DevLog 79: Steam Direct Update and A New Flight Planner

So basically if your airport is suffering from growing pains and turnarounds are slow, you could build additional apron space specifically for aircraft to go wait in? That would work, not to mention a little too realistic sometimes :wink:

haha. So it suits the bill just fine then :slight_smile:

I read this comment on Reddit and i kind of agree:

I think the gate names in the flight planner need to be more prominent, and the airlines less. To me it looks like each row is for an airline, not a gate.

https://www.reddit.com/r/airportceo/comments/6s9hee/devlog_79_steam_direct_update_and_a_new_flight/dlbhw2j/

Wow, looks great!

And all this in one week?
You devs must hardly ever sleep, or have any free time at all!

Ohhhh man this looks cool. Also I noticed that in some screen shots there are some all white planes and wanted to ask which airline they belong to ? And is it possible to rename a gate ?

that could be achieved if we could designate zones manually as different terminals or concourses (like the districts in Cities: Skylines). You mark a zone and then name it and set its properties, or in this case, name it as Terminal A/B/C/etc, then blocking you from reassigning a flight from Terminal A to a stand on Terminal C.

I know it sounds complex but it could be one solution to that particular problem

Matex - re-read the devlog - it says you can edit gate names

As far gate assignments for late running turnarounds. It is possible if you don’t have enough crew or vehicles. So if you have one fuel truck or one baggage cart, and four flights arrive to four gates at the same time, then yes you’ll have delays. That then is a scheduling issue that the CEO should consider when assigning gates.

As far as how the system should handle it? 1) plane lands. Gate is occupied. Maybe a popup to tell the player with option to send to (a) taxipoint (or to tell player the aircraft is being automatically sent to a hold location) to wait for the assigned gate or (b) option to send to another gate? In 1b assumes that more than one gate is available to that particular airline. For 1a, depends on the design of the airport if there is a place you could send an aircraft to wait for it’s gate. 2) aircraft is advised on approach no gates and sent to an alternate airport. As we’re designing the airside too, I don’t mind some ground-traffic control as it is part of managing the operation of the airport.

In a busy airport, one should assume that all available gates will be used but with “buffer” time to allow for delays. So sending to another gate would only likely delay another flight and so on. So I prefer the “hold” idea or sending to an alternate airport,

Any option requiring a wait or reroute to an alternate airport, would obviously annoy the airline and passengers and negatively affect the airport rating. So from a game-play and tycoon perspective I think it would be a neat feature.

IRL this happened to me at LAX. Aircraft landed but the gate was still occupied by a delayed flight. We had to taxi around for 45 minutes keeping out of way of other traffic.

re-read the devlog - it says you can edit gate names

RE READ IT

FOUND NO MENTION

PLEASE QUOTE IT FROM THE DEVLOG

Caps stuck? :stuck_out_tongue:

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If i am following the conversation correctly, then this would be the appropriate text from the devlog: (just below the image of the flight planner)
The rows below in the flight planner are therefore now auto generated from stands places in the world (depending on if they are activated, accept commercial flights, are connected to a security check-point and a taxiway node and so forth). The labels “A1”, “C1” and so forth indicate the gate’s name which can be assigned via the stand panel.

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I must admit I completely disagree with you here @pderuiter :stuck_out_tongue: If You have a spare gate, Think the plane should occupy it. As far as i see it when you assign a gate you are actually assigning a preferred gate. BUT the things you are assigning as definite are the time, the terminal, and (unless you’ve sent a small plane to a big stand) the stand size. It’s a simple thing to switch stand if you have one which isn’t going to be occupied for the ground time of the aircraft in the correct security area. It gets funky when you have a late flight leaving and a busy time at the airport, which is a good bit of management there. Your operations manager (aka the game engine) can automate this more as you grow too. You can set it to try and reassign gates in case of delays, or to make flights wait or something in the middle. It also makes there an incentive to leave some spare capacity, but also minimise delays!

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I wont hold it against you :slight_smile: Problem is that the free gate you take might be scheduled to another flight in 15 minutes. Taking that gate means that flight will now be delayed. Not saying its bad, but it can have a ripple effect you could prevent by putting that 1 plane on a stand

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haha I’m glad! So I thought at a basic level you could reassign to a gate which wasn’t going to be occupied for the gate time of the redirected flight. So if Gate A1 was blocked, at 1300, a flight could go to gate A4 if the total amount of time it would be at A4 would be short enough that it wouldn’t disrupt another flight. A smartish algorithm could work out how to rework a schedule with fewest possible changes in the future, but as a starting step think this is an easiser compromise :slight_smile:

Maybe in the beginning you have to assign stuff yourself and in the late game you can hire a “Operations Manager” to perform the role.

@Fredrik and @Olof what is your plan? Release steady version on the day of 2 weeks period ends, or you implement new features and release it at a time later on August?

Isn’t that what the Devlog covers? :wink:

Test until it’s ready and then release it is my understanding.

They will avoid adding more functionality. More functionality=more time…in development and testing.

They will tweak and change things…mostly User Interface and release.

We do not plan to implement more features. The new flight planner was an exception and that does change our test strategy a bit since a lot of new things must be tested. The ambition is to keep testing and fixing bugs until we feel confident for a public release, however, my guess is that we will not have time to perfect and fix everything. That’s why it is an early access. So it will not be 100% stable the first release, that is for sure.

Oh and we are working on a basic tutorial right now which we hope can at least get most players started.

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Could we have the chance to know your release date?

We will keep it secret until everything is clear from Steam part to press the release button. This will allow us to postpone within August without harming our reputation.

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