Archive for October, 2009

Big scale testing

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Most of you have probably already seen some of the screenshots of the new flight rating system. While these changes sure look nice they also lead to some major disturbance in a running game world. All flights will be rated differently and the booking behaviour of the virtual passengers might change considerably.

Due to this we will do some large scale testing before we introduce the patch on Nicosia. The German community is already familiar with this process: We take all the live data from Nicosia, import it into AirlineSim on our new server Croydon and deactivate credit costs for the system. Within about 24 hours the server will show up in your Aquila dashboard. If you had an account on Nicosia before you will be able to access Croydon and see how the new patch affects your existing airline and its operations.

We will transfer the data sometime today and testing is supposed to last at least one week. Please note that the patch will delete all your booked in flights. They will be re-entered into the system to update the flight ratings but will be empty. Also some flights might be cancelled because the aircraft are left at wrong airports after the update. Please keep these issues in mind, especially for the actual patch we will be announcing in time.

As tests with data from a German game server have shown, you’ll be able to see dependable figures after about 4 to 5 days the latest as that’s when your company’s image has formed and the booking cycle is running regularly again.

EDIT: We will postpone the test for at least one or two days as we want to do some more tweaking before letting the beast into the wild.

EDIT 2: Still working on some tuning which will probably take another week. We try to get it done as soon as possible.

The road ahead

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

It’s been four months already since AirlineSim took on the international stage. Since then we’ve launched a brand new portal, build a small but nice community and are about to start our second game world. Time to take a look at the things to come: It took some time and plenty of discussions, but here we are to present the versions of AirlineSim to see the light of the day over the coming months and beyond.

(more…)

Focus: The recommendation feature

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

Not long ago Aquila, our central account management system, got its first major update since the launch of the international AirlineSim community. One of the bigger new features was only mentioned as a sidenote so far: The friend recommendation feature.

The way it works is both obvious and simple: After entering the name and email address of a friend, we send an invitation to your buddy, asking him whether he wishes to try out AirlineSim. If he signs up, enjoys the game and buys at least 300 credits, we’ll give you 100 credits as a little thank you for free! By doing this you will support the development of AirlineSim and, as a positive side-effect, your friend will most likely be grateful for the heads-up as well.

If you wish to spread the word, simply click here (you need to be signed in). In case you have questions or comments regarding this feature and its purpose, please drop us a note here or on the forums.

Stay connected: AirlineSim on Twitter

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

There are often tiny bits of information that are not worth to publish a news post or to create a new thread on the forums for. Nevertheless these information might be useful, intersting and/or important to you. These could be small bugfixes outside of the regular patch cycle, technical hick-ups or noteworthy events in the community. To make it easy for you to follow these things when you don’t happen to be a big chatter, we have created an account with Twitter. We will keep this stream updated with all these small things you’d miss otherwise.

As we are at it: You might have noticed the new “Follow us” box on the right side of the page. There are other networks we and our fans are using and we will try to complete the content of this box over time. If you happen to be an active member of a social network or similar site and you run an AirlineSim group or community there, please let us know and we’ll be happy to add a link to it. You know where to find us ;)

newsletterrss