DevLog 76: Steam Direct Update, New Connections and Business Design Contest Winners

In the full game, which doesnt mean right now :slight_smile:

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Great job as always, and congrats @Fredrik, but I noticed a couple of grammatical/spelling errors in the devlog:
Fromts (first line of second paragraph)
playabilitt (first line of new connections)

These are all what I found, I know you didn’t mean them and don’t detract from the content but may be worth it to correct these @Olof

Anyway, keep up the great content!! :grinning:

Congratulations to Fredrik.
Part of me is, I can’t wait to play this game and the other part of me is luckily airportCEO is not yet out I need to finish my ethics paper. :wink:

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Hello! Congratulations to the winners of the business design contest and also to Swify Airlines
I hope my logo was there. I have a question,Is the winners in the business design contest final or you may add some more soon?

Is looking nice guys, looking like relase is more and more just the wait for the end of that 30 day period :slight_smile: I think we all are very excited and looking forward to being able to get our hands on it. And congrats Fredrik :smiley:

That can’t really occur since the link between the stand and the baggage bay really only is relevant in an offload situation. We need to keep the systems as fluid as possible and therefore the link between the check-in desk and the baggage bay is only relevant when loading since the baggage truck can drive to any stand from that point on, i.e. we don’t want to lock ourselves to any specific stand if there’s no point in doing it.

In an unloading situation however you’ll link the stand to the baggage bay and then that baggage bay in return must be connected to a baggage claim, or several. Before attempts are made at simulating unloading, this chain is verified to avoid simulation through a broken link.

As you can see, this new system allows for an aircraft to only unload baggage and not load, or the other way around, which perhaps is unrealistic but is a lot more fluid and decoupled.

I agree, the UI part is as we wrote not finished. We are developing in an agile way which means that we first construct the basic UI required for us to test it and then when it’s working we iterate on the UI aspect over time. Good tips for highlighting the relevant links! Will keep them in the back of my head as we iterate on the design.

This kinda tangents the situation I described to vikhattangady. Yes, they are “linked”, but the link between the baggage bay and the stand is way looser and not really existent in the same way that the stand and baggage bay are linked in an unloading situation. In a loading situation, any stand is able to receive a loading from any cargo bay as we don’t want to bolt that down since it doesn’t really serve a purpose. Thus, clicking a stand and in turn highlighting the check-in desk is impossible as we might not know what check-in desk or baggage bay the stand is receiving it’s baggage from, at least not until a certain flight is at that stand.

In an unloading situation, the stand is very much dependent on a specific cargo bay to unload its baggage to as that baggage bay must then be linked with a receiving baggage claim area. When it is loaded from a cargo bay, the link doesn’t matter as the bags don’t travel by belt anymore but by car.

People might find that confusing which is why it would be good from a UI perspective to enable arrowing showing the direction of the baggage.

This is done automatically right now. Cheap and small flights require one desk, medium flights require two desks and large flights require three check-in desks. I guess you could link check-in desks with stands, but then we are back to that difficult with bolting down connections. We could probably build something smart that would adapt the linking but… we’ll have to think about that. For now we want to keep the coupling as weak as possible.

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Congratulations to Frederik! The game is looking absolutely beautiful, and can’t wait to get my hands on it (like everyone else haha- here’s hoping you don’t crash steam :stuck_out_tongue: )

Couple of quick questions- firstly, I think the new baggage system is a much nicer way to get the player involved. Weirdly I also quite like the UI lines but that could just be me. I was wondering how it works connecting multiple baggage bays to a single length of baggage belt. So lets say you have 20 check in desks, all joined to a single belt, is there a piece which acts as a sorter and luggage is directed into the correct bay as it runs past? On the gameplay video I think it looked like it all went to one bay.

also unrelated, but I was wondering if you’ve managed to add in any choice in the airside vehicles. Using a big fuelling truck for GA might be a bit of an expensive choice so was wondering if you also had the option of getting smaller less capacity etc etc. Choice in vehicles I think would actually add quite a lot for (I guess) very little development time. Also long term- second hand market?!

Good luck for everything!

One way connections between stands and cargo bays. Beautiful.
You guys are always 2 steps ahead of what I am thinking about.

