With 2024, a very turbulent year for AirlineSim, the company and myself comes to an end. As such, I want to take a very brief look at what has happened this year and what lies ahead in the first months of 2025. But before I go into that, an important public service announcement: From today until the 26th of December, credits will be 15% off. So now's a good time to get that credit balance in order for the holidays!
A (very) brief review of 2024
For the first time ever in AirlineSim history (I think), I was able to maintain a consecutive weekly development logbook all the way from when I started it in late January to now, the end of the year. As such, what happened this year is out there for anyone to read up on. But to summarize:
As I was returning to AirlineSim with 100% of my capacity - see the recent State of the Game update for reference - I started the year with lots of housekeeping, wrapping up funding paperwork, updating technical frameworks and improving our data pipeline. I also laid the technical foundation for new and much more powerful maps in the game, but stopped at replacing the previous static maps (with more or less identical functionality) in favor of other projects.
One of these was our Steam release which - after several months of preparation - finally took place in June. One reason this took a bit longer than originally planned was the fact that up until this point, AirlineSim was a proper "pay-2-play" game: You can try it for free, but when you like it, you have to pay. Steam doesn't allow this model, so 2024 became the year in which AirlineSim started offering free game worlds for the first time ever.
While we were waiting for Steam to let us launch on their platform, we were busy dealing with the fallout of a tricky data patch to fix the coordinates of almost all airports in the game, resulting in a controversial change to scheduling ("fixed arrival times") which "matured in production" for a good part of the year. I also opened the feature roadmap category on the forums which is where I collect all planned and speculative additions to the game and where anyone can vote on and discuss said additions.
The remainder of the year was dominated by my (and the company's) ad hoc move to another town, the behind-the-scenes implementation of a Distribution System-ORS hybrid based on work done for the AS Technology Demonstrator, as well as my ongoing fall into the rabbit hole of aircraft performance.
So as said: An all in all turbulent but productive year!
An (even briefer) look ahead to 2025
My plans are pretty simple: Continue where we left of. My development log will continue, and so will development on the two major open topics, namely the DS-ORS hybrid as well as the new and completely reworked formulas for aircraft performance. While both of these have a pretty heavy speculative and experimental components, I am hopeful that both projects will start to bear fruit in 2025.
For a plethora of reasons, I really would like to get started on a refresh of the game's UI next year, both in visual and technical terms. Whether I will get around to actual development work on this or whether it will stay limited to concept and design work remains to be seen.
What happens in parallel or afterwards is equally undetermined at the moment. But if your votes on the roadmap are any indication, I should probably start looking into the matter of auto-ops rather sooner than later ;-)
Signing off
And with that, I want to go ahead and wish you all Happy Holidays and great start into the new year!
Don't forget that credits are 15% off for the coming 3 days!
Last but not least, both my team and myself will take some time off as well, so please bear with us as it might take us a bit longer than usual to respond to your questions or screen your logos.
See you in 2025!
Martin and the whole team at simulogics