As most of you know, we’ve had some issues affecting flight instancing in several game worlds recently. While it’s hard to pin-point the exact cause of the problem, we’re pretty sure they are related to several hotfixes we applied over the course of the worst phases of last spring’s performance problems. We do have a first experimental patch ready, but since it affects core systems of the game, we decided to do a pre-release test involving two game worlds (Nicosia and Pearls) to make sure the changes do not cause other bugs and/or degrade performance. If you come across any issues after today’s patch, please let us know.

Once the patch has been applied, flight operations and flight instancing will be unified. This allows us to use the more robust controller of the flight operations routine for flight instancing as well, which up to now used its own controller. This way we hope to get rid of the glitches we saw in some game worlds recently, sometimes causing flights not to get instanced for several hours. One noticeable side-effect will be that flight instancing happens a lot quicker than it used to. When you activate an aircraft’s flight plan, flights will be booked into the ORS after a few seconds or minutes already. It also means that aircraft will be updated a lot more often, which could have negative performance implications and which is the reason for our pre-release test.

Another motivation for this change is that we can really use the unified flight operations system for the next big feature we are working on right now for version 6.3: Variable turnaround times and delays. Some parts of this have already been completed and we hope to get the core parts finalized this week. Once that’s the case, there will probably be another dev-log.