Before we dive in: if you haven't had a chance yet, check out last week's Q1 development update for a look at what's been happening behind the scenes. I also kicked off a call for ideas for AirlineSim's 25th anniversary in 2027 — I'd love to hear from you!
But now, on to the new game world!
The configuration stays the same:
If you want to check out the previous iteration's results, the Junkers VIII statistics are up on the forums.
Have fun!
Martin
]]>Naturally, this calls for a celebration, so I am asking for your ideas and suggestions: Please head over the forums and join the discussion about how we want to honor this milestone.
The more input we get and the earlier we get started on planning, the better!
Looking forward to what we'll come up with!
Martin
]]>If you've been playing for a while, you'll know the game currently offers a "classic" color theme alongside the light and dark one. And while it has a special place in my heart (and likely many others): the classic theme is effectively deprecated at this point and will eventually be removed as part of the UI Refresh, in favour of what's become the standard these days — a proper light and dark mode according to the operating system's setting, with an option for users to override it.
Beyond that, as I start rolling out the first gen-3 components in the coming weeks (more on that in the UI Refresh section below), you may notice the occasional visual inconsistency here and there — like parts of the (new) page frame not quite matching the look and feel of (existing) content. This is expected and temporary. I intend to do the migration in an incremental fashion rather than one big risky switch, so there will be a transition period. The classic theme will likely be particularly affected as I won't spend resources on doing adjustments specific to that theme.
I wanted to flag this upfront rather than have anyone think something is broken. Thanks a lot for your understanding!
Coming back from the winter break, my first order of business was tidying up the Location-Based Demand feature that I had rushed out just before Christmas. As a first visible step (week 2), I adjusted the ground network tab of airport info pages to show connected locations rather than other airports, and updated airport maps to display those locations as catchment area hotspots. I also took a deep dive into the location clustering algorithm — the piece of code that reduces hundreds of thousands of real-world locations down to a manageable set — and fixed a number of edge cases that were producing obviously wrong results, like airports on islands with no connected locations at all. Island handling in particular remains unsolved for now and is earmarked as its own roadmap item.
In week 4 and week 6, I dug deeper into why LBD behaves unexpectedly when combined with Individual Travel Requests — the combination I eventually want to use as the default in all new game worlds. Two key challenges stand out: tourism-heavy destinations generate far too little demand because the current model is purely population-based, and cargo is spread so thinly across destinations that it's nearly impossible to make it work. I've been investigating both issues together with the volunteer data team, but I don't expect a quick fix. LBD remains limited to Wright for the time being.
The first weeks of Q1 were also about ticking off the final remaining items on the ITR to-do list. One of the trickier ones (week 6) was updating the rating displays for service profiles and cabin configurations — tricky because the old ORS and ITRs compute ratings quite differently, but both need to keep working in parallel depending on the game world's configuration. I settled on a pragmatic solution and flagged it for a proper revisit once the cabin config and service profile refreshes are tackled down the line.
The bigger change that shipped in v6.13.2 (week 7) was distance-based customer type probabilities: price-sensitive passenger types now become less common on longer routes, which makes a lot more intuitive sense. Getting this right required a fairly substantial rewrite of the request generation logic, because the previous approach of rolling passenger type and request size in two separate steps was subtly skewing the actual probabilities. ITRs are shaping up well, and I'm expecting them to roll out in a regular game world within the coming months (at least as a preview in a temporary game world until Fares have arrived so address some remaining shortcomings).
From week 8 through to week 12, I worked through a planned "Spring Cleaning" — upgrading all the major libraries and frameworks that our systems depend on to their latest versions. I started with the central account management backend, then moved on to AirlineSim itself. The account backend upgrade went smoothly; the AirlineSim one took longer than anticipated and surfaced several bugs along the way that I had to resolve before I could ship the respective patch. There were a few post-release bumps to iron out as well, but all systems are now on current, supported versions — a solid foundation to build the UI Refresh on top of.
After the Spring Cleaning wrapped up, I finally got back to the UI Refresh in earnest — though not without a key strategic recalibration first (week 14). I'd been going in circles trying to figure out how to balance visual redesign work with the underlying technical migration, and a few rubber-ducking sessions later, the answer became clear: the technical framework is the actual blocker right now. There are countless features I can only properly work on once gen-3 is in place, whereas a fresh coat of paint can always be applied later. So the immediate goal is to migrate the UI framework first, doing it incrementally rather than in one big, risky switch (see above).
