I just had these thoughts in my sleep so thought I would share it especially for future development of the game. Similar stuff to Prison Architect but better
Checklist – I think it would be good if we can get a checklist for the CEO to know the minimum requirements before opening let’s say a terminal for example: one restroom, two gates, a meeting room, two checks in counters etc. With the checklist done you can properly open the terminal and that’s where manual control comes in. Maybe can implement this too with hangars and few other buildings which have multiple sections and rooms.
Manual Controls – A few options like “Open”, “Close”, “Lockdown”, “Evacuate” would be fun. Rather than shut down an entire airport we can control just one building or area. For example, we can shut down one terminal for major renovation so passengers don’t get in the way and there is a second terminal (if we did construct one) to help out with the operation so the airport can still run although it will be really busy and you might have some chaos along the way. You can put these kinds of controls too for runway, hangers, and gates.
Nice idea… In fact I feel it’s should be in the game… I think the devs already have a faint checklist system. But let’s see what devs think. It will make the game more playable.
I like that you have dreams about airport operations and planning, lol, I can relate but perhaps a bit more in code format…
I do indeed see the point of perhaps adding a checklist but I don’t think we’ll do it per terminal-basis as we don’t want to box people in certain requirements. Part of the CEO challenge should be to make sure that you’ve built a terminal that functions as you plan, without any specific ACEO software checking if it works. The code we’ll write is intended to make sure that nothing of the passenger simulation crashes when, for example, if they want to go to the bathroom and there is none. However, yo schedule a flight you’ll need to have a check-in desk, so while there’s no check list to guide you through the building process we’ll make sure you can’t allocate stuff in the blind. What we could do though is to include a “dashboard notebook app”, a simple text area where you can write down and take notes so that you can make your own checklists when building stuff.
About the controls, I agree. This is actually sort of prepared for, but not on terminal basis. We do have a template for some overall controls that apply to the entire airport like those you described but nothing yet on a per terminal basis. Once we’ve implemented multi terminals we’ll look into this!