Tower!3D Airport Sim Session Length

[futureboy]

Since the very beginning of Tower!3D I have limited my sessions to an hour at a time.  Otherwise I would play for an hour or so, then exit, then start again at the next hour.  Mostly because in the beginning strange things seemed to happen after an hour.  But now those anomalies have since been corrected.

So my question is, if I am in the sim for more than an hour, lets say for four continuous hours, does anybody know if I will see the same amount of departures and arrivals as playing the sim for four one hour sessions?  Does the sim start with a set number of arrivals and departures, such as 20 arrivals and 40 departures and after there gone, there gone?

I would think that the arrivals would be on a continuous basis, but the departures would have to include departures of not only planes that are there at the start, but of planes that have arrived earlier then depart later in the session.

How do other people use the sim? As long as they can before the pass out due to lack of sleep or a certain length of time or score?

"Inquiring minds want to know"
 E. F. Hutton (Stock Brokers) 

RickyJ

[Avwriter]

The planes are not generated randomly.  They follow a set schedule over a 24-hour period, and so some hours will be busier than others, and at the end, it will simply start over.  A default schedule is built into the game and cannot be viewed by the user, but it is possible to create and use your own custom schedule.  At the top of this forum you will see a link to Dick Parker's Schedule Creator For Tower2011.  This is a free application that creates schedules for most airports in the game, and it works with both Tower2011 and with Tower3D.  It allows you to change settings to make for a busier or slower schedule, and uses real airline flights.  Detailed instructions are located within the link, and of course we can help you here as well, if you run into problems.

[futureboy]

So are you saying that when I start the sim, there will be 24 hours of departures ready to go? If I play the sim for 24 hours, I will not run out of departures? I did not think there were enough gates to supply 24 hours of departures, unless the planes automagically appear or the sim re-uses planes that arrive as departures.

You may be correct on the arrivals, because I have created schedules with 2880 arrivals and departures, but a lot of the arrivals are skipped, and the departures really stack up fast, but I do not think you are correct on the departures. I think if you run the sim for a long period of time, you are bound to run out of planes.

RickyJ

[achilles1971]

In Tower2011 the sim is limited to 6-7 hours...

[Avwriter]

1 hour ago, futureboy said:

So are you saying that when I start the sim, there will be 24 hours of departures ready to go? If I play the sim for 24 hours, I will not run out of departures? I did not think there were enough gates to supply 24 hours of departures, unless the planes automagically appear or the sim re-uses planes that arrive as departures.

RickyJ

The game does automatically reuse the arriving planes as scheduled departures.  Some of them may sit there for a while, but eventually they will depart, making room for an arriving aircraft later on.  I have attached a sample schedule for KLAX created by the Schedule Creator app that I mentioned.  You can open it in notepad and look at it.  Departures are listed in the first half, while arrivals are listed in the second half; note that each flight has a scheduled time, and an actual departure and arrival airport.  At the end, is a summary of the number of departures and arrivals per hour, so that you can see that the volume does rise and fall from one hour to the next.  Keep in mind that this is not a real word schedule, but is randomly generated so that the flow is relatively steady throughout the day and night. 

 

klax_schedule.txt

[Avwriter]

49 minutes ago, achilles1971 said:

In Tower2011 the sim is limited to 6-7 hours...

Ha  ha.  I had forgotten about that limitation.  Nevertheless, the schedule still contains 24 hours of traffic.  I have no idea if Tower 3D has the same limitation on session length.  I have never played either for long enough at a time to run into that issue :-)

[FeelThere_Vic]

Also, we rewrote the logic for reusing arrived airplanes for departure. By the time we developed T!2011 a turnaround time was about 2 hours. In these days no airline can afford it so you will see turnaround as fast as 20 minutes. If a plane gets delayed on arrival there are times when it will depart again almost immediately. I agree this is sometimes funny, but this is the only way to make some realistic average turnaround to be programmed. Yes we could take account delays etc, but it would require a very complex scheduling system (which in fact my wishlist for a possible next version of Tower :) )