Practically, that means starting with the shared components — the page header and footer — that appear on every single page across all three UI generations (week 15, week 16). Rather than duplicating code, I'm working on a single implementation that generates these components for gen-1, gen-2, and gen-3 alike. The footer was completed and shipped to all game worlds with version 6.13.8 — the first real gen-3 component in production. Work on the header and the remaining page frame is ongoing, with the first full gen-3 feature page (most likely the new DS search interface) to follow once that's in place.
Note that the visual refresh is still firmly on the agenda, it's just pushed out to after the technical one. It is and remains a major development goal, especially in the context of our Early Access release on Steam and the usability/on-boarding deficits it uncovered (or rather: reminded me of).
Alongside the maintenance patch that shipped in week 18, I rolled out a first read-only API endpoint as a closed preview. While the API is built and designed with 3rd party consumers in mind, it first and foremost is a prerequisite for the gen-3 frontend itself — a client-side UI needs a server-side interface to talk to. Designing it in a standardised format means I can auto-generate client SDKs, cutting down significantly on boilerplate. Even this first endpoint involved more thought than expected: questions like how physical quantities should be represented in responses need to be decided upfront and applied consistently across all future endpoints.
A Hungarian localisation was completed and announced on Steam in week 7. On the marketing side (week 9), Michi and I started using a new tool to help with influencer outreach — automating a lot of the manual work involved in finding content creators who'd be a good fit for our games, giving us a much larger pool of candidates to get in touch with and more time to actually do so.
As you'd expect, the UI work is going to keep me busy for a while. But as soon as I got that behind me, I will move straight into feature development again, more or less exactly according to the plan outlined in my State of the Game video from January. As such, the most likely candidates are the (already mentioned) DS search interface as well as Fares to add important new functionality to ITRs.
In parallel, a team of volunteers is continuously working on new updates for airport and geo data as well as new performance profiles for version 1.5 of the aircraft performance system, which can currently be tried out on Paine in a preview. A huge thank you for all this effort!
]]>But enough about that — let's talk Quimby!
To celebrate the launch, there's a 10% credit discount until Sunday, so now is a great time to top up if you've been thinking about it.
Quimby runs with its tried-and-true beginner-friendly setup, making it a great choice whether you're new to AirlineSim or just looking for a relaxed environment to build your airline:
If you're curious how the previous iteration played out, you can browse the Quimby XVII statistics on the forums.
Have fun!
Martin
]]>The configuration is fairly standard: Used aircraft at launch and double the usual slots. This round will run until 21st of December - so it resets just in time for the holidays.
Have fun!
Martin
]]>The configuration remains unchanged, with used aircraft at launch and twice the usual slots available. This iteration will run until 26th of October.
The "winners" of the last round can be found on the forums as usual.
Have fun!
Martin
]]>The configuration is identical to the previous one and this iteration will run until 28th of September.
Last but not least, if you want to see who fared best during the last round, you can find the top stats on the forums as usual.
Have fun!
Martin
]]>A small disclaimer might be in order, though: At roughly 45 minutes runtime, "condensed" might be a bit of an overstatement. If you cannot or do not want to spare that amount of time to listen to me ramble about the project, please find a summary of the key takeaways below.
With personal matters (which I discussed in some depth in the previous State of the Game video) mostly stabilised, I really seem to have found my groove in 2025. This shows in sheer numbers: I wrote a total of 47 development logs, there where 22 versioned released to production and the number of weekly active players rose by about 20% over the year.
The major development topics were:
I already hinted at @Priller's volunteer work in the aircraft data department, but I want to use this opportunity once more to thank all our volunteers who continue to make this project possible throughout 2025:
My immediate plan (as in: over the coming weeks) is to wrap up the remaining work on Individual Travel Requests and Location-based Demand. This refers to the remaining development work...tuning of those features will go on for quite some time.
This will be followed by another "Spring Cleaning", albeit a far smaller one than the 2025 edition.
After that, I will dive right back into the UI Refresh project, by far the single biggest and most important project of 2026. So far, this project has been a blocker for most "UI-heavy" projects, which partly explains the focus of 2025 development on "non-visible features" like demand distribution.
Besides smaller updates and maintenance releases that will continue to be rolled out in between UI development, I plan on adding a new ORS/DS Search Interface as soon as the new UI is ready. If enough time remains, I really want to get started on Fares as well, a feature that rose in priority after our experience with the new Individual Travel Requests in Paine.
