Avwriter

I have begun editing the original post to add new ideas as they are posted, unless Vic says that the idea categorically cannot/will not be added to this version.

That explains it! I have been caught by this several times at KLAX. Was confused because I would look at the indicated gate, plane out my route via right clicks, and then discover the plane was destined for the other side of the airport from where I had planned. This happened 4 or 5 times during an hour long session tonight. I thought I was getting early dementia. THank you for convincing me I am not crazy. LOL No big deal. I am sure Vic will get it straightened out. Andrew

Contact email for Nyerges Design: info@nyergesdesign.com

After four days with the new sim, I wanted to take a moment to offer a heartfelt kudos to Vic and the entire FeelThere team for this release. All things considered, even before the first SP, Tower 3D runs remarkably smoothly, and has generally exceeded my expectations at this stage. Last night, I played KLAX for an hour and a half, and nearly forgot that I was not sitting in a real control tower. Now to be sure, most of us, myself included, have not hesitated to give you a hard time over the few bugs, unpolished corners, and imperfections that we have managed to find. We have also felt free to bombard you with our obsessive demands for more zoom options, smaller airplane icons, bigger clickspots, a first person view from the pushback truck, and jedi mind-control over the entire game :-) But obviously, that's your own fault for not inviting all of us to be beta testers to begin. Of course, if you would have done that, there would have been no one left to buy the game. Anyway, don't forget we do love you and that all the hard work you have put into this project is greatly appreciated and respected. P.S. Don't worry, I promise we are not going to stop our complaining, nit-picking, and general b#ching any time soon. After all, why do you think we are here? :-)

I have yet to see a perfect piece of software. Even PMDG, which probably has higher standards than almost anyone in the market, still usually finds a few things to correct after the release of its products.

Why is that unfortunate? That sounds like a positive development to me. A problem was found and is being corrected. I guess it is all in one's perspective :-)

I generally agree with you there. I think it would be better, just to give the player a list of his infractions, and also an average time between runway and gate.

Another related issue I have noticed is that when assigning taxi routes, you cannot right click on areas of taxiway that are covered up by the icons of other aircraft. THus at a busy airport like KLAX, if there is a lot of traffic, I find that I am often unable to assign intersection takeoffs because another plane is covering up the intersection. Is there some possible workaround for this? For example, maybe when the user begins right-clicking on taxiways, the other aircraft icons on the radar screen could disappear until the send command has been issued?

Perhaps that could even be made an option in settings. "Automatically pause game for alerts."

Wow! I bet that plane has some really interesting flight characteristics. Looks almost like something Burt Rutan might design :-) Seriously though, I wonder if in the Pro version we might have the option to reassign arrivals to other gates. That would be very cool.

Yes. Please guys, let's get back on topic. This thread is was not intended as a place for complaining, bug catching, or demanding major structural changes to the game (there are plenty of other threads serving these functions, and you can always go start your own). The idea here was to have a central gathering place for suggested small-scale tweaks that the might improve the overall experience, and which could practically be implemented in the short term. I'd also really like to keep the environment friendly.

I do not believe the tutorial gets into this ins much detail, if for no other reason than St. Thomas has a very simple taxiway system, and there are not so many choices. Alternative taxi routes are assigned by right-clicking on the desired taxiways along your planned route. You will see them highlighted in yellow. If the route is complex, you may right click on every taxiway from beginning to end, or if you just want to make sure that most of a plane's route goes along a single taxiway, you can just right click on that taxiway, and leave the other turns to the pilot's discretion. For the most part, this system works well, but there are occasionally certain areas that are difficult to get the sim to recognize clicks in, especially if other aircraft are taxiing along the are that you desire to click on.

For the record, I just experienced a similar issue also at KPHL. Over an 1.5 hour session, I had three arriving planes ignore my commands to taxi to terminal. All three happened between 1800 and 1900. I have not seen this yet at other airports. Unfortunately, I cannot provide a log file, because the the .bat does not work on my machine.

I actually had an interaction with Nyerges design about this. My sense was that the version on FeelThere/BMT Micro's server have some kind of problem. They told me they were looking into it, and this was several day's ago. Do not know if anything was ever done about it. I suspect that most of there energies are fucused on getting the new Real Traffic ready for Tower3D.

I once had something similar happen at KPHL too. Notice how the planes to the left and right are sort of blocking it in. I may be wrong, but my sense at the time was that because of the position of the aircraft's gate relative to the surrounding aircraft, the plane may not have had enough room to push back (in essence the tug truck driver may not have been smart enough to realize he needed to push the plane straight back all the way back to the main taxiway before turning it. I recall similar things happening on rare occasions in Tower2011. If this is the case (and again it may not be here), then you will need to either wait until one or more of the surrounding planes have departed, or you could just delete the plane. Clearly there are still a few wrinkles that need to be worked out, but I have only seen such things a couple of times. Best regards.

Welcome to the forum, and glad to hear you like the sim. Though many of us have been here for years as users of Tower2011, we are all also in the same boat with the new sim. You are sure to find lots of good help here as we get to know the game together. As far as short cut keys, it appears that there really are not any (unlike the previous version) pretty much everything at this point is done by clicking on the flight strips and radar screens and then selecting from the menu choices that pop up. True, this does meant that we are slightly more limited in terms of some of the more advanced commands that were available in tower2011 (which is a 2D top down version of this one), on the other hand the initial learning curve on the 3D version is not bad at all. It is all pretty intuitive, and a minimal bit of trial and error clears up most confusion that may happen. By comparison Tower 2011 involved several dozen short cuts and commands, which really did did take awhile to learn well enough to play the game seriously. While I think we all agree that a true manual would be nice, it probably makes since to wait a while, at least until the first SP, in case something major changes. Also keep in mind there is much talk (and very little detail) about a Pro version of Tower 3d that hopefully will be out later this year, and which may well develop in part from the feedback they receive from us here. Again Welcome!

