SkyChart: Airline Executive Playtest · published · build 23067849
Switching the Map Style dropdown wasn't actually switching anything. Casey would clear the old tiles off the table and forget to put new ones down until you panned the map. He's putting the fresh tiles down the moment you pick a new style now.
Satellite mode now has actual satellite imagery behind it, rather than a polite blank canvas. Casey ran the wires up to the imagery hangar, so picking Satellite from the dropdown loads real overhead photos.
If you turn Download HD Tiles off, the Satellite option greys out with a note explaining why — no more wondering why the Earth went dark after you flipped a different switch.
Player report from Hytaki: set up a hub in an airport where rivals had locked up the slots, couldn't launch any routes through it, no way to get the money back. The hub was just sitting there gathering dust.
Casey rolled out a Close Hub button next to the upgrade button on every player-owned hub. Two taps to confirm (so a stray click doesn't shut down your Tokyo flagship), and you get half your establishment money back. Level 1 hub returns $500K, Level 2 returns $2M, Level 3 returns $6M.
If the hub you close was your headquarters, Casey re-stamps the HQ paperwork on your next-best-owned hub automatically. The investments you'd been pouring into the hub each month don't refund — those benefits were already flying you around. But the establishment fee is fair game.
Crash report while buying plane upgrades: a stack of notification toasts tried to fade out at the same time, and the one displaced by a newer toast crashed on its way out. Casey now checks that the toast is still on the table before clearing the plate.
While he was at it, he widened last week's workshop inspector to cover every lever in the game, not just the ones in panels that build rows. Same kind of bug, just hiding in different cabinets — anything that rings on a delay. Same prevention, wider net.
After the aircraft swap fix, Casey went around the rest of the game and tightened the same kind of bolts on every panel that builds rows on the fly. Most were already snug. A few got the same waiting-until-you-let-go treatment: the swap dropdown on the route panel, the price slider, the music player, and a couple of others.
He also bolted a new inspector to the bench. Any future lever added to one of these panels gets checked on the way in, so the same kind of crash can't sneak back through a fourth door.
City dots now scale gently with the zoom level. Smaller when you're looking at the whole world, larger when you've zoomed in to plan a hub. The pins used to stay one fixed size at every zoom — fine in the middle, awkward at the extremes.
Fresh maps render at the correct size from the very first frame. Used to be the dots popped to a different size the first time you zoomed; that hop is gone.
The new bundled SkyChart map ships ready to roll, but a few players still had old cached map tiles from the previous map server clogging their disk. Casey ran the broom through and reclaimed the space — usually 10-200 MB depending on how much you'd flown around.
At deep zoom (4x and beyond), the runtime now stretches the highest bundled tile instead of pulling from the old cache. The map stays consistent all the way in.
City labels are on by default for new players. Click the layers menu to toggle them off if you want a quieter map.
Player report: opening a city, swapping the aircraft on a route, then doing it again, then a third time — game crashes around the third or fourth swap. Casey traced it back to the swap lever, rebuilding the panel while the lever was still moving. Lever now waits until you let go before the panel resets.
Same fix to the + and − buttons inside that panel. They were rebuilding the row mid-press, which is roughly like changing the runway under a plane that hasn't quite touched down. They behave now.
Player report: Launching the game with a flight stick plugged in killed the mouse cursor on sight. The game thought a stuck throttle slider was a player jamming the right thumbstick, hid the OS cursor, and refused to give it back. Casey has filed a strongly worded memo with himself.
Flight peripherals (HOTAS, throttle quadrants, yokes, rudder pedals, racing wheels) are now recognised by name and quietly excused from the controller-mode handoff. They stay connected; they just stop pretending to be gamepads.
Stick movement on its own no longer flips into controller mode either. Only a deliberate button press counts. A drifty analog stick can't grab input mode at launch anymore.
And just to be sure: the OS cursor is now explicitly set visible at boot, in case anything upstream left it hidden.
Toolchain prep so the world tile bundle ships clean. Java's installed, the map builder is staged.
The map tile rendering pipeline is fully wired now.
This patch is plumbing only — no visible change in-game yet. The actual world tile bundle ships once Casey gets his hands on a planet-sized map dataset (the kind small countries use to draw their own roads). The pipeline waits, ready.
Every airport in the game is now country-tagged. All 496 cities walked through the official ICAO database in one pass; seven lingering cities with decommissioned airports got tagged by hand.
176 country flag pixels arrived too. Tiny PNGs at 16×12 and 32×24, ready to pin next to city names, route endpoints, and anywhere else Casey wants to wave a flag.
All 29 supported languages caught up to the new strings — distance ruler, search labels, and recent patch notes. Foreign-language players see localized text from the next launch, no English fallback.
Hotfix from a player report. The new region and country labels were drifting across the map on every pan — the labels' positions were getting set once when they spawned and never updated again. Casey put a thumbtack through each one. Pan, zoom, all good.
Smoke test grew a guard, so this exact regression can't sneak back. Foundation for the localized map labels, lands clean.
Every airport now knows what country it sits in. Casey ran the official ICAO database against the city roster and tagged each one. Twenty cities backfilled in this patch as a sample; the full sweep across all 496 will be shortly.
Country flags are incoming, too. The plumbing for showing little flag pills next to city and airport names is in. Actual flag art lands once Casey finishes batch-converting the SVGs.
None of these changes how the game plays today. It's the foundation for country licensing fees and home-region selection — both arriving with the v0.4.0.0 realism arc.
The map tile system got rewired under the hood. Eventually, the tiles ship with the game itself instead of streaming over the internet — bigger download, no waiting for tiles when you fly somewhere new. The plumbing for that is in. Actual bundled tiles arrive in a future patch.
Tiles know about the active theme now. When the bundled SkyChart map ships, switching between Sunset, Midnight, and Daylight themes reverts the world without re-downloading a thing.
Localized labels on the way too. Country and region names will draw in your language, no matter which map style you've picked. The framework's there; the labels themselves arrive with the bundle.
No visible change today. This patch is the foundation Casey laid before the new map paint dries.
Long lists got a search box. The Hangar, the Bulk Replace candidate picker, and the Strategic Advisor recommendations now have a Search field at the top — start typing and rows that don't match fade out.
Hit Ctrl+F anywhere in those panels to jump straight to the search field. Esc clears it. The down arrow on the search field hops focus into the list, so the controller crowd doesn't have to grab the mouse.
More panels get the same treatment in the next patch. Casey's running the typeahead through every screen with more than ten rows.
Hold Shift and click-drag anywhere on the map. Casey runs the tape between any two points and tells you the great-circle distance plus a flight-time estimate at a typical cruise. Drag near a city, and the line snaps right to its airport.
Strategy Planner picks up the same readout — when you've got two cities loaded, the distance shows up in the panel without you having to leave the planner.
Steam Deck and controller players: tap RB to pop the ruler into aim mode. A button anchors each end, B button cancels. No more guessing whether Anchorage to Tokyo is worth the widebody.