My overarching goal for the coming years is to complete a set of updates and improvements that warrants a version bump to "AirlineSim 7.0". This isn't a milestone as much as a "target definition"...all the features that make up version 7 will be rolled out continuously, just as I've practiced it over the past years.
Those features will be, among other things:
As always, the exact scope remain "to be defined". But the above three are the main areas I want to address.
I am looking forward both to working away on all of these items as well as to your feedback. So make sure to join the discussion on the forums or leave a comment below the State of the Game video!
Martin
]]>If you're confused by the opening paragraph, don't worry: My most recent devlog covers in some depth what this is about. But since crafting this present took a bit longer than planned and it's the day before Christmas here in Germany, I will try to keep this as short as possible and limit this message to the key pieces of information:
I sure had fun working on this ad hoc feature and I sincerely hope you'll have fun both trying it out as well as playing in the unusual game world it debuts in. My list of disclaimers already states it, but location-based demand and all the parts of the game it affects still need some work. Given that I will spend a few days with family over the holidays, I have to ask for your understanding that these changes and improvements will have to wait, likely until the new year.
Similarly, my latency might be a bit higher than usual when it comes to answering your support tickets, forum posts or Discord messages. But I plan to be back after the 28th, so you shouldn't have to wait for too long!
Last but not least, if you plan to spend the holidays with AirlineSim (and with family, of course!), note that credits will be off 10% until the end of the year!
And with that I want to wish you all Happy Holidays and great start into the new year!
Martin
]]>Discount first: Until Wednesday, credits across all package sizes will be 9% off!
And on to Single Holding Mode: As the name suggests, this mode limits all players to a single holding...ever! This means that once you've created your holding, you won't be able to found another one before the game world ends. You cannot reset it either, so you will always be limited to the initial starting capital of 20 million AS$ (double of regular game worlds). Consequently, two practical tips before you get going in Domination:
As you can probably tell, this game world is geared towards experienced players looking for a challenge - this time more than ever! With this disclaimer out of the way: May the best win!
You can find a detailed list of the world's configuration when clicking the game world name within the game. Noteworthy in this case:
Domination has a run-time of 35 weeks and will reset on August 3rd, 2026.
Before we finish it up, let's not forget about our overview of the airline rankings from the previous iteration! Congrats to RichS, manolo and Philkirk for winning the top three spots in the "All-Time Passengers" category! As usual, the full dataset for this and all other categories is available on the AirlineSim forum!
]]>To ease back into things, we're keeping it super simple this time — no fancy program or aviation theme. Just a relaxed get-together in the town closest to simulogics' new HQ: Würzburg.
Date: Saturday, 20th December 2025
Here’s the plan:
Important: If you’d like to join, please make sure to let me know in this thread on the forums, so I can make reservations!
Looking forward to meeting some of you in person again this year!
Martin
]]>Naturally, the world comes with all the updates and changes introduced with version 6.12 plus a small data patch. Other than that, it runs on a fairly vanilla configuration, including used aircraft at start. Junkers will end mid-May 2026 and as always, you can find the key stats from round 7 on the forums.
To celebrate the relaunch, credits will be off 10% until Friday!
And on that vacation I mentioned: I'll be off to Greece for a week starting this Friday. As I will actually be travelling and physically out of the office, my access to emails and ticket systems will be (intentionally) limited. My colleagues and community moderators will be keeping an eye on things and anything urgent will be escalated to me, of course. But don't expect a response to a name change request between the 3rd and the 12th of October ;-)
]]>TL;DR: This world is intended as a space to develop, test, and fine-tune new features in a production-like environment with real players and real data—before rolling them out to existing or future worlds. As a result, things may be a bit unstable at times. That’s why Paine comes at the low rate of just 2 credits/day and is restricted to Premium accounts. If you don’t have Premium yet, all it takes is a single purchase—and right now (until Sunday) you’ll get a 10% discount on most Credit package sizes.
At launch, Paine includes two in-development features:
In particular, the development of Individual Travel Requests would benefit greatly from realistic test data—meaning many active airlines competing for passengers. So please go ahead and create your airline here. It would be a huge help!
For more details, check out the dedicated FAQ post on the forums. And if you have any unanswered questions, feel free to post them in the Paine forum category.
Have fun testing!
Martin
]]>Quimby's configuration remains unchanged, so the world starts without existing second-hand aircraft, but all types can be ordered as new, regardless of when their production ended in reality. The world also comes with fewer restrictions, as nighttime bans and noise restrictions have been lifted. Combined with a slot factor of two, this makes Quimby the ideal game world for experimenting and learning the ropes.
