DevLog 97: Alpha 24 Deployed, Airline & Livery Modding Enabled, Steam Cloud Saves Enabled and the Future of the Airline Contract system

Woohoo! I found it…just after a long sleep, that’s all! :slight_smile:

Nice changes! Have a great Christmas! :grinning:

I was thinking about bulk flights and reocurring flights differences in real life.
Normally airlines ask a bulk flights in high seasonal times like Christimas, but in normally the most of their flights are reocurring what helps pax to plan himself. I mean if I go to another city every week I as customer know what time is reocorring available to go and back the city.

What I would like to propose is a smal, but more realistic change:

  1. Including in the game travel agency (who is the most consumer of this type of flight) Also this travel agency would ask bulk flights , in each flight they would say what airline will operate the specific flight.
  2. Airline also ask bulk flights but in a smaller portion than travel agency.
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Sounds great, especially the new contract system. I can’t wait! I love that you plan to implement a few of the ideas I (and probably many other people) have posted here :slight_smile: Thanks for listening to the community!

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I Love the new contract system!!!

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A nice, christmassy security station… :grinning:

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Yep been absent from the game, but this new update is great! I just took a break.

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Having a slight problem. My game has updated to alpha 24.0-0 but the new features aren’t working

what issue are you having?

One poster uploaded a photo of the staff wearing Christmas hats? Is that on everyone’s game? Also the master contacts aren’t showing up.

Master contract feature is a work-in-progress feature. It will be released in future.

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You have to find the secret button to enable “Santa’s Little Helpers”! :slight_smile:

Do love santas little helpers, wonder if we will get a suprise visit from santa :slight_smile:

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Next year we’ll have you signing a master contract with North Pole Transportations, a flight from the north pole to your airport will be offered and in time for holidays you will turnaround flight XMAS1337 hauling several tonnes of cargo on board a nine reindeer Sleigh with experienced captain St. Nicholas at the helm.

Thanks for the feedback on the contract system, we’ll keep watching your responses! :slight_smile:

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Yeeeeeeeeeees!!! :smile::+1:t3:I am extremely happy about this decision and the road we take now! :blush: I think this is my favourite christmas present for this year! I have just one question for the devs. After the master contract is signed and u get the request for the single flight contracts can u see the route of the flight? So that I can choose which cities I would like and also to create a diversity?

You are correct we see planes at the airport all the time, and mainly due to 2 reasons

  1. Large airlines such as Emirates will schedule most of their long haul flights so that they arrive around the same time n dubai in order for passengers to catch connecting flights. So you can see international flights departing throughout the day. But these times are planned and if those flights are delayed they cost airlines a lot of money to get those passengers on new flights etc (one flight from Dubai to Australia is so time sensitive if the plane is delayed by 10 minutes it gets cancelled as Australia has a time curvue and the plane wont make it in time)

  2. Where I live we have a big low cost airline that has flights between 2 major cities every hour. But between 11am-3pm 4 other airlines will fly the same route, often departing 5minutes apart and arriving 5 minutes after each other.

So larger airlines can offer more flights and can ‘fill’ an airport but small airlines will target peak hours to ensure their flights are full.

So in conclusion Airlines are picky when it comes to departure times for many different reasons… (PS sorry for the long post)

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Love the master contracts setup :smiley:

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@Olof any info ?

Info about what? The new contract system won’t be deployed until after the holidays. Trying to cut back on work a little bit now to preserve our mental health, lol.

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About my question in the post before ^^ :slight_smile: I totaly understand that :slight_smile:

For the new contract system, I’d like to see the airline contracts rent a certain number of gates/stands during the contract. When they rent gates, they would have the expectation of unlimited use of them as long as they give so many hours advance notice. They would then schedule the flights without you doing anything, although you could have the option of canceling them (although at the expense of angering the airline and risking the future of the contract). This would also reward micromanagers because there may be some times when an airline rents a gate but can’t use it, so you could pick up a one-time contract with another airline for use of the gate.

I’d also like to see the option to negotiate contracts. Price would be the main factor, but you could also negotiate number of gates, amount of space (for food and retail contracts), number of contractors (construction contracts), and level at which your fuel supplier delivers. For airlines, perhaps how much you negotiate could influence the starting airline happiness level.

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