Dev Blog 150: Stabilizing Alpha 35, Alpha 36 and beyond!

Good evening everyone!

As promised, here’s this past two week’s development blog:

Enjoy! :slight_smile:

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Great Dev Blog as always. Welcome Lewis

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Sounds GREAT! Can’t wait to see what comes our way! Looking forward to some new sounds too! That should be fun!

Mr. Andrews does get paged over the terminal announcements to call 3326 a lot :joy: Does he live at the airport? :thinking: Or maybe he is that man played by Tom Hanks in “The Terminal” and is stuck/lives at the airport because he is denied entry into the airport’s country and at the same time is unable to return to his native country because of a military coup… :rofl:

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Love the Dev blog! And that this will deploy on Monday! Now I have a reason to not refresh Airport CEO every 5 seconds and not do my homework… Anyways my birthday is on May 15th, so I love this present! :slight_smile:
EDIT: Where can I fly on Apoapsis Airlines? lol :slight_smile:
EDIT #2: Can’t wait for the new sounds Lewis! :wink:

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Why you making fun of the real life story… :thinking: :sweat_smile: The Man Who Was Stuck in Paris Airport for 18 Years - YouTube

I really think alpha 36 will help make the game more dynamic. The reason why Prison Architect is so popular and fun to play, is that you get to simulate so many things that are all both surprising and stressful to the player, which helps the game be replayed so many times. I think this is a great step forward, but also wish to see more challenging, fun, and exciting scenarios and goals. :+1:

Also welcome Lewis. :partying_face: :partying_face:

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Yeah the dynamic will we very cool. From a passenger stopped in customs, so he has to go on a flight back, to the check-in system breaking down, so it has to be done manually or something, to the more oblivious ones including airplane emergencies. Also world events would be very cool, conferences, events in cities close to you.

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Nice Devblog
Wow 150 you could write a book with all these devblogs. :grin:
And welcome Lewis

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Thank you for the 150th devblog! I’m even more excited for Alpha 36 now. Also, I wonder how Lewis is going to enhance toilet flushing, as promised. :slightly_smiling_face:

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LEt me tell you… Incidents will be fine as long as you;ll be able to dynamically adopt and mitigate them. So far switching the bloody boarding desk is a nightmare. :smiley:

Plus, I’d like to see 2 boarding desks (1 domestic 1 int’l) assigned to the same remote stand, for instance…

In any case the game is the best. :slight_smile:

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Well, considering more experimental updates will be released, I guess that’s a relief, considering I feel there’ still some issues with A35 at the moment.

Will there be some balance readjustment as well to go along with A36, or can we expect these in beta? I feel like having that many large security checkpoints to process a large flow of people is a bit too much.

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I hope that Alpha 36 will include Aircraft Maintenance. This greyed-out option has been in each Stand’s left-side tasks list for many, many months, but never implemented. My question is how will it be implemented? Couple options:

  1. similar to Catering and Cleaning. There is a Maintenance Depot and Maintenance Trucks that drive to the Stand and park next to it to fix the aircraft.

  2. similar to Ramp Agents. Aircraft Mechanics are hired. When the plane lands, they either walk to the aircraft to repair it (attached stands), or are taken by Service Cars to remote stands (as Ramp Agents do now).

Alpha 36 is the one big, final push to lockdown features before beta, when only bugs are fixed. Will Maintenance be one of those final features?

I don’t see Maintenance in Trello. So, I don’t hold out for much hope.

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It is quite likely, since there are a few things related to maintenance in the game files. Maybe the next devblog will reveal more…

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When will the zone brightness slider arrive? I fear many bug reports will arrive monday due to the zones being ultra-bright all of the sudden.

Also, would it be possible to create webpage on the website that will show what version the experimental, and standard branches are on se we will be able to know when it is possible to switch back to standard without having to abandon the save?

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Awesome stuff! Looking forward to seeing what Alpha 36 entails. I’m very innterested to see what the “incidents” include, an airport fire service perhaps?

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Welcome Lewis!

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yes, welcome Lewis!, lets hope you do an amazing job on new game sounds!

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I’m just waiting for the unattended bags.
I also can’t wait for this image

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Someone should make a mod… :wink:

Yeah, someday we will print them out in a book and have it on the sofa table! :joy:

The “large, silent majority” are having a lot less issues with Alpha 35 compared to Alpha 34, although not adjusted for volume obviously. Considering the serialization stability changes we’ve made and the numerous other bug fixes in Alpha 35, it is a lot more stable than Alpha 34 at this point. The main Alpha 35 issues we’re seeing right now, partly from anonymous experimental user and partly from this community, is more related to design and not so obvious gameplay controls which of course should be rectified but are not critical compared to, for example, serialization. In short: “Regular users” don’t build as complex airports as this community does… :stuck_out_tongue:

Beta, definitely. Alpha 36 is all about new content.

Aircraft maintenance will come in Alpha 36. How, why and when will be detailed in an upcoming dev blog.

The reason you’re not seeing any tickets is because Alpha 36 is yet to be publicly planned, which will happen at a later stage when Alpha 35 is out and stable.

We’re not seeing any complaints about this in the back log as of now, and have only seen complaints on it on this forum. As I’ve mentioned multiple times before, if we do get a lot of complaints it’ll automatically be elevated.

Unfortunately I don’t think we have time to manage such a page at this point as we really need to keep the administration overhead on the down low. The general rule is that saves are never backwards compatible and if you upgrade to a new, experimental version, you cannot expect to have it stable on an older version.

Who knows… :wink:

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I will try on my computer I am getting in a few weeks. This will be my fist mod so it might not turn out good. But first things first. @Olof, what are your favorite 7 aircraft? (in the game of course :wink: )