As usual, you can find the high scores from the 16th round on the forums.
Did I miss anything crucial? I don't think so. So I'm back in holiday mode...see you next week!
Martin
]]>To make things a little bit easier, I’ve implemented a change today that I’ve been pondering for a long time: I have disabled the mandatory screening of small company logos. For years now we’ve frequently received complaints that the process of screening logos takes too long, especially in cases where the first two moderators disagree, so that a third one has to break the tie. As with many things in and around AirlineSim, this cumbersome process stems from a time when the game and its community were much smaller and there was a stronger desire to keep things „realistic“. As such, the motivation behind this process was not just one of preventing copyright infringements (still a valid concern which I plan to address differently in the future) but also of maintaining a certain level of „aesthetic quality“. By its very nature, this is highly subjective and not something a highly time-constrained developer (yours truly) and an always-too-small team of volunteers should be spending their valuable time on.
Obviously, you can and should report any logo that violates our community standards or infringes on a third party’s copyrights. Just as with violations of the naming or other rules, you can do so using the „report company“ form on an airline’s profile page.
And with that: Have fun and keep it tasteful!
Martin
]]>At this stage, the in-game translation is around 80% complete, which means it should be fully playable in Japanese. GINS has also taken care of the website and account management interfaces, so Japanese-speaking players can enjoy AirlineSim in their native language — from signing up all the way to building their airline empire. Thanks to this, I’ll soon be enabling Japanese as a supported language on Steam as well.
It’s worth noting here that — aside from the English and German versions — all game localisations are the result of pure community effort. I honestly can't thank our team of volunteer translators enough for the time and dedication they’ve put in (and continue to put in). If you're interested in helping make the game more accessible to speakers of other languages, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. It’s quick and easy to get started, and there are no obligations — just give it a go, and if it’s not for you, that’s absolutely fine.
Once again: Arigatō, GINS!
Martin
]]>The 11th iteration of this game world comes with pretty much unchanged settings compared to the previous one: Second-hand aircraft at launch, double slots and at most one holding per player. It will run until February next year, and it comes with all the updates introduced by today's patch, of course.
As discussed before, the relaunch of Yeager was pushed back because I was working on some major upgrades to modernise AirlineSim's technical foundation in preparation of upcoming feature developments. These updates have now been completed and applied to all game worlds. While most of the changes should not be visible to players, the patch also brings a few changes that are. Most notably, there are a lot of updates to our airport database (thanks a lot, Koen!) and of course the changes to aircraft trader behaviour. For a full list of all the changes, including those that might be added over the coming days as I fix teething troubles of the new version, can be found on the forums.
Speaking of teething issues: Given the scope of the update, there are bound to be some. If you run into any issues or bugs, please don't hesitate to get in touch on the forums or on Discord!
Among the changes that made me push back the launch of Yeager was a change to how the official AirlineSim aircraft trader prices second-hand aircraft: Rather than just computing an initial price based on the linear depreciation of an aircraft, the trader will also take into account a value based on how long the aircraft has been on the market already. This value will typically be higher than the book value for older aircraft and will then fall off at a fixed daily rate.
To make things a bit more interesting, all game worlds now have more than just the single "Aircraft Trade and Leasing Organisation" that has existed before. All of them feature a slightly different "personalities" that determine how they might deviate from the baseline formula described above and at which point they give up and scrap an aircraft. We'll keep an eye on how these personalities work in practice and tweak them as we go.
Some of you might have noticed that another game world ended today: Quimby XVI. As I don't want to launch two game worlds on the same day, this relaunch will be postponed as well. I'll work out a new launch schedule and let you know as soon as I've got something concrete to talk about.
And with that: Have fun in Yeager (or any other game world) and let me know what you think of the changes!
Martin
]]>The slightly longer version: I have big plans for AirlineSim, as outlined by the roadmap and discussed in previous updates. To prepare for those, I have been busy taking care of a long-overdue modernisation of AirlineSim's technical foundation for several weeks now. As usual, this has taken and is taking a lot longer than originally planned as AirlineSim's technical roots in the early 2000s are showing a lot of cracks. This alone wouldn't warrant delaying Yeager. I could always launch with the current version. But firstly, having a new short-term game world for a first real-world test of the past weeks' work would be invaluable.
