I have missed so much lately being out in Ohio (flying to visit family 
), that I was not on for over 3 days! Great video, I saw a few bugs that I reported. I do like the idea of multiple runways and having you make airlines and aircraft available to use a certain runway.
I’m confused by the hype about time. Would you guys really like that a hour in game will take a realtime hour? Because if so, then building your airport will take about 3 years of your life, the REAL life…
It’s like playing rollercoaster and waiting 3 months for your coaster to be build and another 2 years to make enough money for your next ride.
I honestly don’t bother the entire time aspect, as long as it is playable. Meaning that if boarding will take an hour, so be it, as long as there is a good balance between objects and their timing. So if boarding normally would take 8-10 minutes realtime and drinking a cup of coffee also, then both should take 1 hour in-game. Etc.
I think if you really would like to make a realtime game, you should lose the graphic`s. But I don’t think that would be fun to play for the majority of gamers.
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I think you misread a couple of things, 3 real life seconds are a minute in game at normal game speed. So no it is not realtime.
We want consistency. Which means we want the relative duration of actions to be the same as in real life. And not for construction perse 
but more for baggage handling, refueling, etc
I agree on that.
Would this risk the game slowing to a near halt once we get a busy airport with multiple flights turning around simultaneously throughout the day?
As others said, 4 seconds real time to one game minute is not real time. My concern is that speeding up animations to get boarding speed roughly equivalent to real life would make it look bad, but slowing down the clock by 1 second per tick could solve the problem, or at least bring it much closer to prototype. If the only thing they do is set turnaround to 5 or 6 hours (remeber this plane only had 109 people) to get the Air Strada off on time, you would need a massive number of gates if you wanted to have several flights a day. You could only have 2 or 3 of the BAe’s a day per gate. What happens when aircraft that hold 200 to 300 are added? You are talking 12 to 24 hour turnaround to get it off on time.
As i said in my OP, one of the worst aspects of SA gameplay was getting larger planes off on time, the clock was ticking too fast and it made it close to impossible to get on time departures without a massive break in realism (like 4 or 5 gate desks per gate).
Perhaps the devs will test a few of my suggestions or something else that they come up with so that turnaround is more realistic without causing any unintended issues elsewhere.
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Defiantly not a 1 to 1 time ratio. Just to improve turnaround, maybe change time ratio a bit and/or improve baggage/passenger loading times. Small ai tweak or faster employees or something. This part of the game will likely be difficult to balance for a good mix of realism and playability.
I think perhaps a slight tweak to people walk speed and a bit to aircraft taxi speed could help, maybe the first step. It took Air Strada almost 30 minutes to reach its gate.
Also not sure since I can only observe what they showed us, but is boarding allowed during baggage loading or is there a checklist order that must occur? If you can do a few things at once that would help. When cleaning and catering is added, it would make sense those 2 plus baggage unloading could be going at the same time like deplaning and baggage unloading should occur at the same time.
I saw that the flight on the video was weekly. So are the slots days or gates @Fredrik and @Olof (asking the devs to clear this up)
If one we’re to actually implement this, there’d naturally be a limit to how slowly time would progress to make sure it never actually stopped.
Also in my mind I’m making a distinction between game speed and scaling of game time to real time. That is, for example, normally an in game minute takes 2 seconds, but slows to take 5 seconds if any turnaround is in progress. This would let flights turn around in a realistic number of game hours, but also allow all passenger and bag animations to proceed at a normal looking speed on screen. Once your airport is huge, however, you could set the game speed to fast-forward (1x, 2x, 4x, etc) which would simply speed up everything including animations.
I’m not really sure if this would even work, it’s weird enough that it probably needs a basic play test to see if it even makes sense or is just confusing.
Not sure if that is the best kind of time control for this game. I will find ways to pass the time while it is slow. Maybe I’ll watch the passengers and staff move about the terminal, plan my next decision as CEO. I think having several different time speeds will be better.
For boarding why don’t they just simply file past the boarding gate one by one without stopping like they currently are? It’s each person stopping that is adding the time to boarding.
Another alternative could be to ‘cheat’ a little bit and have each pause where a passenger stops to get checked represent more than a single passenger, so for each pause while the ticket is checked, say 5 passengers will board. The number would obviously be up for consideration
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For baggage handling we’ve seen that the issue is that each bag is simulated and currently only a single bag is picked up at a time. The device have said they’re working on this to enable multiple bags to be picked up by the ground crew at once. If this was 3 bags at a time and there were 3 crew, and a round trip took 3 real world seconds, 99 bags would take 30 real world seconds.
I mainly think the delay is the time it took the cart to get to and from the baggage centre, which is both an airport layout/design problem but also a speed to the cart/baggage belt problem. Would it be possible for the underground baggage belts to move the luggage faster than above ground? This may help alleviate some of that issue. While it shouldn’t ‘teleport’ there’s no reason why the underground belt couldn’t move at 5x or 10x the speed of above ground. Since we can’t see it it doesn’t ruin the experience of the simulation
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or you just implement high speed underground belts, perhaps an upgrade you can purchase?
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or you just implement high speed underground belts, perhaps an upgrade you can purchase?
Devs said they will fix the baggage system by improving baggage car and baggage workers. The other issue was from design of baggage system. Baggages need to unload and deliver to terminal with a very long route. With bug fixes and proper design it won’t be any more issues.
Yup, I’ve heard that too, that still doesn’t solve the issue of if the baggage centre is a decent distance from the reclaim area for passengers. Since we can’t build multi level we can’t stack it underneath like airports actually do so it’s likely it will be tucked away with the fuel handling and truck areas. Loading the cart quicker does not solve this issue
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What happens with large airports then? Inevitably you will have long distances to some gates even if your baggage terminal was dead center. High speed belts sounds like a neat feature that you could purchase and upgrade to get.
I also liked the multiple passenger getting checked per tick, and 3 bags per worker picked up. Those might actually be the best solution rather than messing with the time. Perhaps then just speeding up planes a bit when on the taxiways so it doesnt take almost 30 minutes to arrive at the gate and everything should be smooth.
Maybe both of those could be tied to employee speed or something. I am not sure if employee stats actually do anything but this could maybe be a real impact. Hire slow gate agents and it takes them longer to check in that pack of 4 or 5, same for the guys loading bags, maybe also impacts their walk speed from truck to plane.
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Just a few thoughts on balancing the passengers “life circle” from what I can read from the video:
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Checkin seems fine. Having the opportunity to assign two or even more checkin-desks to a certain flight would be great though.
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Baggage handling has been discussed in many posts, I think you already got enough and the right feedback on this topic.
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I think boarding as a high potential for (in my opinion) easy improvement
– The boarding seems to take as much time as the checkin right now, you could speed this up quite a bit with every passenger simply (slowly) walking through.
– there is only one staff member to check the boardingpasses of the passenger. If it would be possible to assign a second person, the queue could split up right in front of them and people could be boarded quicker