Due to a number of minor bugs within the beta version of Airport Madness 3, release will have to be delayed a few days. I shall try to keep my promise of “June”, and will resist the temptation to delete all prior blog posts containing promises of release dates 🙂

I’ve received some great last-minute ideas that I decided to implement, including several emergencies. The tornado was not my idea, but that of my young son. He was insistent that it would be a crowd-pleaser, and even sketched out his vision of an air traffic control supervisor who warns of approaching doom.

Here is a brief update on the progress of our latest air traffic control game, Airport Madness 3. We are putting on the final finishings to this product, as well as final testing for problems. We are aiming for a release date of Friday, June 25, 2010. Airport Madness 3 will have a sticker price of US$9.99. There will be a free version available in early July.

Unlike the full version, which offers a one-hour ‘level-based’ exercise as well as ‘continuous-play’ mode and ‘challenge mode’, the free game will offer a sudden-death ‘How much traffic can you handle?” challenge that gradually builds in intensity and complexity. The free version will exist on Facebook as well as a variety of game portals on the internet.

My apologies for not posting more progress updates for our latest air traffic control game, Airport Madness 3. I’ve been a bad blogger (Sigh…). Progress on Airport Madness 3 is actually moving along very well. We estimate a release in mid-June.

We have lots of neat new features to brag about: Emergencies, challenges, snow, runway assignment, speed control, holding patterns, change of active runway, plus a mammoth-sized resolution of 1000×725. That’s about as big as we can make it without disqualifying the 15% of you who are still running 1024×768 resolution (You know who you are 🙂

Probably the coolest feature of Airport Madness 3 is the Adobe AIR platform, which automatically checks for product updates. The release of Airport Madness 2 in May of last year was rather painful, as there were several minor adjustments that needed to be made during its’ first month after release, requiring buyers to have to visit the website for update information. Now it’s all automatic. Technology is so amazing.

Here are some screen captures of Airport Madness 3. Please bear in mind, the actual resolution is much larger than the images below. These images are only meant to show off the parallel-runway operation. To view an actual-size screenshot, click here.

Airport Madness 3 is progressing well. You may have noticed that the release date has been pushed back to June 2010. We learned from the release of Airport Madness 2 the value of thorough testing before release, and we intend to launch a solid game with hopefully no major issues.

When you create an air traffic control game or simulation, you must build a great deal of “intelligence” into the aircraft. For example, if two aircraft are taxiing towards each other on crossing paths, how do they decide who-stops-for-who? What at first seemed like a programming challenge quickly revealed itself to be a trigonometry nightmare. For example, how do two artificial aircraft decide who should stop in the image shown here? The answer is, whichever aircraft has a smaller relative angle to the other shall stop. I almost had to phone up my Grade 10 math teacher to figure that one out. Creating this simple rule added a couple of weeks to our project. We also received a great suggestion from someone to incorporate pushbacks into our game, whereby an aircraft is moved backwards out of its’ gate before commencing taxi. However, the concept of backwards-moving airplanes threw a wrench into our formula above, since all of the relative angles get thrown out of whack when you reverse direction. As always, we developed a workaround to the problem. However, these things require time.

You may be asking yourself, “Doesn’t air traffic control decide who taxiis and who stops?”. In reality taxiways are controlled, however parking aprons are not. In the real world of air traffic control, most of the “action” is on the runways and in the air. Controlling taxiways is generally kinda dull. Like the earlier version of this game, Airport Madness 3 is about runway management including airborne conflictions. The apron/parking conflictions are left to the pilots to figure out.

Airport Madness 3 has had a few other challenges, most notably the large resolution which increases CPU demand on computers. After building out the game’s foundation one month ago (a very basic no-frills single-level test platform) we noticed some performance issues as well as some unusual aircraft behavior. We decided not to move forward until these issues were resolved. I am pleased to say that these issues have been successfully eliminated and we are now moving forward with the addition of pilot voices, game options and other details. Please sign up for the newsletter above to be first in line for its’ release.