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Will have to wait and see this baggage claim system because although I like giving control to the player this seems to restrict which check in desks can use which stands as you want to get the baggage close to the stand. Will have to wait and see how the desks are allocated too. Maybe connecting desks to stands?

Also congrats Frederik

Can you assign one check-in desk to more than one flight at a time? Eg: to two very small flights.

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Full steam (or rather avgas?) ahead! Excellent news :smiley:

Just a small addenda though: it may be interesting to consider other ways to highlight things in the new UI. If there are a few items the green lines work fine, but in bigger airports I think that the screen might become a bit crowded with all those overlapping lines. Perhaps it could be made so that check in desks baggage belts etc get contoured with green colour? Or maybe use numbers? Or a combination of all of the above?

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Agree with others regarding the lines. This always bugged me in PA when linking security cameras or wiretaps for instance. In a large prison it became a web that was almost impossible to detect. I am sure the devs can come up with a more elegant UI for this. Maybe a simple numbering system. 1B, 1C link baggage sorter with 1 checkin, 2B, 2C and so on, colors possible but some are colorblind.

Thanks for that. I get what you are saying. I’m wondering how check-in desks are assigned? Would the system take into account proximity to the gate? Or gate other means.

My question on number of gate desks wasn’t about check-in desks, but about the desk at the gate where people show their boarding pass. Are these boarding desks linked to stands in such a way that we can place two or even three boarding desks at the gate so speed up boarding? Or even share a boarding desk between two or three gates?

I like what you’ve done and interested to play it to see how it works. I also want to say I’m incredibly impressed with the attention to detail and realism built into this title, and the flexibility you are building into the code. It looks stunning too.

We know that trailer will come before release, but will you announce when trailer will come out ?

Nope, that is not possible and would mess up a lot of stuff. Is this even practiced in real life? I’ve never checked in at a counter which would accept passengers from different flights but then again as it turns out airports are very diverse in how they operate.

Thanks for the kind words! That would be possible to implement pretty easily I think, right @Fredrik? Although I have never seen a gate with three boarding desks I have seen two at a time. But the way the systems work right now building multiple check in desks would be a minor to medium fix, an hour or something perhaps.

I’d like to put “Available on Early Access Now” at the end of the trailer and so showing it before that wouldn’t work then, so probably no…

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Thanks. Having two boarding pass desks at the gate could be a requirement of an airline contract if the airline flies larger aircraft. It would also set you up for priority boarding and first class and business class passengers.

Nope, that is not possible and would mess up a lot of stuff. Is this even practiced in real life? I’ve never checked in at a counter which would accept passengers from different flights but then again as it turns out airports are very diverse in how they operate.

Actually this is very common in my country. For example lets say there are Turkish Airlines flight at 7 AM and another Turkish flight at 7:30 AM from not a big airport. 1 check in desk with 1 employee on it accepts both flights’ passengers and their baggages.

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It is actually quite common nowadays for one desk to receive bags from multiple flights.

I’ve seen it for really small flights, like Loganair who operate small planes throughout the Scottish Islands. When there’s only a handful of passengers on each flight, it makes sense to have just the one desk.

But even for big flights nowadays, it’s very common for airlines to have a bank of check-in desks for all of their flights. In fact, it’s quite rare that they would split them up into their constituent flights (unless of course there is only one flight). For many airlines, they’ll have a row of desks that manages all their flights and checks in bags for all of them. I’ve done this in the past few years on Vueling (Barcelona), easyJet (Milan, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Prague), Virgin Atlantic (New York JFK), Jet2 (Glasgow), flyBe (Cardiff, Edinburgh, Birmingham); and I’ve seen it for other airlines in other airports too (BA, KLM, . Since the bags are all sorted somewhere in “the system” anyway, it’s perfectly possible.

It’s becoming more common because of the drive to keep costs down and the increasing propensity to travel with hand luggage only. Many passengers now don’t check anything, and with things like online check-in becoming the norm, the need for desks has decreased somewhat. There’s no point for the airline operating a desk or two (with the cost of staff) for a flight that’s quite quiet or hasn’t got a lot of passengers yet when they can have a row open all the time serving everyone.

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Exactly, especially “baggage drop-off” check-ins are usually not linked to a certain flight.

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Looking great, keep up the amazing work guys. This is going to be an amazing game! Super excited to play it when it comes to steam.

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