Hello respected community!
It's been too long since the last post, I deeply sorry for such communication silence and huge thanks for your patience.
The work on planes advanced a lot since the last post, yet there are some bugs to be fixed and flaws to be polished. I am finally almost satisfied with the AI movement on the ground, so we advanced this version to internal testing.
Airports & Planes in Mashinky
We are currently testing very promissing version of planes movement over the air and especially logic on airports.
Movement over the air is quite simplified, obstacle-awareness including hills, buildings and trees, changing altitude in circles when needed, curves with the same radius as trains on the ground etc).
On the ground, the sitation is a bit more challenging to implement. Player can build his airport tile by tile, using airport stands, hangars, taxi ways, runways and airport buildings.
This plays like a puzzle. Planes moves like road vehicles on roads, but occupy the whole tile (like road vehicle if occupies both directions on roads), so it can easily become locked by another plane heading opposite direction.
I've implemented several different approaches to address this (including automatically placed signals on bi-directional taxi ways, separate airport into signal blocks etc), but none of these survived due to either very low airport capacity, deadlocks or due to be non-intuitive for the player.
Current version uses only one-way taxi ways, planes can enter the same "signal-block" freely and the only restricted signal blocks for just one plane at the time are: Airport stands, Runways and Depots. "Signals" are placed automatically, so it is very satisfying to make your way to the perfect airport layout and share the "stamp" with community.
With the latest approach, the airport has high capacity with a small map footprint and most importantly without freqent deadlocks (there are some, but caused mostly by the wrong layout, easy to understand where the issue is).
Planes can lock runway when approaching to the landing point from air (5 tiles ahead from runway), cancel landing maneuver if anything goes wrong. Later it can waits on the very last junction on the ground if all stands are occupied.
There are first several planes ready as well as airport infrastructure, AI works almost seamlessly, so if this version survive testing, I will finish bugs and some last 3D assets, do last ballancing touches, prepare very first airport stamps and soon we will fly together on experimental branch. This will include driver mode, although it is very challenging to land properly :D
Borderless and improved driver mode
Meantime, there is a new (non-planes) update on experimental branch, adding many fixes, borderless window, improved driver mode etc, so you may already switch to experimental and try some new features before planes come!
Thank you for your time, reading this update and for your patience. I has been a bumpy flight, but we are almost landing with this delivery ;)
Best regards,
Jan