It's been four months already since AirlineSim took on the international stage. Since then we've launched a brand new portal, build a small but nice community and are about to start our second game world. Time to take a look at the things to come: It took some time and plenty of discussions, but here we are to present the versions of AirlineSim to see the light of the day over the coming months and beyond.

Originally our ideas for "AirlineSim 1.4", the next milestone in AirlineSim history, were bold: A complete rewrite of the interface, many deep changes to the system and an overall reworked gaming experience. After several months of working on the game full-time we came to the conclusion: They were too bold. Most of the time available we had (and wanted) to spend on improving the current version of AirlineSim, leading to more new features and improvements as we had expected to be possible. At the same time we were hardly able to get beyond some fundamental work on Airlinesim 1.4, pushing the release date further and further into the future, essentially rendering our "great milestone" to be vaporware.

But not evrything about these developments is bad of course! Luckily we came to the conclusion that our 1.3-branch comprises too many hours of hard work, too many  features and far too many good ideas to just throw it overboard and replace it by a completely new, untested system that probably takes years to finish and leaves the community without new features for a long time.

Because of this we have deciced to completely review our planning. The result looks like this:

Version 1.3

• We will keep on maintaining our current version about the way we did it over the past months, fixing bugs, adding smaller improvements and optimising larger parts of the game towards better balancing. This might lead to some bigger disturbances of the game as we might touch important systems like the upcoming flight rating system or demand distribution. Such changes will be tested and announced in advance to keep problems to a minimum.

Version 1.4

• To avoid confusion we decided to skip this version. There will never be a Version 1.4 of AirlineSim!

Version 1.5

• The dubious "Version 1.4" is renamed to 1.5. We learned from our mistakes and defined a list of must-have features that justify the opening of a new branch. The most important and most desired of those features will be Alliance and Marketing.
• 1.3 and 1.5 will share the same technological basis which puts the focus on new features and less on interface changes. In theory this might even allow for a switch to 1.5 without a reset, but this will depend on the grade of change the new features bring about.
• The work we put into 1.4 so far isn't forgotten: We will try to implement as much of the new tech into the existing platform as possible.
• Since we are not doing a complete rebuild of the game, we expect the release cycles to be much shorter than originally planned. It won't take years until 1.5 is released. Probably on of the biggested advantages of the revised roadmap!

Version 2.0

• To keep it short: There isn't any planning or work in progress on this one! 2.0 is merely supposed to be the name of a potential new AirlineSim that we might develop in the future, somewhat the way we intended to develop 1.4. But as I said, this is a dream of the future and work on it won't begin before we haven't realized at least one other project.