Open Sky Mode
Happy to announce a major new gameplay mechanic in Luftrum: Open Sky. Mandatory checkrides and area licenses might be too restrictive if you just want to find a great new route, but they still function well as the backbone of a proper career mode. So instead of dropping the existing career progression, a new parallel mode was added called Open Sky Mode. This effectively unlocks the entire world and the full fleet, eliminates the need for checkrides and relaxes certain aspects of job flights - no mandatory club membership, insurance deposit or travel fees.
If you feel like "I'm flying a Twin Otter, surprise me today", then go to your Dashboard or Account settings and flip your game mode over to Open Sky Mode. You can switch back to Career Mode the same way. Currently your Career hours and Career wallet are tracked separately to avoid doing a few quick contracts in Open Sky then getting an unfair advantage in your career.
I'm thinking of reconciling the two modes in a Relaxed Career mode, which would be a difficulty setting within Career.
Contract Work
Contracts have been in the system already, and they unlock in career mode after logging 15 hours. In Open Sky Mode they're available right away, so a little howto: they're always a rotation sequence - arrival is the next leg's departure and you end where you started. They're more lucrative than quick jobs. In Open Sky Mode you always have one contract per aircraft class. They're generated based on your flight history (length, aircraft), so they're not available for everyone.
Job Template Engine
The job template engine was an initial placeholder so far, generating very generic flight missions. Now a workable alpha has been rolled out, which creates more credible flight stories. It's very alpha still, and will see continuous improvements. There are striking issues (coastal runs, island runs can be bogus, contract themes don't reflect underlying legs) that will be ironed out soon. Would be great to use AI-based mission generation (like JetCard), but we have 300,000 live jobs in the system - so it'd be comically expensive and has its own problems too.
And More
Now you can configure the rollup mechanism of your overall Luftrum score: click on Settings on the (https://pilothub.luftrum.world/grades)[Grades] page and define exactly what's factored in into your global score or not. You can fly practice flights going forward without polluting your average.
Job cards show departure-arrival country. The rental-payout model has been revamped completely to work better across different aircraft, especially different TUR planes. Landing fees now reflect aircraft weight. The job map component got some cosmetic surgery and performance improvements. It's still a bit sluggish, so further perf improvements are in order. Job Board has been renamed to Quick Jobs to look better with Contracts and Employment (Employment is an unlockable in Career Mode). Mobile layout got improvements too.