0.16.0 - Your airline runs its own timetable now

You all told me the management side was too thin. Fair. So I went looking for what was actually eating your time and it turned out to be admin.

Building a timetable by hand meant clicking in flight after flight, one aircraft at a time, making sure each plane got home again with a legal turnaround. That is a real job at an airline. It is also not a decision. It was soaking up all the attention that should have been going into the interesting stuff: what to fly, where, how often, and for how much.

So it is gone.

Say when the route flies. That's it.

Open a route and add a departure, a time, and the days it runs. Want a morning bank and an afternoon one? Add a second departure. Want it Monday to Friday only? Untick the weekend.

Your fleet gets assigned to it automatically. You never place a single flight.

Aircraft have a home now

Each plane is based somewhere, and it flies out and back from that base. Which means where you put your metal genuinely matters, a route has to touch a base for that aircraft to be able to serve it. Move a plane to a new base and its whole week changes to suit.

When it can't do what you asked, it tells you

This is the bit I'm most pleased with. There's a new Assignment page under Network that answers the question the game could never answer before: why isn't my route flying what I asked for?

EGLL–KJFK — 9 of 14 flown. No aircraft based at EGLL has the range with a full cabin.

That's a shopping list, not an error message. It'll also tell you when it had to substitute an aircraft type you didn't pick, and which of your planes are sitting idle because no route reaches their base.

A few other things

• The Schedule page is now a view of what your fleet is flying, across the whole network, rather than somewhere you do work. You can still take any single aircraft off automatic and fly it by hand if you like having the control.
• Changes take effect next week. A timetable that's already being flown doesn't get rewritten underneath you — edit freely, and it all goes in together when the week turns. (Anything you change before the day's first departure goes in straight away.)
• The tutorial teaches the new loop.

Your saves are fine

Your existing timetable gets read back into route plans, keeping the departure times and days you had. Nothing to redo.

One thing to know: a save from 0.16.0 can't be opened by an older version of the game. If you want to be careful, take a copy of your save before you load it.