Hello fellow airline directors,

As written in the last blog update our focus is now on development for version 14.

The first major feature we are working on is a redesign of how the game handles countries.  Countries are now divided into areas. These areas are combined into countries. The interesting thing about this new system is that an area can now switch from one country to another. This means that we can now accurately simulate border changes due to war or other causes. For this to work, we changed all country ID's in the airline and airport files to area ID's. (note for the modders: the locations/borders of the new area ID's will be released shortly in the forum) While we have implemented all border changes due to all wars, it should be noted that it is possible to ignore wars and have no borders change throughout the game, unless it is not a temporary change.

With this new country system comes another nice little feature: country relations. These relations will further improve our demand model. We have implemented two different kinds of relations: one for business and one for holidays. The relations that are currently implemented are true for 2000-2003. This means that anything before 2000 uses data of 2000, and anything later than 2003 also uses data for 2003. In the next couple of releases this should become 1994 - 2018. But for the far future, we have the data available from 1940 on, meaning we have yet another step ready to become fully historically accurate. (Data before 1940 might become arbitrary based on major events)

Besides these changes, we have implemented some optimizations for ordering of aircraft. It is now possible to order the same aircraft with different configurations. 

After we finish these tasks we will focus on updating the employees. But more on that in the next devblog.

The Devteam