Many thanks for your detailed and comprehensive explanation. It’s great to get these backround informations about your ideas and thoughts! I appreciate this very much from my first day as an CEO here!
Nevertheless, this information I like very much - but it conflicts with information, written ingame. There’s mentioned that average rating affects "amount of traffic your airport receives and who wants to do business with you." I understand this exactly otherwise as you explained, now…
I can adjust to not acheiving game’s “airport of the year award”. But I really would dislike to have less traffic/worse business contracts, just because of specializing on an commercial, international airport - which often IRL only having GA on a “medium plane size” base.
So for me perfect solution would be to introduce medium size GA, I really would love this…
Hi Olof, I’m still having major issues with the romote stands and the buses borading way too late. The buses always board on time but leave the stand around 30 mins before departure, then to takenearly 30 mins to get to the stand, to then do a loop around the stand which wastes upto another 10 - 15mins before they board the plane…it’s causing my flights to be delayed well over an hour on each stand
I want to make sure I understand your point here. You are suggesting the limiting factor is the number of runways correct?
This is truly the limiting factor at airports, how many runways are available. It does get a bit more complex than just the number of runways as all runways are not always equal. Throw in some weather and aircraft needing instrument approaches and you reduce the capacity especially if an arrival runway does not have an instrument approach. Throw in further reductions to visibility and that could cut down on which runways are available for landing. Other factors will always have an impact on the theoretical arrival rate of an airport such as terrain and airspace as well as airport layout.
As an example, an airport with a dedicated arrival runway that does not have any conflicts with other runways, airspace etc and the weather is VFR, can handle a max of 50 arrivals in 1 hour. Throw in weather requiring and instrument approach and assuming an ILS with vectors to final, that capacity may drop to around 40 arrivals an hour. Throw in low IMC conditions and that number would drop further.
If the runway is being used simultaneous arrivals and departures, assuming VFR conditions and no other constraints and a continuous stream of arrivals and a line of departures, cut the arrival rate in half.
The point I am getting at as airport capacity is more a factor of the number of runways available for arrivals and departures. That rate can change due to other factors such as layout, airspace, and weather. We should not be basing this on the size of a tower. The only reason for a larger tower is to have more room for more controllers. That need will vary depending on the design of the airport. One tower controller can handle multiple aircraft to multiple runways in some instances. Again, depending on the airport configuration, you may have 1 controller for each runway and the airport divided up into multiple zone for ground controllers. The only reason to have more than one tower on an airport is generally due to visibility restrictions. A prime example is DFW which covers such a vast area which makes it difficult to see all of the movement area from the central tower. As a result, there are two remote towers closer to the outer runways to provide better visibility to those areas. Other airports do not have this issue and only one structure is needed which provides sufficient coverage.
Again, the number of towers should not be used to determine airport capacity, number of available runways should be the determination and a better measurement is number of movements per hour.
Anybody else noticed problems with the toilets?
I have a male, a female toilet in both the secure and unsecure area.
People (no matter what sex) use the unsecure toilet without problems, even the men wash their hands (but don’t dry).
But in the secure toilet, they enter the room, think of a toilet and then leave with a full bladder.
What’s the deal? Is the room too small?
Good evening! First update of the week and four more should follow. Here’s Alpha 34.1-1 with a fix for the concrete issues, some other random bug fixes and an initial fix for strange rating system regression values.
Release notes - Airport CEO - Version Alpha 34.1-1
Improvement
[ACEO-21354] - Improved flight planner stand settings
Bug
[ACEO-21040] - Construction overlay text replaced with object preview to avoid performance issues
[ACEO-21203] - 512x256 airline logos are not shown correctly in stand- and flight planner panel
[ACEO-21215] - First regional airport tutorial step not progressing.
[ACEO-21219] - Service technician missing in the staff panel filter
[ACEO-21270] - CEO avatar does not arrive to newly created airports
[ACEO-21310] - Runway possible to upgrade to concrete without researching it
[ACEO-21318] - Player starts with $3M regardless of selected starting difficulty level
[ACEO-21323] - All minor ratings can randomly drop to 0% over time due to faulty regression calculation
[ACEO-21325] - Bulldozing terminal foundation causes walls to remain
[ACEO-21328] - Structural engineering project not unlockable preventing concrete structures to be enabled
[ACEO-21343] - Security check-point can display incorrect unmanned warning icon
[ACEO-21344] - Initial need values for hunger adjusted to avoid issue with departing passengers not invoking eating or shopping behavior
[ACEO-21345] - Employees cannot always find a bathroom if the nearest one isn't available
[ACEO-21348] - Conveyor belt system tutorial pictures updated to match Alpha 34 requirements
First day back at work after a long vacation. Everyone else pitched in to get GA part of the airport built and open Lots of emails to go through and time to get the Commercial aspect up and running. Glad the CEOs are forced to get back to work!!
I’ve run into another bug where all of the people currently inside my airport are frozen, passengers and staff alike. I was curious why a plane was running behind schedule, and it turns out no one was boarding because they were all stuck. Strangely enough, people deboarding planes and coming into the airport act normal, but because all of my staff are frozen, nothing will function as intended.
I think the walls itself do not cause the issue. I do always build walls in the bathroom zone after it is placed.
In your case, the door caused the problem. That needs to be outside the zone.
