Hey everyone,
It has been busy around here. Two things shipped that I think you will like: a new set of buttons in the editor that make posts and comments a lot more useful, and a pile of updates for Virtual Airlines. Here is everything.
New in the markdown editor
Wherever you write on the site, the toolbar has some new buttons.
Mention a member. Click the @ button, search for someone and they are added to your text as a mention. The person you mention gets a notification with a link straight to what you wrote. This works in comments, forum posts and Virtual Airline discussions. It is only turned on where other people can read what you write, so you will not see it in private messages. If you edit a post later, only people you newly mention are notified, so nobody gets pinged twice.
Link an addon or a flight plan. Search for one and it is inserted as its share card, a picture with the name, creator and numbers that links to the page. Flight plans did not have a share card before, so I built one. It shows the route, distance, flight time and who made it.
Link a Virtual Airline. Pick an airline and you can drop in its card, or link to one of its tracked flights, jobs, events or scheduled flights. Job, event and scheduled flight links scroll to the item and highlight it when you open them.
Link a forum topic or post. Search for a topic, then link the whole topic or a single post in it.
The card and link buttons show up in the longer editors, and are left out of short fields like reports and messages so they stay tidy.
Virtual Airline updates
Your own address. Owners can claim a name and get an address like name.va.hangaraddons.com. Names can be as short as two characters. The site checks that the name is free as you type, and the same field is on both the create form and the edit form. When an airline has its own address, links to it use that address everywhere, and pages that do not belong to the airline stay on hangaraddons.com. Your sign in carries across, so you stay signed in. The share dialog uses the airline's own address too.
Flights page and scheduling. Every Virtual Airline now has a Flights tab. Pilots or the airline can schedule flights, and you can leave a flight open for any pilot to take. The Telemetry app picks up your scheduled flights, so you can choose the one you are about to fly right from the app, and the flight is matched when you take off. Jobs can be tied to scheduled flights too.
Telemetry app 1.9. The app records much more about each flight than before, like configuration, engines, weather and forces, and stores it with the flight.
Links on tracked flights. A tracked flight now links to the airline's own things when we can match them: the aircraft in the fleet (by tail number), its livery, and the airline's flight plan if you loaded a route in the sim. If we cannot match something with confidence, we leave the link off rather than guess.
Flight plan suggestions. The Flight Plans tab now suggests plans based on routes your pilots have actually flown lately. If the airline already has a plan for a route, it opens it. If not, it opens the flight planner with the airports and route filled in, so making it takes a few clicks.
Job board currencies. Rewards are now written properly, with two decimals for dollars, like $1,250.50. Airlines can pick from 35 currencies, each shown the way people read it, and airlines that prefer their own made up money, like credits, can keep using that.
Airline API for apps and tools. Owners can create an airline key with permissions, and tools can then read and write data for your airline. Apps can save their own data on your aircraft and pilots, add flights they tracked, and plan or cancel scheduled flights. If you are building something for Virtual Airlines, the developer guide has every request and example: https://hangaraddons.com/virtual-airlines/bot-api
Smaller things.
- A Virtual Airlines menu in the header with Flights, recently active airlines, Create and the Telemetry app.
- Pilot profiles show the performance of all their tracked flights.
- File sizes now go up to terabytes, so no more 1747.4 GB.
- A pilot who changed airlines in the middle of a flight no longer shows as flying twice.
- A fix for hard to read hover text in the theme menu and on the Remove photo button.
Tell me what you think
If something looks off, or you have an idea for what should come next, reply here. Bug reports are especially welcome, since a lot of this just went live.
Thanks for being part of this community, Mike