Demo Patch Notes 0.2.39.7 -> 0.2.41.6

v0.2.41.6 — Casey's Flight Inspection Report

• Casey was squinting at his tutorial clipboard when he noticed every em-dash had been replaced with a question mark. 'Who redacted my briefing notes?! I specifically wrote DASHES, not RIDDLES!' Tracked it down to 13 corrupted characters across the tutorial steps — some encoding gremlin swapped them during a file transfer. Casey personally re-inked every dash with a fountain pen.

• 'Why is my spotlight illuminating the ENTIRE AIRPORT instead of just the Route Info panel?!' Casey found the tutorial highlighted falling back to a full-screen placeholder when the target window wasn't open yet. Now it gracefully hides instead of turning the whole screen into a crime scene.

• The tutorial kept whispering 'Swap All', but the button actually says 'Upgrade All'. Casey cross-referenced four separate documents and found the old name in every single one. 'Did nobody update the manual after the rebrand?!' All references now say Upgrade All — including the pilot handbook.

• Casey discovered rival airlines entering receivership and never coming back — like sending a pilot to the break room and bricking the door shut. All routes suspended, zero income, guaranteed dissolution in 6 months. Now receivership keeps the top 60%% of profitable routes flying, and airlines that rebuild their cash to $0 can emerge early. Restructuring, not liquidation!

• 'The game keeps pausing, and nobody's telling me WHY!' Casey added a visible indicator on the tutorial card: when the tutorial auto-pauses the game, you'll now see a clear '⏸ Game paused by tutorial' label. No more mystery freezes.

• Players were opening panels via keyboard shortcuts during tutorial steps, but Casey didn't notice. 'You already DID the thing I was about to teach you!' Now the tutorial auto-advances when you open the correct panel via shortcut — Casey gives you credit for being ahead of the class.

• Chapter 9 used to say 'here's what historical events look like' without actually showing one. Casey now pops open a demo Event Explainer with 'The Jet Age Begins (1958)' so you can see the format live. Show, don't tell — that's Aviation Instructor 101.

• Casey found the Era Objectives panel occasionally showing every goal twice — a timing bug where two rebuild signals raced through the same door. Added a bouncer (a guard flag) so only one rebuild runs at a time. No more double-vision on the objectives board.

• The tutorial promised 'find the Legacy Lounge on the main menu,' but there's no Legacy button there — it's on the era victory screen. Casey corrected his own notes before anyone else noticed. Almost.

• Steam Deck and ROG Ally pilots reported the controller cursor hiding behind Save/Load and Quarterly Report windows. Casey traced it to the cursor sitting at layer 103, while 13 modal panels could stack up to 102. Bumped the cursor to layer 110 — always on top, always visible.

v0.2.41.5 — Casey Checks the Deck

• Casey was pacing the tarmac while a trainee spent fifteen minutes picking an airline name — meanwhile, three flights departed, two landed, and a quarterly report filed itself. 'Time doesn't STOP just because you're choosing a font color!' Now the game clock pauses during airline setup and performance config screens. Casey finally gets to finish his coffee before the chaos starts.

• 'Who approved unlimited credit for an airline that owns ONE propeller plane?!' Casey found the loan officer rubber-stamping $500K requests with no ceiling, no questions asked. The corporate bank now caps total debt at $5M, and every $500K tier bumps the interest rate by 0.5%. At max debt, you're paying 6%/mo — enough to make even Casey's monocle pop off.

• Steam Deck pilots reported the cursor snapping back to the airline name box every time they dismissed the keyboard. Casey traced it to a focus trap with zero cooldown — the moment the keyboard closed, focus yanked right back and reopened it. Added a brief post-keyboard grace period so Deck pilots can actually reach the Confirm button.

• Casey noticed Deck controllers couldn't open city windows intermittently — 'I'm pressing A right on Tokyo and it's showing me NOTHING!' The virtual cursor was checking if a HUD button had focus instead of checking what was under the cursor, so leftover focus from the Play button was blocking city detection. Removed the stale focus check; cities now respond reliably.

• Strategy Planner dropdowns on Steam Deck were invisible during selection — 'It's like filing a flight plan blindfolded!' Added visible focus highlighting to all OptionButton menus so controller users can actually see what they're picking.

• Casey felt the map fighting him after zooming — dragging vertically moved either too fast or too slow, depending on the zoom level. The Y-axis panning wasn't accounting for map scale like the X-axis was. One division later, drag-to-pan feels 1:1 at every zoom level.

• Remapped Music Pause from Shift+Space (which never worked due to the Ctrl key filter) to Ctrl+M. Casey can finally mute the in-flight entertainment without unbuckling his seatbelt.

v0.2.41.4 — Casey Sorts the Stack

• Casey was filing paperwork at two desks stacked on top of each other when his pen went right through the top form, and he signed the wrong document underneath. 'Who designed this filing cabinet — the clicks are landing on the WRONG window!' Turns out, when two panels overlapped, background windows were hijacking focus before the buttons could register. Casey installed a z-order checkpoint in the window manager so that only the topmost panel at the click point responds. No more phantom clicks through the Fleet Overview into the Strategic Advisor.

