Blog

Follow this space for regular updates and news from our team.

Upcoming: New staff features

Since AirlineSim first appeared based on our currently employed technology, the human resources features have been nothing but a shadow of their former self. When doing the switch from the old framework to the new one, some parts of AS simply went overboard due to time constraints or because they were simply "overlooked". So as promised on the forums and elsewhere, this topic will be one of the last big ones we will definately tackle to some extend in the 1.3 branch.

Bringing AirlineSim to the market

It has been a while since I last reported from the hangar. That's because the "hangar" now is an actual office. Well, in some way at least: I moved to a different city which kept me away from doing AirlineSim-related work for a few days but on the other hand resulted in a new appartment with my first ever dedicated room just for work. Within this environment my favourite daily schedule would look something like this: get up late, grab some coffee and unhealthy food, lock myself into the office, do programming all day long, chat with the team and fans every now and then, leave the office at some late hour of the day. Unfortunately, besides the fact that my girlfriend would probably be gone after a few days of practicing this schedule, there are many more aspects to "making AirlineSim" than just writing the code.

Next Patch: Targets & Testing

Now that most of the kinks have been worked out of the international side of things, it's time to start thinking about the next patch. This one is likely to be quite a lot of work, and as a consequence of that we're looking at doing some open testing before we set it loose. The preliminary release date for the next patch is the 29th of September 2009\. This is not a definite date; depending on how the testing goes it could slip a bit, but the 29th is the current target date.

Back to testing

AirlineSim used to have a comprehensive set of automated tests. This means, most functions of the game had at least one corresponding test which ensured the respective function behaved as it's supposed to. The big advantage of this approach is that you can easily test hundreds of different situations with a simple click of a button. If you apply a change to something at one end of the system which breaks some functionality at another end it's likely to show up in one of the automated tests.