Posts Tagged ‘Community’

AirlineSim is celebrating!

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

January 2002. On a cold, dull winter day, the idea for a web-based multiplayer airline simulation took shape. Just a few days later, the AirlineSim project is born!

It’s been 10 years since that first milestone, and the small idea has grown into a large project, allowing thousands of players to run the airline of their dreams – and around which a lively and active community has formed.

To celebrate, this year we want to put on a really special event. On September 22nd, 2012, we will join former team members – and our fans – in one of the most beautiful regions of Mallorca for a look back at 10 years of AirlineSim!

Join us!

All the information you’ll need to take part in this unique event can be found on this special website:

en.airlinesim.aero/mallorca2012

We are looking forward to meet you on Mallorca!

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December Status Update

Sunday, December 4th, 2011

Find below a long overdue summary of current information on AirlineSim:

Development Status
As most active players have doubtlessly notices, we didn’t make as much development progress as we’d like to have made. The prime reason for this is that we need to finish another (non-game) project which is taking far more time than planned. Nonetheless, more of these side projects will be required in the future as we didn’t succeed in shaping AirlineSim into a viable business over the past two years since its internationalization.

Of course, development and operation of AS will continue, even though we will need to make some adjustments to our development process. That said we will move away from the classic patchday model towards a continuous update strategy. Small and medium-sized changes will be deployed as soon they are ready and tested. This allows for a far more flexibility during development and a better utilization of our limited time budget. Larger features – like the new aircraft configurator scheduled for 1.6 – will be broken down in as many sub-features as possible and integrated piece by piece. To some extend this should prevent endless waiting periods in which no new new features are released due to a lack of resources.

We’ve been living this new approach for a few weeks now and you can follow and comment on our progress on the development logbook board.

AirlinSim becoming even more international
For some time now, AirlineSim has been available in Dutch. Although the game has been built with localization in mind from day one, this is the first new translation to be introduced since we launched in English two years ago. But now we got three additional translations in the makings which should be ready for release in a few months time: Chinese, Spanish and French. A big thank goes out to the voluntary supporters who have chosen to tackle this immense amount of work free of charge!

Christmas meet-up in Salzburg
This is a final reminder that this years Christmas meet-up is coming up! The event will take place on December 17th in the beautiful Austrian city of Salzburg. All details can be found non the respective board. The Christmas meet-ups are traditionally geared towards being more family-friendly and less aviation-focused. The two main parts of the program are strolling the traditional Christmas market and enjoying local cuisine in cosy atmosphere. To make long things short: The ideal way of getting to know your fellow alliance member or your biggest opponents!

Events 2012
Important information for anybody who wants to book early or has to make arrangements with his employer: The dates for next year’s community event are out! Since 2012 marks the 10th anniversary of AirlineSim, special emphasis should be put on the special birthday event on Mallorca.

  • International Meet-Up, Dublin: June 9th and 10th 2012
  • 10th Anniversary Convention, Mallorca: September 22nd and 23rd 2012
  • Christmas Meet-Up, Location will be determined in Salzburg, Dezember 15th 2012

Further information and details on the particular events follow. As always, feel free to discuss the new events on our forums!

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International and German communities merged

Sunday, June 19th, 2011

This is just a short post to let you know that – following our earlier announcement – the up-to-now separate international and German communities of AirlineSim have been successfully merged into one this past Saturday.

For our international players this means that – besides the new forums – four new game worlds are now available in both English and German! Two of these (Idlewild and Devau) feature special configuration options, so head over and have a look! All new game worlds are listed on your dashboard in the account management system, including details on the special settings.

Please note that these game worlds were offline for several hours yesterday while they were being moved to new hardware. This means it might take up to a few days before they have picked up all their back-log. Thank you for your patience!

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New discussion boards online

Thursday, June 9th, 2011

EDIT: The new forums are now officially in service! The old ones are kept for reference here.

A crucial part of our “community unification effort” are unified forums for all players, no matter what language they speak. Although it will be another week until the transition of our German community into the international one takes place, we have put up our new discussion boards already so you can have a thorough look at them before our current board goes into “read-only mode” some time next week.