• The route information panel had a sneaky fuel leak — every time it refreshed, it left an old signal connection dangling on the tarmac. After 14 minutes of flying, Casey counted 85,000 stale wires in the cockpit. 'No wonder the error light looks like a Christmas tree!' Now the panel properly disconnects the old cash-change listener before wiring up a new one. Zero leaked connections, zero error spam.

• Casey caught the Route Recommender's background scanner reading the flight manifest while the main crew was rewriting it mid-air. 'You can't check the passenger count while someone's still boarding!' Added local snapshots so the cache validator doesn't race with the main thread.

• Casey was running new captains through the pre-flight briefing when someone pulled up Chapter 1 mid-campaign. 'Where's the NEXT button?! I can't just stand here on the tarmac forever!' Turns out the tutorial hid the navigation buttons because it expected setup screens that don't exist in an active game. Now Chapter 1 shows full Next/Back controls when accessed from a running campaign — no more stranded rookies.

• 'Stop moving my clipboard!' Casey taped his tutorial card to a spot on the console, but every new lesson kept yanking it back to the default corner. Now, once you drag Casey's card somewhere, it stays put — your chosen position is respected across all steps.

• RemovedCasey found three warning lights blinking on the control panel for no reasona phantom 'unused signal' alarm on the legacy toggle, and two 'static function called on instance' alerts from MigrationManager and PlatformManager. Quick wiring fix — suppressed the false alarm and removed the unnecessary static markers from singleton functions.

v0.2.41.3 — Casey Grounds the Antiques

• Casey was inspecting the fleet roster when he spotted something alarming: 'Why is the ticket counter still selling seats on a 1960s prop plane in 1980?! That thing belongs in a museum, not on the tarmac!' The aircraft catalog now properly filters out retired airframes — no more booking passengers onto planes that should be collecting dust in a hangar. Route creation, upgrade suggestions, and the recommender all respect retirement years now.

• The Upgrade Advisor was drawing a blank on grounded routes — 'No suggestions? We've got planes parked on the ramp with propellers from the Eisenhower era, and you're telling me there's NOTHING better?' Casey discovered the advisor couldn't estimate demand for non-operational routes, so it assumed zero passengers and gave up. Now it peeks at what demand WOULD look like if the route were flying, then recommends the right modern aircraft to get those birds back in the air.

• Casey noticed the Quarterly Report was missing transfer passenger stats entirely. 'We built this whole hub-and-spoke network and the bean counters aren't even tracking the connecting traffic?!' The quarterly financial report now shows total transfer passengers routed through your hubs when hub traffic is active.

v0.2.41.2 — Casey Tunes Up the Engines

• Casey ran a full systems diagnostic and found the flight computer was choking on rush-hour traffic. 'Three thousand routes and the radar screen was redrawing weather blips eight times a second — no wonder the cockpit instruments were lagging!' He throttled the weather radar to half-second refreshes at high traffic, switched route lines to fast-draw mode when the network gets dense, and cached those pesky gate-check lookups that were scanning the entire terminal every frame. FPS should climb noticeably at scale.

• The Comms Log dismiss button was occasionally crashing the radio stack — Casey traced it to a timing issue where the logbook was rebuilding mid-click. 'You can't rewrite the manifest while someone's still reading it!' Fixed with deferred rebuilds.

• Every panel in the airline now shows a loading spinner when crunching numbers: Hub Strategy, Fleet Risk, Market Dashboard, Route Forecast, Threat Analysis, and 11 more. 'Passengers deserve to know when we're thinking,' Casey notes, polishing the spinner.

v0.2.41.1 — Casey Fixes the Boarding Pass Scanner

• Casey was reviewing the era progression logbook when he noticed something suspicious: pilots who'd completed Dawn of Flight were STILL locked out of The Jet Age. 'I personally stamped that boarding pass CLEARED — how is the gate still shut?!' Turns out, the scanner was comparing apples to oranges — literally. The save file stored era completions as decimal numbers (0.0, 1.0), but the gate reader expected whole numbers (0, 1). Godot 4.6 treats those as different species, like comparing a macaw to a parakeet. Casey installed a type-normalizer in the career stats loader that converts all JSON floats back to proper integers on load. Era unlocks, achievement checks, and the completed checkmark all work correctly now. 'A boarding pass is a boarding pass, whether you print it in Courier or Helvetica,' Casey declares, oiling the turnstile.

v0.2.41.0 — Casey Builds the Hub-and-Spoke Express

• Casey's been studying airport blueprints and connecting-flight timetables with the intensity of a macaw who just discovered layover lounges have complimentary seeds. 'You've got routes radiating out of Tokyo like spokes on a propeller, but nobody's CONNECTING through it! That's like building a roundabout with no exits!' He's installed a brand-new Transfer Passenger system: from 1955 onward, cities with 3+ of your routes naturally attract connecting travelers routing A→Hub→B through your network. Buy a Hub upgrade and the flow intensifies — Level 3 hubs channel passengers at 80% efficiency, turning your spoke cities into transit powerhouses. Build a trunk route between two hubs and double-hop itineraries (A→Hub1→Hub2→B) emerge automatically, with intercontinental passengers bouncing through your network like frequent-flyer pinballs. Casey even added transfer stats to the Route Info panel, hub cards show connecting traffic totals, the news ticker reports quarterly transfer volumes, and the map marks active transfer hubs with an ⇄ icon. AI rivals now prioritize hub-feeding routes too, so watch Atlanta and Dubai light up. 'A real airline doesn't just fly routes — it builds a WEB,' Casey declares, pinning red yarn between pushpins on his wall map like a conspiracy theorist who happens to be right.

