AirwaySim Development update

[Sami]

Hi all,

As you saw from our Christmas post, the year 2022 was a bit unexpected for me, and with AirwaySim development too.

The aviation industry, where I work full-time as an Airbus pilot, bounced back quickly and rapidly during the winter and spring, leading me flying around 800 block hours during the year, which is a few hundred more than usually. The entire summer was for example spent working at around 25% overtime rosters and summer vacation was a whopping 5 days in total. I had also started some other big projects during Covid, such as an IT development project for another small local airline and also personally studies for a business degree, to keep the future afloat if the flying work would have gone sour during the pandemic. This all lead to a rather big lack of time for all projects not requiring immediate work or help, including AirwaySim. And as you saw the updates for AWS during 2022 were minimal but I did the best to keep things running smoothly and games launching on regular basis.

But, the year 2023 is hopefully a much better. I have decided to start flying only part-time roster, and the other projects I mentioned are either finished now or will be soon. Since I do like to focus also on other projects than just the main profession of flying, I intend to dedicate much more time into AirwaySim development during 2023. The ground work for some major updates has been already laid during 2021, with development of a totally new website / backend framework, and the usability and graphical design of a new mobile-friendly user interface.

As the first step, a new development build (internally dubbed AWS version 1.4) will be put into open beta testing shortly. This is a major technical update to the route and flight structure of the simulation.

In this update there aren't that many visible changes to the user, but the target has been to upgrade the route database structures and designs to better suit how the simulation has developed over the years, how users are using the features, and to support the direction I wish to take the development. With the old design, dating back from the origins of the sim, these plans would have been very difficult.

Major benefits of the update will be for example that we can technically have unlimited flight legs on a route (A-B-C-D-A?), unlimited techstops on a route, a single route can be assigned to multiple aircraft (meaning 7-day scheduling out of the box), and allowing the creation of other possible future features such as flight connections. At first though the current system is simply converted to use the new one, and no features are yet changed since it has to be made sure everything works normally since huge parts of the system code have changed - and this is where the open beta comes into play.

There are a few final tweaks to be done, but expect a separate news of the test game before new year.


Happy New Year everyone!

[Sami]

The test game of the new backend features is now open. Check the details from the testing subforum: https://www.airwaysim.com/forum/index.php/topic,91100.0.html