If you already possess an account (you definitely will if you are playing AirlineSim right now), just head here and sign-in: community.airlinesim.aero No sign-up required!

We are employing a different software for the new forums and as such, both you and us will probably need some adjustment time to get used to all the new or different features. Especially the fact that these boards will be multi-lingual means that we will require a few weeks to streamline our processes of posting announcements, dealing with UAB proceeding, organizing events and similar things that are relevant to all players independent of language. Please stick with us!

PS: We recommend to start new discussions on the new forums from now on!

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Two communities become one

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

As you might know, AirlineSim has been in existence since long before the first international game world started in 2009. In fact, AirlineSim was founded almost 10 years ago, as a purely German-language hobby project, and has since developed into the game it is today. The division of the game into separate German and international communities occurred for contractual reasons, rather than resulting from any desire to split the playerbase.

This June, however, this community split will come to an end! As we will be saying goodbye to our German publisher, we will have the ability to merge our German and international communities under one roof – both administratively and technically, giving us an integrated support and administrative structure for the first time – and, naturally, we’ll be taking the opportunity to do just that.

There are plenty of advantages for both the players and us in this deal: First of all, all players – independent of their language – will be able to use any of our game worlds! When we make the switch (probably on June 18th), there will be a total of 7 game worlds available, with an 8th and more being added in the near future. We will set up a new discussion board* with both language-specific and common areas which will only require a single login and give access to the latest information to all players at the same time. Last but not least, the overhead caused by running two completely independent systems will be reduced considerably so we will have more time for what’s most important: Working on AirlineSim!

If you currently only have an international account, you won’t have to do anything. We will let you know as soon as the new forums are ready, but beyond that everything will mostly remain the same for you. In case you also call a German account your own, please refer to the more elaborate announcement on our German page for more in-depth information.

* The current forums will be set to read-only and kept available for future reference.

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Easter Update

Friday, April 22nd, 2011

After a rather long period of silence it’s about time for a status update concerning current and future AirlineSim development.

Results from Hamburg: Easier access!

How many steps does it take to get an aircraft flying in AirlineSim? We’ve been asking ourselves this question on this years team meeting in Hamburg and after short counting the answer was: About 10! Even though these do not even include optional steps like browsing for the best starting airport or the optimal launch fleet they pose a major hurdle for beginners and make many of them quit the game before they have scheduled a single flight.

To tackle this issue and the resulting loss of new players we have agreed on a package of “immediate measures” to be implemented in the upcoming patch to 1.5.7. Their basic goal will be to automize as many steps as possible in between sign-up and first take-off. Beginners should not have to quit the game because they are overwhelmed by the interface but instead should have an easy start so they can investigate AirlineSim’s rich and detailed feature-set after they’ve got their basic enterprise up and running.

In practice it will look like this: Whenever an airline is founded, it has a default on-board service profile set up already that will be used for all flights. A maintenance provider is pre-selected and aircraft are equiped with a seating configuration on delivery/purchase. If no such configuration exists yet, AirlineSim will create a standard one. All auto-generated profiles can of course be deleted and replaced by own ones. Beyond this, staff management has been streamlined considerably – not only for beginners. Pilots are hired or trained automatically on assignment while the management of cabin crews has been completely automized and does not have to be handled manually at all anymore. Aircraft are ready to use right after purchase – having seating installed and crew assigned – and flights can be scheduled immediately. Further optimizations are planned but might not make it into the next release.

Before the pro-gamers among you get scared of loss of control, behold: All these comfort tools can be disabled in your custom settings and for existing accounts and companies they won’t be activated in the first place.

On our way to 1.6

Other than these immediate changes we have layed out the core goals for 1.6. What we are thinking about in detail will not be disclosed just yet. But one important fact should be announced already: According to current planning, 1.6 probably won’t be backwards compatible. For this reason we want to realize as many feature ideas and improvements in the lifespan of version 1.5. As with the broader 1.6-goals, these changes will adhere closely to the results of the survey we ran on out forums just a few weeks back and which generated some pretty clear results on what things about AirlineSim are most important to you. Consequently, we want to work on these areas as much as possible.