Yes. Alt+S = "Hold short of" + "Runway XX" This command must be issued after you have told the aircraft to taxi to the runway or to the terminal.

I believe that the point is that many would appreciate the ability to zoom considerably further than what is currently available in the game. For example, the views provided by the automatic camera mode zoom in very close to the aircraft during pushback, takeoff, and landing. It would be desirable to have that in manual mode as well.

Yes. please make them a bit smaller, but with another notch or two of zoom capability at the same time.

The ability to set up user profiles, as we could in Tower2011, would also be great. Sometimes after racking up thousands of negative points, one just wants to start over. Also, in addition to the scoring system we have now, I think it would be very helpful if the game would report the player's average time in each session from gate to runway, and from runway to gate. This would create a much more realistic sense of how one is doing on a practical level.

Not sure it this is an issue with the fake airline schedule included with the default game, or perhaps something that will be added with Real traffic, but there seems to be a very limited number of aircraft types. I have yet to see a four-engine aircraft of any type. At LAX we should definitely be seeing A-340s, 747s, and A380s. Please confirm that the game does support more aircraft types than what we see so far, including four-holers? Likewise, we desperately need some freighters. After Tower!2011, I figured you guys would know that your main customer base is obsessed with cargo ops.to a level that most outsiders would consider bizarre ;-)

Thank you for that. It is not ideal, but better than nothing.

After a number of hours of playing, I have a round of small suggestions. These are not bugs, but simply improvements that would be desirable from a user's perspective: I will try not to bring up items that have been already repeatedly put forth. Note these are not demands, but respectful suggestions from a generally pleased user. I welcome others to chime in here as well. 1. We need more POV options than just the tower view. This is especially true at larger airports, which in real life have one or more ramp towers, in addition to the main control tower. After all, in the game, the controller is responsible for the ramp controller's job as well as the ground controller. Better yet would be to add a new camera mode in which the camera position was freely moveable by the user. 2. We need a way to control the volume of nature sounds and aircraft noise separately. At a major facility like KLAX, whatever nature sounds that exist would be largely drowned out by the sounds of aircraft and cars. 3. It is sometimes impossible to right-click taxiways or send aircraft to intersection takeoffs if aircraft on the map are covering the spot you need to click. 4. We need more weather options. While downloadable real weather would be great, in the meantime it would at least be nice to be able to select partly cloudy, overcast, light rain, heavy rain, perhaps even snow, depending on the airport location (obviously not KLAX or TIST). 5. While I understand that not all of the commands from Tower2011 could be fit on the mouseclick menus, it would be nice if some or all of the old key combos from that game could have been preserve for those who would still like to use them some of the time. Thus, I could select "Taxi to runway XX" with the mouse commands, and then, if desired, could hit Alt+S for hold short of another runway. 6. Please find a way to make landing lights visible in the air. I can see them reflected on the ground after landing, but not in the air. Even in daytime, landing lights are typically visible on approaching aircraft from three 3-5 miles away, and even farther at night. 7. Add a slider to control the traffic level, as could be done in Tower2011. 8. Add and 3rd camera mode in which the auto panning camera when a plane is selected is completely shut off. This is a very useful feature, but there are times when one might not want the view to flip when issuing instructions to a plane (i.e. you are carefully watching a potential ground conflict, but want to issue a landing/takeoff clearance (based on the radar) without looking away. 9. Reduce the icon size of the ADIRS. 10. Increase the available zoom range, both on the main view and in the ADIRS.. 11. Slightly increase the speed at which aircraft taxi. Right now it is unrealistically slow. 12. Some way to more easily track which aircraft have been waiting the longest at the gate. Not sure what the best method would be. Perhaps just clicking on the aircraft could bring up the time waiting. I suppose having the icons change from green to yellow to red would be unrealistic. 13. Expedite departure/expedite vacate runway would be nice, but this is probably only practical for the Pro version. 14. Make it easier to scroll through the flight strips. Perhaps when an aircraft is clicked the flight strip viewer could automatically scroll the correct strip into view. 15. Make the movable windows (radar screens) darker (less transparent), it can be really hard to see the plane's designations if there is a white background (ground radar is giving me issues. 16. User profiles. 17. The game should automatically remember how you configure the radar screens. 18. Scoring system: I realize that everyone here has different ideas and preferences regarding the current scoring system. While it may be hard to come to an agreement, it would at least be nice to have the ability to disable it entirely from the Settings screen. 19. It would be a nice feature to include the option of setting up timed session. For example the user could chose a time limit (selectable in 15 minute increments), after which a session will automatically end. I cannot tell you how many times already I have discovered that I had been playing for and hour or more, when I thought it had only been 30 min. Yes most of use could just set a timer, but having the option integrated into the game would be handy. 20. Display the number of scheduled ops per hour as the user scrolls through the starting times on the main menu page.

Go into the editor and change the landing/takeoff distances of the aircraft types in question.

No manual. There is a tutorial, but many subtleties are not covered. Give us users some time, and maybe we will put one together ourselves. In the meantime, expect some trial and error, and do not hesitate to politely ask here about anything you do not understand. To select taxiways for routing, first click on "Taxi to" the select your runway from the menu, then right click on each taxiway along the route you have chosen, then click send or hit Enter on your keyboard. Andrew