And secondly, I would love to get in a crucial game design tweak before Yeager goes live again. As Yeager starts with second-hand aircraft, I want to test out a set of reworked pricing formulas that Fabian has come up with. The goal of these is to counteract the often extreme initial growth of some airlines fuelled by far-to-cheap aircraft in an effectively empty market.
This means there are two projects to be finished before I am ready to flip the switch: The "spring migration" and the aforementioned formulas. As such, I can't really tell how long of a delay it's going to be. I can only ask for your patience.
Thanks a lot and have fun!
Martin
]]>Bleriot features a pretty vanilla configuration but comes without initial second-hand aircraft. This means initial growth will be a bit slower and airlines shouldn't be able to "flood" the game world with massive fleets of "oldtimers" within the first couple of weeks. This is something we've received a lot of complaints about in recent months, and we're (again) looking into options to address the issue.
This iteration will last 35 weeks, and Bleriot will reset on January 26th, 2026.
As usual, you can find the top stats from iteration VII on the forums.
And with that: Have fun!
]]>Two important items to get out of the way before we talk development projects:
Firstly, credits will be 10% off over the long Easter weekend, meaning from today until Monday. No egg-hunting required!
Secondly, I will be more or less out-of-office next week, so I want to use this opportunity to remind everyone that Otto will relaunch on Monday the 21st. There won't be much fuzz about it on that day, so mark your calendars!
If you are following my weekly development log, the following paragraphs will hardly be news to you. And if you aren't...you should! You can also click the little bell icon in the upper right corner to get notified about every issue.
A feature that is technically done and ready to go live is our v1.5 aircraft performance system. But you guessed it: While done in code, our team of volunteers stands merely at the beginning of researching the data required to feed the new formulas. So while this new system promises much more realistic fuel consumption and improved landing and takeoff performance, I have to ask for a bit more patience until we can flip the switch and enable it in new (and possibly existing) game worlds. We might also be able to pull off a "gradual release" once we feel like we've got the most important types covered. In that scenario, some types would use the new and some would use the old system. This is yet to be determined, though.
Another feature that's mostly done but not quite ready for primetime yet is the first part of the over-arching DS-ORS hybrid project, namely individual travel request generation in bulk. If that is all Greek to you, let me give you some context: The current system that distributes passengers and cargo among competing connections is called the ORS. It comes with several flaws, one of which being that it really only knows three types of passengers (plus one type of cargo) which all airlines have to compete for. This means that it is near impossible to employ different business models: All airlines end up looking and working the same. To address this fundamental issue, we applied for and received public funding several years ago which allowed us to build a prototype of the Distribution System, or DS for short. Contrary to the ORS, the DS generated individual, point-to-point, return travel requests between arbitrary locations and would then book each one of these requests based on a set of itineraries matching the respective request's criteria.
I barely got this "pure model" to work in the prototype, and it's very unlikely that I'd get it to work in current generation AirlineSim. So I opted for a compromise: Whatever components I can re-use from the prototype I'll graft onto current generation AirlineSim. And wherever I run into performance issues (or other show-stoppers), I try to find a best-effort solution that comes as close to the "pure model" as possible.
Case in point: Instead of generating and booking hundreds of return trips every second, the DS-ORS hybrid will initially employ the ORS' code to generate physical connections. This means each airport is processed once a day (as today) and all physical connections to each destination are computed at once. Then, for each destination, the DS' travel request generation generates the required amount of travel requests "in bulk" which are then matched to the connections.
This by itself should already bring a lot more depth to the game. But it's merely the first step: Bit by bit, more concepts from the DS will follow, like custom booking classes, fares and much more. So stay tuned!
All of the above is nice and dandy, but I hear you asking: When will all of this actually ship? Well, technically, it already has. All of what I described is already live in all game worlds behind feature flags. But while the aircraft performance formulas are pending data, bulk travel request generation has to go through a few cycles of testing and tuning. To that end, I plan on launching a public (but premium-only) game world in the near future where everyone can (and will be invited to) build real airlines so we can get a feel for the new system.
Over the coming weeks, I will still be preoccupied with a few private matters (again, see the devlog). Despite that, my plan is to have this preview game world ready to go before the end of the quarter. What follows afterwards is yet to be determined and will naturally depend on the outcome of our public test run. But in either case, you can vote for what you'd like to see next in the roadmap category on the forums.
And with that, I wish you all Happy Easter! And if that's not your thing, a beautiful weekend!
Martin
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