I feel like this method would be much more difficult to communicate with players, and it certainly is more difficult to work with. I would rather there only be limits on how many stands and runways you can build per tower level, than have a limit on how many flights can operate that day. It would be much more intuitive to stagger arrivals to avoid having to many aircraft trying to land at once than it is to try to ensure the auto-scheduler doesn’t exceed the flight limit (unless this is done automatically, I haven’t actually noticed this being enforced yet).
From a programming perspective, I think it would be best to include this with a complete overhaul of ATC and aircraft path-finding. Currently the way aircraft are handled by the game is incredibly sub par, and it seems every few updates a new path finding bug occurs with them. We still have aircraft taxiing through each other, many aircraft will hold short of a taxiway waiting for an aircraft at the other side of the airport to cross in front of it, the complete lack of taxiway restrictions causes large aircraft to clip structures and aircraft when they use taxiways that weren’t designed for them, and many useful ATC commands (such as line up and wait) are also absent.
As far as implementing a maximum pattern size is concerned, I feel like it would be pretty easy to use a FIFO stack to represent each controller, as well as stacks for aircraft holding on the ground and in the air. This would basically mimic ATC’s usage of strips for managing aircraft, as each object in the stack could contain useful variables with aircraft information (such as a max holding time for arrivals that represents how much fuel they had). Any time an ATC transfer would occur, the strip would be poped of it’s current stack, and added to the next, while also triggering a transfer from thr controller (stack) before it. For instance on a medium tower ground control could have a limit of 10 aircraft, tower could have a limit of 2, and approach could have a limit of 8. Both ground and approach have unlimited (effectively unlimited, as all stacks have default limits that would be impossible to exceed). In this system any arriving aircraft will attempt to enter the approach stack, if it is full they will then enter the holding stack, once an aircraft has landed, it will be poped from the tower stack, and then attempt to join the ground stack, if ground is full, it will join at the front of the ground hold (it might be better to just overwork the ground controller and let all arrivals taxi once they are on the ground). As soon as the landed aircraft is transferred to ground (or the holding stack), the tower will then attempt to grab a departing aircraft waiting at that runway (pop from ground), and allow it to takeoff, then transfer it to departure (just pop it from the stack and discard the strip), after the departure, or if no departures are ready, the tower will then pull an arrival, causing the arrival stack to then pull another aircraft from the holding pattern (if available). An additional check could be added at this point to see if the arriving aircraft’s max hold time has been exceeded, which would then cause the aircraft to divert (with all the penalties associated with rejecting the aircraft), and cause approach to pull the next aircraft in the hold)
By mimicking an ATC hand-off the system should be able to run fairly efficiently, and since the number of aircraft involved is relatively low it shouldn’t have much of an impact on the overall efficiency of the game.
Now onto a different topic all together, Shops, Restaurants, and micromanaging.
I know that a business overhaul is planed for Alpha 35, however in the meantime would it be possible to just make contracts auto-renew/remove the expiration. As I’m sure you are away, it is really annoying to use shops and restaurants currently, but they look nice and they now impact the rating system, so it would be nice to have a hotfix that makes them a little more user friendly while we wait for the overhaul. On a related note, would it be possible to either hire more employees at once, or implement an auto-hire system (with the HR director) to meet player defined staffing numbers as employees become available. Currently any major expansion requires multiple trips to the employee screen to hire enough employees for new stands (I believe a single large stand will require two trips to get enough ramp agents, obviously worsened with larger expansions.
Lastly, I saw one of the devs mention that moving sidewalks were coming (I thought it was in 34, but maybe he said 35, I can’t find it now). Now that walking distance is considered in the rating, could this (and other systems to transport people around the terminal) be prioritized?
Different question from me. I read something that you can make an airport that not have GA. But if i do, i cannot win the year award? For that i need all parts operational?
Can we have a R&D Project for De-icing for Small Stands/General Aircraft available before getting the commercial license? You have to get the Commercial License before you get De-icing… Deicing is a great source of income in a cold region especially when all you have is GA. And GA doesn’t produce that much income and therefore a reason why I think many like to get rid of their GA stands ASAP (with the limited space to grow in the map). You just keep going in the RED every day with GA only. Getting the commercial license activates the ratings for all of the commercial ratings and then reduces my airport overall rating which then prevents more GA to show up. But I needed De-icing because it shows everyday at my airport in Valdez, Alaska and I wanted income!
Also, it would be nice if more than just a few GA showed up when I have 32 stands dedicated to GA and a rating in the 90s for GA but a horrible rating for Commercial because I had to get the Commercial license just to get the De-icing service.
Thanks, and I hope you can add this option!!! (See image below on rating and how GA traffic)
GA Airport with Deicing and ratings
Ratings - great for GA, Poor for commercial but I don’t even have commercial yet
LOW turnout for GA aircraft because of this? or its been this way forever
How am I suppose to make money with this type of GA traffic? And what’s the point of keeping GA when you can’t make money because of the cost to keep up everything else. Yes I know I went overboard on an airport with only GA but I have had this issue with minimal all grass stand/taxiway/runway airport GA only as well… It just cost too much to in operations and you make nothing with only 5-10 GA showing up at at time.
Also Devs, I love how the Executives go home at night… I even turn off the lights except the ones in the front lobby and bathrooms. Hopefully someday the other staff get to go home too to get some well deserved rest.
Admin building closed for the night except for a few PSA (but I closed the front desk), Janitors & Technicians who have to stay thought the night, I gave them plenty of couches to get some shut eye. I should probably put in a shower for them to freshen up in the morning.
Lots of emails to go through and time to get the Commercial aspect up and running. Glad the CEOs are forced to get back to work!!
