Hello airport CEO!
The long, long, long wait is finally over and tonight we're super happy to finally deploy the next performance update to the experimental branch. It consists of about two months of development, completely re-inventing the way we simulate passengers in Airport CEO. On top of that, we've snuck in several bug fixes and added a lot more bugs, caused by the new systems, which then consequently have been removed again and now... we want to make sure that we catch the remaining ones with your help!
We've had tremendous help from the internal testing team with checking the functionality of each version we've rolled out, slowly squashing the most critical bugs and then rinse and repeat until stable enough for the experimental branch. There's a few new features enabled in excess of the total overhaul which include new terrain textures, new passenger behavior (they can finally switch queues) and minor stuff such as a few update item sprites and a new aircraft. The full change log will be posted once we transition this update to the default branch.
To verify that we are in fact bringing you more frames per second, we'd like your help in testing out this version. It's available via the BETA section when you right click on the game and choose properties and after a quick update you'll be good to go.
Important things to remember
Q: Is this experimental version stable?
A: No! It's called "experimental" for a reason, anything can happen ranging from crashes to passenger deadlocks. Remember to back up your saves before trying the new version!
Q: I'm not really noticing any performance differences, what should I do?
A: Write about it here! As we're rolling this out on the experimental branch we'll be profiling your saves and watch how the game behaves to further adjust and make performance improvements. While a lot has changed, there might be unexpected situations in the simulation engine that result in performance degradation which we need to inspect. We'd really like to get our hands on large airports with a lot of passengers and other stuff going on so that we can perform additional performance improvements ahead of rolling Alpha 29 out on the default branch.
Filing bug reports
Please, as always, use the in-game bug reporting tool for any issues you find! This is the best way to enable us to improve upon the new tech we've implemented for Alpha 29.
Week long patching
Well be watching the bug feed and patch the most frequent issues as of the rest of the week and the next.
Thank you for helping out in enabling us to bring you a smoother Airport CEO experience. We'll post a new devlog before the holidays begin detailing the road ahead.