Extremely weird staff behaviour (incl. pic series)

[sirhc80]

Especially in large airports it is obvious, that staff behaviour needs improvement.

My staff is running around anywhere in my airport, but missing, where they are needed. Especially staff room allocation shows this perfectly.

Perhaps I’m naive, but IMHO staff should use nearest staff room to its workplace. So they stop working, go for a break to closest staff room, and afterwards they go back to their workplace. But in fact, very often I can not see any sense in staff’s paths.

I’m just permanently wondering, why there is no staff, where it is needed, even if I’m having nearly twice as much as needed.

staff policy & figures

Since my first days as ACEO I’m hiring way too much staff, as they’re cheap (in total) and I do not want staff to be my bottleneck.
Having 36 medium and 6 small security checkpoints, in fact, I do need 150 security officers - 278 still isn’t enough, as they are walking around anywhere…

airport size

3 small GA stands
53 medium stands
16 large stands

One (of several) good example is where I can find my security offiers hanging around in my airport:

security officers: pics&stats

nearby needed security officers	pausing/idling in staff rooms nearby
1	7

nearby needed security officers	pausing/idling in staff rooms nearby
0	12

nearby needed security officers	pausing/idling in staff rooms nearby
34	18

ramp agents: pic with figures

nearby needed ramp agents	pausing/idling in staff rooms nearby
64	0

And here an example, how weird (not to say totally dumb) ramp agents pathfinding is:

ramp agents: unbelievable path

here they suddenly split up in two halfs - exactly in that moment, when game is processing an autosave… coincidence?

half of them walk exact same path back, just into staff room, they passed, a few minutes ago.

other half of them makes an airport tour…

just to end up at the other baggage bay, they’ve passed before - without resting, without using bathrooms, must be massively unhappy.

This finally is the unbelievable path, ramp agents walked in my airport:
whole path overview:
bright blue: ~20 ramp agents
->split up 50:50 to red path and dark blue path

Please be aware of scale! they just spent at least 2 ingame-hours with walking a complete nonsense path - and then start working again, without fulfilling their needs.

Edit: And in advance, yes, staffrooms’ settings are correct. Every staffroom is open for according (nearby needed) staff type…

[EG0611]

Your staff is like “Meh who needs to work I prefer to walk around airport and enjoy the view”

Joke aside this is an annoying bug. It may also create path finding issues and maybe even lag on path finding algorithm. I wonder it would get worse on Alpha 35 Terminal update with one way doors.

[sirhc80]

@EG0611

Your staff is like “Meh who needs to work I prefer to walk around airport and enjoy the view”

I appreciate they like my decorations so much, that they spend their breaks with looking around!

@EG0611

Joke aside this is an annoying bug. It may also create path finding issues and maybe even lag on path finding algorithm. I wonder it would get worse on Alpha 35 Terminal update with one way doors.

That’s exactly what I’m afraid of…

[ReV0LT]

I feel that this problem is a legacy issue from the multi-floor update, since I also notice similar behavior on my airport, as well as when the rooms are open for all staffs, they become “broken”. Have you tried setting the rooms specifically for your ramp agent/security officers?

[sirhc80]

Yes, from the scratch, all staffrooms are set to specific staff types, as needed. So janitors and technicians are allowed everywhere, ramp agents & security only nearby checkpoints/stands/bays. PSAs only nearby boarding, check-in and infodesks. Admins and executives have there own environment and aren’t allowed anywhere outside this area…

[Puma]

Thanks for the detailed information! I understand that you don’t want the staff to be the bottleneck, but could also be that too much staff can ‘overload’ the pathfinding system. Just a thought, no clue on coding level if that is the case, but I can imagine that if you actually have jobs for let’s say 200 - 250 ramp agents and you hire 300+ that the system has 25 - 30% un-utilised path finding items running around that it cannot keep up with at some point. So in a small airport 25-30% extra staff is not a problem if you have 12 instead of 8 ramp agents for example because the total amount is only 4 ‘too many’ but in your case it’s 50 to 100 too many staff (in your example 310 hired and 220 jobs available) that the system has no work for but is still requesting path finding and job assignment.

Again just a thought and don’t know if it is related, but just to open the discussion on the possible cause. Based on that thought I’m also curious for other peoples larger airports and their hiring amounts and if their staff is also running around like headless chickens, or if you hire ‘just enough’ that they all work as expected? My test airport in A34 is not large enough yet to need these amounts of staff, so cannot test it myself, but guess there are more people with large airports.

[sirhc80]

Thanks for your detailed response!
While reading your explanation, I remembered that there had been discussions about ‘too much staff’, long time ago…

Unfortunately devs didn’t make this clear - or did I miss it?

My bug reports about these issues (probably dozens of it, over the time) are NEVER worked on ("can not reproduce, duplicate, …) and I did not find any actual statemnet about these issues… Here no comments, too…

EDIT: Another “nice” one:

Yes, these are all sidewalks… pax just do not want to walk shortest path…

[Puma]

A general call to everyone who has a large airport to share their information around number of staff hired against jobs requested and your experience of how staff works at that airport.

@Olof @Fredrik how does the job request system work in relation to the amount of personnel hired and needed? As described above, I can imagine that the engine could get overloaded when you have X% personnel too much in comparison with jobs needed, or will all the extra personnel just be idle? I assume that if 100 ‘too many’ ramp agents are in a staff room the system will get 100 requests and only 5 are eventually selected to perform the job, or is it just ‘start at the top’ and when 5 ramp agents have been chosen the rest is idle again? The system must also be aware of the 95 other ramp agents and probably need to do something with it when a job request comes in? I can imagine that at some point there is could be an exponential difference between jobs needed, asked and responded when you come to a certain point of scale. With that I mean that if you have a small airport with small amounts of job asks but hire ‘too much’ personnel the problem is less then when you have a large airport with tons of job requests and ‘too much’ personnel to handle the amount of jobs. Maybe it’s also the case when you have a small airport and way too much (so let’s say 150 ramp agents for 5 stands) personnel to handle it, not tested that yet.

I’m sure you guys have thought about all this, but I’m just curious how it works and if it could affect each other eventually, also because others have mentioned similar behaviour as @sirhc80 does above. But all could obviously also be connected to airport design, staff room layout, logical pathing, etc.

@sirhc80 The last picture above is more around PAX and not personnel. But I agree that this is a bit of a ‘creative’ pathfinding, where you would expect it to be the other way around, so all PAX walking straight ahead and then divide to the top. Also not sure if that is related to the ‘headless chicken’ issues because of your large airport.

[Olof]

I wrote a general response here regarding why these types of issues is not something we’ll fully look into until all the content is in the game, but in general the job task systems solves a number of questions as it distributes tasks, mainly looking at what jobs that needs to be done, what agents that are available, what agents are preassigned to certain job task objects, where agents are and then calculates the closest pairs and does some more magic. With Alpha 35 however, there will need to adaptations that I cannot yet fully speak of as we need to do some more development before we know exactly how the system is going to work. This is thus as I said something that most likely not will see its full potential until the beta stage, where we can do ruthless fixes and balances as we then have a full idea of what all of the game’s contents is.

[sirhc80]

Thanks for both of your replies, makes things more clear and understandable!
Looking forward and crossing my fingers, that this works as planned!