationality but also because of the distance you are from concentrations of airports of any given size) I honestly need a bunch of play-testing data to make sure that I’ve struck a balance between believable realism and crippling realism.
Side Notes
- I fixed what was becoming a super annoying bug in the planner that resulted in skipped flights and problematic UI. If you felt that flights just weren’t reliably carrying forward day to day you might want to try again now.
- The “different departure vs arrival route” feature is on hold until I am confident that the simple there-and-back-again system is working well.
- Baggage is still being checked in for flights without baggage service, driving down airport rating. Its on the list, but in the background I’ve been working on the ability to save and load data to and from your save file. Once I am confident with that it will expand the tools I have available to make the turnaround services work how I’d envisioned.
- I’m using keywords like “link” and “express” to identify little regional carriers that shouldn’t fly internationally. keyword submissions are welcome.