February 2025 Update (Patreon)

Greetings Everyone,

I took a week off to clean my house. To call it a pig sty would be an insult to pigs. I'll probably take the next week off to work on the outside. There is a chance folks walking on my staircase might fall through.


FBS Fundraising

The FBS system will resume in June. I expect to set the goal to $2000 with an additional $1000 from the leftover money from the failed artwork in Milestone #2.

GearCity: 2nd Gear

As mentioned above, the FBS system is paused until June. The few bugs submitted for v2.5.0.0 will be addressed in June when I reopen the FBS system.

AeroMogul

I've been working on cleaning up the code implemented the last few times I worked on the game. That mostly means fixing bugs, edge cases, and making AI improvements in route creation, aircraft selection, and aircraft purchasing systems. The only new major functionality recently added was related to aircraft production. Manufacturers are now properly producing ordered aircraft. My next step is to make the AI look toward the used market if too many aircraft are in the order queue. After that, I will tackle bugs/issues in the slots systems. Then AI model replacements. (Aging out old aircraft)

There is still a lot of work going forward, but the AI is now making logical^ and expansive moves, and the manufacturers are a time sink to their progress. So, we're making good progress toward having a real game in the backend system. (^Although, I have limited their logic to doing the same thing every time for testing and bug fixing.)

On the data side of things, I've begun cleaning up the Airport data. The game currently has just over 7700 airports. My goal is to make sure the data in the game is correct. I am removing non-viable, private, or military airports and adding missing historical/closed airports where I can find the information. I'm also throwing in historical events, such as name changes, runway resizing, and more as I find the information. I hope to get the number of airports under 7000, but anywhere between 6000-8000 is good. Although, I think I will need some filtering tools on the world map for crowded areas like the United States and Western Europe.

It is a delicate balancing act, as the game will let you grow airports beyond what they are now. At the same time, I can't add the 80,000 or so airports, strips, helipads, and so forth that exist. While IATA shows past, current, or potential commercial use, some poorer countries tend not to register their airports. Likewise, while some may have IATA codes, there is very little chance that a dirt strip with no surrounding buildings could support commercial traffic.

So, during my downtime, I'm manually combing through airports for this data. I'm approximately 0.85% done. I've completed Afghanistan, Albania, and about 80% of Algeria. At my current pace, I should be done with this process in about 2-3 years.

Anyway, I hope to give some nice visuals in my mid-month update.

Until then.