Currently aircraft AI blocks route from start to finish in totally nonsensical way and prioritizes traffic in random manner. To update this I’d love to see the following:
A hold short -marker for a taxiway would be placeable like the current one way markers. It could be only a dot, it could be a line, cosmetics is not really that important. However, that would allow plane AI to then book the route up to next hold short -marker if the path is clear, which would ensure traffic keeps moving in all parts of the airport.
Using a 2-way taxiway system one could then organize arriving and departing traffic efficiently and make it flow well as planes would always then be able to hold short before a junction on taxiways. I’d imagine this wouldn’t need massive amount of work on the code.
Hold short should also be available for taxiways. There should be a setting for a node just like one way/two way markers for runway nodes. Either that or priority should always be given to INCOMING traffic, because I see two aircraft bunch up at the end of the runway waiting for a pushback aircraft all the way from the stand to the runway.
Think is not in a random manner. Instead, they wait for the earlier flights to pass the node. The problem here is for earlier flights, they might still far away from the node and the later flights still need to wait for them to pass first. So the hold short thing might not be feasible here because that needs another pathfinding algorithm.
It’s not always the earlier flight which gets a priority. And the whole point for these hold short markers is that the path is reserved only to the next one, if the section is clear. That way it doesn’t need a whole new pathfinding, it just does it in shorter sections.
Anyway, devs have confirmed that this kind of feature will be implemented with ability to say what size aircrafts can pass that point. This way we can allocate only ATRs to some stands and ban them from others. For example.
Could you tell me what topic they (the developers) wrote about it? I was flipping through the topics and did not see it. Possibly due to the language barrier. I use google translator.
“The pushback issue, i.e. caused by aircraft occupying nodes too far from itself, will be fixed in beta 2. Beta 2 will also feature taxiway holding points that only allow aircraft of a certain size.”
Unfortunately that doesn’t do exactly the same thing what I proposed. What I’d want to see is that aircraft can taxi up to this point and wait next to junction if the path across it isn’t clear. This way plane coming up from an alleyway between terminals could taxi up to the junction for taxiway, wait there any other planes passing that junction and then move onwards. Now, if this departing plane starts its movement first with pushback, it reserves the whole path to the runway and stops any other traffic on taxiway well before it needs to causing unnecessary traffic jams and slowdowns.
I wouldn’t have a problem if blocked planes would start to move after a certain time and drive through eachother. But we need a solution for this current issue.
With that issue, I can never fully operate my XXL airports.