Dev Log Week 2024-11/12: Time off

I was on vacation for the better part of week 11 and all of week 12, but I don’t want to break my devlog streak, so here is a quick update on what happened :slight_smile:

In week 11, I moved on to the account management bit of our Steam integration. To understand what this means, here a brief outline of how the Steam integration actually works:

AirlineSim is and will always be a browser-based game. So to bring it to Steam, we basically need to ship a native (Windows or Linux) application that wraps the AirlineSim web application. One could say we ship a very reduced, application-specific web browser.

When Steam launches AirlineSim, our native “wrapper app” first retrieves credentials for the logged-in user. It then opens a Steam-specific page of our account management system and passes those credentials. The account management pages then try to find an existing AirlineSim account for those credentials and if they can’t find any, they offer the user a form to create a new one. Once an account exists, we will show a reduced account management page that allows a user to see their active game worlds, select a game world, add an email address to their account (so they can play without Steam) etc.

Most of the above actually already exists for Prosperous Universe, so a large chunk of the work is copy&paste, then reducing code duplication and finally design adjustments. I am hopeful that the majority of this as well, as the actual deployment to Steam for end-user testing, will be finished in week 14 (despite Easter). But that’ll just be the technical foundation…the real work on making AS “feel right” on Steam will begin afterwards.

Week 12 I was out-of-office…but I spent a lot of time thinking about we could go about integrating the outcomes of the ASTD project into legacy AirlineSim. But that’s a topic for another day…and likely a lengthy write-up.

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