The turn of the year traditionally is a time to reflect and to look ahead. It's no different for me, so I sat down to remind myself of what the team, our volunteers and myself achieved in 2025 and what my plans look like for 2026 and beyond. I condensed my findings into this year's State of the Game video which you can find on YouTube.
A small disclaimer might be in order, though: At roughly 45 minutes runtime, "condensed" might be a bit of an overstatement. If you cannot or do not want to spare that amount of time to listen to me ramble about the project, please find a summary of the key takeaways below.
Review of 2025
With personal matters (which I discussed in some depth in the previous State of the Game video) mostly stabilised, I really seem to have found my groove in 2025. This shows in sheer numbers: I wrote a total of 47 development logs, there where 22 versioned released to production and the number of weekly active players rose by about 20% over the year.
The major development topics were:
- Aircraft Performance 1.5: A project which already started in 2024 and was completed in 2025, at least in terms of software development. It brings an improved set of formulas for aircraft fuel consumption and takeoff/landing performance. Our data volunteers, first and foremost @Priller, are working on researching the required data so we can roll this feature out to all game worlds.
- Individual Travel Request Generation (bulk): Arguably the main development effort of 2025. It transferred one of the key features of the Technology Demonstrator to AirlineSim, albeit in the form of a hybrid between the old ORS and the new Distribution System (DS). Travel requests are generated and booked for each airport once a day rather than continuously as it was the case with the Technology Demonstrator. The feature has been available for public preview in the new Paine game world since September and it lays the foundation for many things to come. More on this below.
- Yeager XI was the first game world to launch with new "aircraft traders", each with a slightly different personality that determines when, at which price and for how long they offer their aircraft on the market.
- Besides an extensive Spring Cleaning in - well - spring of 2025 that consisted of many long overdue updates of frameworks and libraries we use, I also laid the technical foundation for the upcoming UI refresh. This includes an API (an often requested feature in and of itself, albeit not public yet), a new frontend framework (the first bits to use this new framework are the changelog and game world info overlays) and the whole build and localisation pipeline for the new UI.
- The very end of the year saw a passion project of mine come to fruition: Location-based Demand! It was a time-boxed project right before the holidays and as such was still quite "rough around the edges" when it launched with the Wright game world.
I already hinted at @Priller's volunteer work in the aircraft data department, but I want to use this opportunity once more to thank all our volunteers who continue to make this project possible throughout 2025:
- Everyone who provided corrections for our airport and geo data as well as @koenc86 who maintains the airport data files and researched loads of demand and other data updates, resulting in hundreds, if not thousands of updates over the course of the year.
- All our volunteer translators who work to make AirlineSim accessible in more languages. A special shoutout this time to @GINS who finished a complete Japanase translation in 2025 and to @UGameGerm and @lunar who provided an equally thorough translation to Simplified Chinese, which I was able to make a supported language on Steam just yesterday!
Plans for 2026
My immediate plan (as in: over the coming weeks) is to wrap up the remaining work on Individual Travel Requests and Location-based Demand. This refers to the remaining development work...tuning of those features will go on for quite some time.
This will be followed by another "Spring Cleaning", albeit a far smaller one than the 2025 edition.
After that, I will dive right back into the UI Refresh project, by far the single biggest and most important project of 2026. So far, this project has been a blocker for most "UI-heavy" projects, which partly explains the focus of 2025 development on "non-visible features" like demand distribution.
Besides smaller updates and maintenance releases that will continue to be rolled out in between UI development, I plan on adding a new ORS/DS Search Interface as soon as the new UI is ready. If enough time remains, I really want to get started on Fares as well, a feature that rose in priority after our experience with the new Individual Travel Requests in Paine.
Longer-term development plans
My overarching goal for the coming years is to complete a set of updates and improvements that warrants a version bump to "AirlineSim 7.0". This isn't a milestone as much as a "target definition"...all the features that make up version 7 will be rolled out continuously, just as I've practiced it over the past years.
Those features will be, among other things:
- A modernised look and feel to make the game more accessible to new players (especially on Steam), including better on-boarding.
- A fleshed out "Distribution System" with Fares, Booking Classes and Advanced Interlining in place, among others, that will serve as the foundation for many of the features on our roadmap.
- Replacement and/or modernisation of most "Gen-1 features" of the game, so for example anything to do with staff. These features look and feel incredibly outdated and are ridden with bugs.
As always, the exact scope remain "to be defined". But the above three are the main areas I want to address.
I am looking forward both to working away on all of these items as well as to your feedback. So make sure to join the discussion on the forums or leave a comment below the State of the Game video!
Martin