It is again time to post a newsletter for all of you who are interested of the AirwaySim project and to update with the latest development news. Firstly the good news. We have moved to our new dedicated server in January and it's working as expected. The game development is also progressing every day. Latest added features are for example:

- Payload / range system for aircraft (the aircraft's range depends on the payload carried - this feature enables a whole lot of other features that are added later, and this greatly enhances the realism of the game).

- Updated aircraft scheduling module with better usability (routes and maintenance are scheduled hour-by-hour to each aircraft).

- New route editor.

- Country data enhanced, countries now change names and status accoding to what has happened in real life (the break-up of Soviet Union for example). The traffic ratings at airports also change according to these country changes.

- Passenger demand calculation between airports has been enhanced with real statistical data on the background.

- New aircraft models and airports have been added (more to come..).

- Airline press releases system (works both in forums and inside the game interface).

- Plus many other smaller things.

Then some news that are not good. My real work is taking up a rather much time at the moment and that is a thing I unfortunately cannot affect. Coding of AWS is done on my free time among other things. And because of the big workload the release date and start of the public beta of AirwaySim is going to be pushed forward for some months. The initial target has been early 2008 (= basically right about now) but a slight timeout is needed to finish all the core features.

The game has been in playable condition for a long time now but some subpages are missing the content and proper layout and also some additional features (such as airport landing slots, company image/advertising, and aircraft seating config changes) are missing. I consider those to be still the "core" features of the initial release that must be completed before the release to beta.

Beta testing itself is then more testing of the load generated by the game and the functionality of the background calculation scripts. Most of the actual bug hunting has been already done by the small group of pre-beta testers so we are expecting to get out a rather bugfree and nicely working game once it's finished. And this has been the target all the way - not to release anything that is buggy or incomplete. As before there has never been a fixed time for the release and there won't be such now either as the goal is to release a working product. But like mentioned the work is progressing all the time.

Thanks for reading, stay tuned for more news later on!