Originally the motto for this game was "There are no runways here"... well, now there are!
Update 1.3.0 introduces them, along with a larger world map, and other tweaks and fixes requested by the community. As always, I'm super grateful about everyone's feedback and support!
Currently the airstrips only consist of a runway with the checkpoint flag pole. Each runway has a randomly generated heading, displayed on the map as 2 numbers as shown in the image above.
Each game world has 5 airstrips.
(Looking at it, I should probably also change the discovered checkpoint colors...)
Going into the pause menu, there's now a new "World Map" button that opens a map of the whole playable area. The gray dots are undiscovered checkpoints, the green ones are discovered, and the purple squares signify airstrips. Undiscovered hidden checkpoints aren't shown.
Upgrades and fuel are now 5 times more expensive on checkpoints that aren't on an airstrip.
There's also a new Checkpoint section in the Guides menu.
Sometimes when landing, you'd get terminal damage, even though the landing seems soft.
This is an issue that's commonly mentioned by players. I can't consistently reproduce it, but I was able to apply a change that seems to have fixed it.
There are still other potential causes though, so I'll revisit it if mentioned again.
Technical details: when the wheels touch the ground, the game keeps track of the aircraft's local vertical deceleration. If it's too high, it will trigger terminal damage. Before this update, the direction of the acceleration didn't matter. This meant that the crash could be triggered by the suspension's kickback rather than the ground impact.
My other main lead: another potential cause that I didn't address in this update is turbulence downdraft slamming the aircraft down into the ground without player reaction being possible. The reason I didn't address it is that landing in turbulent winds should be dangerous, and maybe it would be better to improve visual and sound feedback instead of directly nerfing the crashes.
Visited checkpoints are now colored in the delivery selection menu.
Fixed a bug where settings weren't persisted after unpausing.
Revisited a bug where going back from the save/load menu wouldn't close the confirmation prompt.
Added a message in the new game screen explicitly stating that the "Master" goal section is only achievable on Hard difficulty.
I really want to start adding buildings around runways and checkpoints, but before that, I want to get more feedback and tackle issues mentioned by the community.