We haven't released many development news in a while. As such, it felt like another issue of the development log was in order again. I would love to release them on a more regular basis, but at the moment it is quite hard to predict when anything worth writing about happens: As always, I have to work on external projects next to AirlineSim to make ends meet and we've also been very busy working on a new title slated for release later this year. Given these constraints, I'll stick to an irregular schedule for the development log for the time being.
Team Changes
This isn't really development news in terms of "software development", but it's a development nonetheless: This year, AirlineSim is 15 years old. Many things have changed over the years, team members and supporters came and went. But the general way of how AirlineSim is run as a project hasn't changed all that much. Many things around AirlineSim have always depended on the work of volunteers (think of translations, data research, forum moderation and much more), but recently we did a bad job of on-boarding new supporters. This was mostly due to the fact that there used to be only one team: Either you were a member or you weren't. And when you were, it was not clearly defined what your jobs and responsibilities were.
So in an attempt to improve this, we have for several months now been busy developing and introducing a new team structure. We decided to split up our monolithic team and move to teams — plural — instead. Each of these teams has a well defined set of goals and acts as an autonomous unit in achieving those. With less people involved per specific team, things should move quicker and more efficiently.
Aircraft Data Team
One example of such a team as described above is the Aircraft Data Team. As the name suggests, they take care of maintaining, improving and extending AirlineSim's aircraft database. Plenty of new types are currently in the works so we will have them ready for release once they go into commercial service in reality.
Booking Classes and Diverse Passenger Types
Here, the primary goal is to get the basic feature playable. Up until now, most of my work was focused on the technological foundation that allows us to have dozens of booking classes and a wide range of different passenger types. Since it is extremely important to get testers into the game to start balancing the new rating system, making the new feature actually usable is my top priority. Once that's done, we might actually open a public test world at some point...but one step at a time :)
That's about it for this issue. Turned out to be more of a status update than an actual development log, but I hope to be able to publish more feature-centric updates in near future!