v0.2.40.3 — Casey Extends the Boarding Pass

• Casey reviewed the demo lounge and decided one hour wasn't enough time to properly inspect the aircraft. 'You can't judge an airline from the boarding gate — you need at LEAST three hours to kick the tires, check the rivets, and fly a few routes!' He tripled the demo timer from 60 minutes to a full 3 hours. Even better, passengers who already used their original hour get a fresh boarding pass — the new limit applies retroactively, so everyone gets the full 180 minutes. 'Generosity is the first rule of aviation hospitality,' Casey announces, stamping EXTENDED on every expired demo ticket.

v0.2.40.2 — Casey Unsticks the Worst Routes Panel

• Casey was trying to inspect the Worst Routes report and found it wedged behind the HUD like a baggage cart jammed under a jetway. 'I can SEE my losses, but I can't TOUCH them — which is poetic, but unhelpful!' The panel now opens properly centered below the HUD bar instead of spawning at coordinates (0,0) directly behind flight control. He also noticed the same Worst Routes data was still duplicated inside the Advisor panel — 'Two copies of bad news doesn't make it twice as actionable, it makes it twice as depressing.' Removed the redundant tab so there's one clean panel, one source of truth, and one very smug macaw.

v0.2.40.1 — Casey's Global Event Calendar

• Casey's been poring over a century of airline schedules with a magnifying glass and a world atlas. 'You mean to tell me a World Cup kicks off in Rio, and we don't see a SINGLE extra booking? That's not an airline sim, that's an abacus!' He's now installed a Global Mega-Events Calendar covering 1930 through 2100 — FIFA World Cups (all 43 of them), Summer Olympics, Winter Olympics, World Expos, UEFA Euros, Rugby World Cups, Cricket World Cups, and annual crowd-pullers like Hajj, Carnival, Oktoberfest, Chinese New Year, Diwali, Golden Week, Mardi Gras, and the Holiday Rush. Each event boosts demand at host cities and nearby airports — fly to Munich during Oktoberfest and watch your load factors soar, or position aircraft near World Cup venues for a two-month windfall. Casey even extrapolated future hosts through 2098 using 'rigorous ornithological rotation analysis' (he picked cities out of an atlas with his beak). 'A real airline chief reads the event calendar before the route map,' he declares, pinning a giant wall chart to the flight ops board.

v0.2.40.0 — Casey Polishes the Cockpit

• Casey's been eyeing the dashboard gauges and the flight school curriculum with his trademark clipboard intensity. First up: the HUD's era goals strip now lights up each goal individually — cash turns green the moment your treasury hits target, route count goes green when you've got enough legs in the air, and regions follow suit. 'Why should a captain have to squint at one big grey blob when I can give you three precision instruments?' he says, buffing the glass. The strip hides itself in Sandbox mode ('No goals, no gauges — that's the whole point of flying free, Captain').

• The City Panel got a cockpit upgrade, too. Selecting an origin city no longer loses your place when you close the panel — Casey installed a persistent origin banner that shows where you're flying from, complete with a clickable city name and a Cancel button for when you change your mind mid-route. 'Real pilots don't forget where they took off from just because they closed a window,' he notes.

• Over in Flight School, Casey now knows when to keep quiet. Sandbox mode? No auto-tutorial — chapters are in the Settings menu if you need a refresher. Scenario mode? Casey pops up with a polite 'Want the guided tour starting from Chapter 2?' since the scenario already handles setup. And for controller pilots, every tutorial button now shows the right gamepad prompts — [A] Next, Back, [X] Skip — switching live as you swap between controller and keyboard. The virtual cursor steps aside while Casey's talking, too. 'Can't have two birds on the instrument panel at once,' he explains, smoothing his feathers.

v0.2.39.7 — Casey Installs a 'Please Wait' Light

• Casey noticed pilots staring at a frozen cockpit screen, wondering if the instruments had broken. 'You can't just lock up the controls without telling anyone — that's how you get a mutiny at 30,000 feet!' He bolted a spinning beacon to the dashboard that fires up whenever the flight computer is crunching heavy data: loading route manifests, tallying fleet rosters, building market share charts, or rendering performance sparklines. The spinner runs on a GPU shader — independent of the main avionics bus — so it keeps turning even when the flight computer is maxed out doing math. The mouse cursor flips to a wait icon, too, because Casey believes in redundant systems. 'If the light's spinning, we're working. If it's not, we're done. Beats staring at a blank panel, wondering if you need to slap it,' he explains, tapping the beacon approvingly.