To put long things short, this sums up our current roadmap: AirlineSim has to become more accessible to new players, but it will also remain a specialized, complex and challenging business simulation.

As always we are neither able nor willing to answer the inevitable question for a realese date. The only thing for certain right now is the fact that quite a bit of Jet-A will get burned before 1.6 will hit the browsers. Another important piece of information: If 1.6 actually proves to be incompatible with previous versions, all 1.5 game worlds will remain in operation until community interest vanishes.

New game world and version 1.5.7. This and that.

As soon as development and testing of the new comfort tools as well as some performance improvements has been completed, we will patch all game worlds to 1.5.7. After these changes have proven themselves in production we would like to start a new international game world for which there is no launch date yet, of course. We also got a data patch in the pipeline but it won’t be completed before Easter.

Last but not least we’d like to point your attention to the upcoming community meet-up in Prague. If you want to be there on June 11th make sure to book your flights and hotels as soon as possible. Prices are rising by the day! As usual, the meet-up and its program can be discussed on our forums.

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New approach to slot problem

Friday, April 1st, 2011

This of course was our contribution to April Fools Day ;-)

Tomorrow we will be holding our annual team meeting to discuss the further development of AirlineSim in its boadest sense. While preparing for this event, we addressed a somewhat smaller but nevertheless urgent issue: Lack of slots.

Every player knows the problem: After a game world is some weeks or even months old, free slots become scarce at most larger airports. This problem is fueled by the misuse of slots – for example by employing small props on trunk routes – or the intentional blocking of slots.

Unfortunately there is no simple solution to this issue. Every approach we have thought about so far has its own disadvantages. One-time or recurring payments for slots favor large airlines over small and young ones. Big airlines will always be able to afford their slots and thereby the occurence of the problem will only be postponed. A strict assignment based on size of aircraft and route is too rigid to allow for new or experimental airline concepts and as such does not provide a solution either. Implementing complex assignment rules from reality – like grandfather rights or similar mechanisms – would require a bloated and complicated interface and would – as most complex rules in a game do – cause several unwanted side-effects that cannot be anticipated in advance. The seemingly easiest solution – removing or softening the slot limits – could not find a majority among the team since it would effectively diminish one of AirlineSim’s most important features: The mere existence of actual resource limitiations. The idea of assigning slots for actual credits was short-lived and discarded for obvious reasons.

Following the success of the User Advisory Board we have therefore followed a totally different approach: If strict rules don’t suffice and when artificial intelligence won’t do, actual humans have to step in. As such, in the future slots will be granted by a so-called “slot manager” as soon as a certain treshold has been exceeded. This manager is elected by the airport’s local airlines for a fixed amount of time and he has to decide which flights will get approval and which won’t.

By means of this feature, the game is enriched by a completely new social and strategic aspect since from now on airports will differ in their “political attitude”. The players will keep their influence via the election and they will be able to decide whether they prefer a pro-corporation or a pro-start-up management. We will be able to judge whether this approach works as we envisioned it as soon as we have patched to version 1.5.7. This will be the patch to contain the changes. As long as no slot-manager is elected, slots are granted automatically every day while prefering airlines local to the airport or the airport’s country. To ensure a quick and smooth introduction we will provide “start managers” where desired. If you are interested in being one of these, please contact support and provide your airport and game world. If more than one application comes in for any given airport, the initial manager will be picked by lot.

We are looking forward to your feedback and are very excited about seeing this feature unfold within the game. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide a specific launch date for 1.5.7 as of yet.

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Our community events 2011

Monday, January 10th, 2011

They’ve become a tradition with AirlineSim and they are highly popular with their attendees: The community meet-ups!

Of course we will have these in 2011 as well and they will follow a by now proven pattern: Spread across the year there will be three events. The first will be the international meet-up in a non-German country, designed specifically for our international community. Then there will be the two-day AirlineSim Convention, an events geared towards the aviation and AirlineSim enthusiasts with a matching program. And last but not least we’ll end the year with the Christmas meet-up in cosy atmosphere with friends and family.

