Hello fellow airline directors. As this is the first devlog this year, I'd like to wish you all a happy new year! May this be the year you get your hands on the game.

Release Date Announcement

It's time to mark your calendar as we now have an official release date: The game will release on the 24th of May.

Thanks to the continued support on Patreon I have the funds to develop the game some more before I publicly release the game on Steam. Which will inevitably return in better ratings and thus more income to continue development afterwards. It may be a good idea to have some decent AI on initial release after all rather than promise it as a first update! Our Steam page will go live sometime in February, which I will of course announce via all our Social Media, so you can start wishlisting soon. ;)

That being said, I do expect to have a Closed Alpha on Steam for everybody who supported the game via Patreon with €15 or more sometime early - mid April.

Seatmap Update

As you can see the seatmap window is taking more shape, and the seatmaps themselves are starting to become customizable. If you are familiar with our previous version of TAP, you will recognize the colors we're using for the classes as well. One feature is new compared to TAPv2: cargo on the maindeck will be visualized and customizable. The settings will have an influence on the weight and thus range of the aircraft. Here you can see an example of a full freighter:

Some Extra Developments

One of our patrons told me the game crashed while loading the sandbox creator. Taking a closer look at the crashlog showed that he ran out of graphics memory. For this reason I decided to take on a course on better memory management (and writing custom extensions to the Unity Engine).  The results are there: I added a low graphics setting to the game and it already reduces VRAM usage by about 1.5GB. To achieve this I reduced the quality of the tiles of the world:

I will put some more effort in improving memory usage when we get closer to release.

I'm glad to say Discord Rich Presence is now enabled for TAP NG, which means you get to show your friends what amazing game you are playing:

Patreon Update

I kinda optimistically promised to have a small release every 2 - 3 days, but in the end I settled on a release every 1 - 2 weeks, which is more achievable. It still an improvement over the old bigger updates that came around every 6 - 8 weeks.

If you hadn't noticed already, we have a new update for you available here: https://tjoeker.itch.io/tapngdev0115

I do notice not that many people have sent in their airlines. If you are still interested in getting your airline in the game, feel free to send me a mail at theairlineproject@gmail.com.

Stay Tuned!

The current latest version (V0.1.1.5; January) is available here: TAP NG DEV 0115 (note that this is not a fully functional game yet; the payment is considered a donation to contribute to our Feature Queue)

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See you soon!

The Devteam