GearCity FBS DLC Named! Minor AeroMogul Update!
🕑 Added 2023-03-22 15:46:01 +0000 UTCVoting has concluded for the GearCity FBS DLC. A majority of voters selected the "2nd Gear" option. So I will go ahead and set up that in the next few days and get the initial build uploaded.
Time issues (or the lack thereof) and slightly more difficult implementations have dampened progress on the FBS. I currently have 7 bounties remaining, of which 2 are over 75% complete. I will postpone the self-funded "DLC launcher" bounty to the v2.0.0.9 update to Classic GearCity. Its primary purpose is to PR the FBS DLC "2nd Gear" anyway.
This leads me to AeroMogul. Unfortunately, because of my timing issues and the difficulty implementing two of the bounties, I haven't been able to put any work into AeroMogul this month. Originally I intended to be able to put "Mondays," approximately 5 hours into the game a week while working on the FBS. But with the current delays, I couldn't justify it. As such, there isn't a big AeroMogul progress update this month. But I will update you on the progress made from the last report.
In my last update, I put out a cliffhanger about the amount of data we'll process in AM. My initial test run contained a single variable for all data points, resulting in 40GB and 4 minutes of processing time! Ouch. After some time, I worked that down to 7GB and 4 minutes, and then further down to 4GB and 4 seconds! While I think 4 seconds is adequate, the 4GB leaves a sour taste. Additional variables would eat a gig of ram each. And we need a few, probably around 20 variables for route processing. This leads to minimum ram requirements of 32GB. No.
Luckily, I figured out a better way architecturally to handle passenger demand data points. Theoretically, this should eat approximately 400-700MB, not much more ram for additional variables, and it should be faster than 4-seconds. The only downside is that the AI won't have as much data as the player, but at the same time, I think it's too much data for the player to use anyway, putting each other on an equal footing. Now it's just a matter of getting time to implement it.
