August 2025

Greetings Everyone!

FBS Fundraising

We raised $741.81 in July. $658.95 came from Patreon, $82.86 from PayPal. That brings our total to $1,533.09 toward our $2,500 goal for Milestone #6. Remember, we’ll also have an additional bonus $500 from the failed artwork in Milestone #2.

At the current pace, we will likely hit our numbers in 2 months.

I have updated the data on the FBS website. Forgot to do it last month and clear up the paused contributions text. I also fixed browsers ignoring my "no cache" requests, so now your browsers should be downloading the up to date information rather than loading from cache.

Voting Points will be updated in the evening or tomorrow.

GearCity: 2nd Gear

Not much to report here. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to set up a meeting with Serhey yet. I also couldn’t find the time to create an XMPP to replace Skype, since Serhey is allergic to IRC.

While we in fundraising limbo, please don’t forget to submit your bugs and balancing feed back here on the forums. Long term play through save games are also very welcomed!

AeroMogul

Since the last AeroMogul update I completed the UI for the in-game chat system.
   

The body color will likely change to the blue we're using elsewhere, and I have not hooked up the in-game chat to the lobby servers. I have these connections in the Main Menu, and I will likely need to pass that information/connection to in-game. There is also some debate with myself if in-game communications needs to be piped through our server. I’m leaning toward not, though we may need to do so for matchmaking games just to moderate abuse. Thus, WAN and LAN games would be run through the host’s servers.

Anyway, none of that’s important now.

Moving on, the next bit of UI is the Aircraft Menu. I decided to start working on the Order New Aircraft UI, even though it is not the first in the list.
   

Much of this UI already exists in the other Aircraft UI I have made. And once I have completed this UI and a few others, I will need to look at all the iterations of the UI and condense them so that the extra information and layout is pretty much the same on each panel.

As you notice, much of this UI is blank or says “New Text.” I decided instead of making UI to display the 3-4 aircraft I had in the game at the time, I’d import my recent data entry work. So, much of the last few days went into writing the conversion tools, fixing bugs in the conversions, and then fixing issues server side so that the AI would buy the new designs. I made some large changes to the aircraft file formats, for example moving from year based flight, certification, and death dates down to the day based. (Internally the game tracks time in daily increments from 1900. Though turns in the game are currently week based.)

I fixed the issues I ran into. The AI is perfectly happy deciding what aircraft to buy out of the 100 or so in the game now. I also fixed a few bugs in the revenues and fuel expenses systems to get a better idea of how well the AI is doing… yeah, they’re not doing too well. I still have some work to do on the fuel consumption code. And the AI needs to get smarter with pricing.

Now it’s time for me to pass the aircraft information to the client and fill the UI. After which, I start making all the various functionalities work, and write the functions in the server for things like changing engines or adjusting seat designs and pitch values. And I would assume server side manufacturer factory production needs work and need in game UI to see what they’re doing.

Implementing the back-end for the engine and seat customization systems should allow me to complete those UI which already have some functionality. Though I may just jump over to route side of things in the client and clean up the company creation stuff so we can get a prototype out. I know you all are itching for it.

Unfortunately, I’m going to have significantly reduced work hours for the next 10 days. I should be able to make it up with increased data entry. Which is stuff that needs to be done anyway.

Speaking of Data Entry. We are now at 2001 hand selected AI generated character images. None of it gets added without my approval. I know AI generation is very controversial, but it’s a choice between faceless names and having these avatars. There is no way I could afford to pay a team of artists to paint (or photograph), age, and de-age, 25,000 1024x1024 pictures. It would be a complete waste of money if I could afford that. And I have never been a fan of paper doll methods of bulk avatar generation. We’re at 667 characters, about 8% of my goal.

Data entry wise, we hit 21 aircraft and engine manufacturers. 98 aircraft and 109 engines are now in the game with reality inspired data. I’ve completed one set of aircraft/engine data.

Taking a break from that, I switched over to airports again. I have completed America Samoa and Andorra (because Andorra doesn’t have any airports.) And begun working on cleaning up Angola’s data.

With the speed at which Milestone #6 is approaching, I hope to get the order new aircraft system, and it’s child subsystems complete by the time I start working on GC:2G again. Unless there is data entry requirements for Milestone #6, work on the data entry will continue unabated.