After several polls we decided on these places and dates for 2011’s events:

International Meet-Up: Prague, Czech Republic, June 11th/12th

AirlineSim Convention: Frankfurt, Germany, August 20th/21st

Christmas Meet-Up: Salzburg, Austria, December 17th/18th

Planning and preparation of the events will take place on the German and international forums and, as usual, participants and interested users are invited to help. More detailed information concerning the particular events will be released in time in this location.

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A short status report

Sunday, December 12th, 2010

Hi everyone – I’d just like to briefly outline what we’re currently working on, and what updates are planned for the next few weeks. First of all, I’d again like to draw your attention to our Christmas fundraiser, which will remain open until the 24th of December. Anyone who hasn’t yet made any donations still has two weeks to do so – remember, you’ll walk away with some free credits!

Data Patch D3 and Aircraft Data

There’s some good news and bad news to report on these fronts. First the good news: the D3 data patch will be released in December, and will bring with it a large number of new airports, including more than 30 in China alone. The patch also contains a lot of updated airport traffic information, a number of revisions to airport ground connection links and similar changes.

The bad news is that the aircraft data, which we were hoping to release alongside D3, has been a major headache. The patch will see the introduction of two new aircraft models – namely, the Airbus A330-200F and the Bombardier CRJ-1000NG – but our work in preparing for the introduction of these two aircraft has highlighted some significant ‘legacy’ issues with the way AirlineSim handles performance data. As a result of this, the performance of these new aircraft may in some ways be a little odd – their fuel consumption, for example, may not match their less-advanced predecessors, as a consequence of the (unfortunately well-known) shortcomings in the way fuel consumption is handled internally.

As a consequence of this, we’re intending to spend some time conducting a general overhaul of aircraft performance data and the way it’s handled, rather than focusing on new or otherwise neglected models. How this may end up looking is not currently clear, but there’s a chance the work may lead up to – and develop into – the next major update (i.e AirlineSim 1.6), in which case it’d bring with it a number of new features and major changes. Final decisions on this process aren’t being taken until 2011, however, so we’ll keep you posted!

Updates to the Payment System

We spent most of the past week working on our payment system. Our aim was to prepare the system for the introduction of new, more internationally-compatible payment methods, including support for foreign currencies. This should make AirlineSim available in a number of countries which have so far been mostly locked out of the game, for want of a suitable payment method for the majority of the prospective playerbase. This has taken – and is still taking – longer than we’d like, but the update will be going live over the next week, and the revised payment system should be entirely online by the end of the year. The German servers will continue to have their payments handled through 4players, so no change there.

The Next Patch: 1.5.5

Last but not least, some informaton on the next game system update. Our original intention was to make 1.5.5 a ‘hotfix’ for any problems introduced by 1.5.4 and the associated changes to the stock exchange system. However, this hasn’t really proved necessary; most of the changes are not very high on our priority list, while preventing stock price surges after IPOs is not really practical right now given the amount of work that would be involved. Therefore, those changes already implemented will make their way into the revised v1.5.5, which we’re planning to release in the last week before Christmas. Besides the usual bug fixes, 1.5.5 will probably contain some new and very useful analysis tools, which should help you optimise your existing routes. There’s a small preview of them here: Click!

That about wraps things up for the time being! We’re also organising our usual Christmas meetup this weekend in Nuremberg – you can find information on the forums, as always.

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Summer. Airplanes. Amsterdam!

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

What’s better than a combination of warm, sunny weather, the smell of burned kerosene, some heavy metal passing over your head, plenty of good food, some cool beers and long discussions with fellow aviation geeks about your favorite airline simulation? Can’t think of anything? We neither!

Summer is coming and we will have our traditional summer meet-up! For the first time ever the event will take place in the wonderful city of Amsterdam, Netherlands, with the official part of the meeting commencing on August the 7th, 2010. Usually there is some inofficial get-together on the following day for all those who don’t leave the day before already.

As mentioned above and contrary to our city events (like London 2010, don’t forget to sign up!), the event is supposed to have a somewhat strong aviation focus. As usual though, the program is more or less open and we look forward to your suggestions on how we can make this a fun event for everybody! We invite anyone to join the discussions on our forums.

For those of you who are on Facebook, we have also created an event page HERE!

See you in Amsterdam!

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