Work on the Steam client continued, albeit with a few road blocks. In a classic example of “seemingly trivial things blowing up the schedule”, the matter of “opening external links in the system’s native browser” caused quite a bit of extra work.
Here’s the thing: As discussed, AirlineSim technically is a website. So the “Steam client” is merely a stripped-down browser that shows that website when someone opens the game through Steam. For anything that’s actually a part of the game, we of course want all links to open within that frame. But any link to a page that’s not, like the handbook or the forums, we want the operating system to open in the browser the user has set as their default.
This, in fact, requires a certain permission to be granted by the framework we use for the Steam client, because it’s something that could be exploited by malicious websites. But the version we used requires to grant such permissions for every domain…sub-domains not allowed. With AirlineSim making heavy use of sub-domains (every game world address is a sub-domain of airlinesim.aero), this was a deal-breaker. Fortunately, a beta of the next major version of said framework as available and I was able to solve the problem by migrating. But it meant that a lot of previously unscheduled work as required to get it done. Oh well…
In other news, the build pipeline and general deployment process for the Steam client are mostly done. A few Windows-specific things still need to be wrapped up this week before I will move on to adjusting the game’s UI to work better within the Steam frame.
