anyone heard anthing about the next airport

[ATC AlaskaGuy]

I have seen some videos and pictures from KIRO7 in Seattle WA but as of lately not heard anything new last i heard they were in the process of raising the structure in place this walkway is going to be even higher then the one at EGKK.

[Braf123456]

It's supposed to be 790 ft

[ATC AlaskaGuy]

I don't know that could be i just know that they were going to lift into place.

[FeelThere_Vic]

@crbascott
Craig,

We are going somewhere with our bar offers. I could handle a bottle of cold Sam Adams any time now 🙂 

It's very difficult to answer at the moment because we are not there yet to see if we can capable importing the "old" airports into the new system, It;'s possible (however it's my personal quest not to happen) that we wont be able to move the old airports to the new version regardless of free/pay/whatsoever. The editor I envision is somehow totally different from the current one. I will have to pitch the idea to the team and see if it's possible at all. I would love to get into details but pretty much hours after I posted here someone jumped on us in our Facebook group and I rather not fight on multiple fronts 🙂 

Re: greedy. I learned to ignore it. As long as we ask for money for our software someone is going to call us greedy. The funny thing there is a beautiful free add-on for the flight sim I use for fun and there are people who still attack the developer. It tells everything. We can see a bigger picture; we received so much requests for more airports we had to reshuffle resources and now we can release a new airport in every month. That makes some other people happy while it make some unhappy. To give you an example how much we try to save money I'm willing to marry our marketing person soon 🙂 

The Tower!3D and Pro was built on Tower!2011 and to be honest we underestimated the community. I thank you all for proving us wrong. T!3DX will be built from scratch and it's whole development and support philosophy is planned to be changed. Once again I wish I could get into details but I don't want to fight over this on social media while everything is still in planning stage. For sure once we make the new editors we will keep future compatibility in mind. So after the release of T!3DX we should expect backward compatibility for the future versions (Tower releases after T!3DX). 

 

Quote

I want to see next level stuff.

That's the goal 🙂 

Thanks for the Uber, I pick up the tab for the drinks 🙂 

[Graavan]

As a newer person, I enjoy playing what we have now. Heck I tried ATL at 50% and it kicked my a_s so I have a lot to learn yet! There are things that tick me off about this version (stupid 500 point penalties) but I also extremely look forward to whatever the next version will be. I will gladly buy the FeelThere crew a beer sometime also! @FeelThere I think a blog would be a great form of communication, I know a company can't be transparent on everything but some sort of regular updates would be a fun peak behind the scenes. 

Peter

[ATC AlaskaGuy]

next airport is EDDF 

 

[Braf123456]

7 hours ago, ATC AlaskaGuy said:

next airport is EDDF 

 

I can't wait to play it I hope egll comes out 

[ATC AlaskaGuy]

I know right it looks really awesome from what i have seen of ATCJoe's video of the airport.

[andredragt]

Considering how many votes the KLM got in the retro-poll, gives us his homebase  ;p

[Avwriter]

On 2/7/2020 at 12:29 PM, ATC AlaskaGuy said:

I know right it looks really awesome from what i have seen of ATCJoe's video of the airport.

Also in the comments section of that video (the first one), FeelThere confirmed that EGLL is in the works.

 

Andrew

[ATC AlaskaGuy]

yeah i saw that to really want egll to as i have gatwick and really want egll

[andredragt]

On 2/11/2020 at 4:41 PM, Avwriter said:

Also in the comments section of that video (the first one), FeelThere confirmed that EGLL is in the works.

 

Andrew

In that case: 

Request for terminal Priority in EGLL; make Terminal 5 a higher priority to go to for incoming flights as Terminal 3. Both are used by BA, but T5 is only used by BA, while T3 is used by more airlines. If T3 has a higher priority, it would just fill up with BA-flights, thus taking up the spots for non-BA flights.

[hexzed]

2 hours ago, andredragt said:

In that case: 

Request for terminal Priority in EGLL; make Terminal 5 a higher priority to go to for incoming flights as Terminal 3. Both are used by BA, but T5 is only used by BA, while T3 is used by more airlines. If T3 has a higher priority, it would just fill up with BA-flights, thus taking up the spots for non-BA flights.

Unfortunately there is no way in the current engine to allow for prioritising flights to a particular terminal. The only way around it, is to not assign BAW to terminal 3

[andredragt]

22 minutes ago, hexzed said:

Unfortunately there is no way in the current engine to allow for prioritising flights to a particular terminal. The only way around it, is to not assign BAW to terminal 3

I may be mistaken, but isn't T1 a lower priority as the rest in Gatwick? I was not talking about doing it playerside, but about programmer-side

 

Edit 5 min later: I just tested it quickly, seems Terminal 3 (S3) has a higher priority as T1 and the T2's in Gatwick

[hexzed]

The terminals are split into multiple sections. I would say that what you are seeing is based on what gates in those sections are set as heavy, narrow body, and prop.

There has never been an indication of priority in programming

 

[andredragt]

This turning into a nice little discussion  🙂

More testing.. and what I have learned from LFPG-schedule (adr-lfpg)

What I see from LFPG is that arriving planes look for a Terminal they are assigned to, and in that Terminal first go to the gate which is their size-gate with the lowest number. After that they just fill up bigger gates. (this has the strange quirk, that if a heavy plane is assigned to a Terminal with heavy gates, and all those are taken, it won't spawn, but if a heavy plane is assigned to a gate w/o Heavy Gates, it will randomly spawn on a heavy gate somewhere...probably based on terminal-Priority)

What I just did is run the following schedule on EGKK;

SZG,LGW,320,BA,2657,17:01,12:00,1,BA
LGW,JER,319,BA,2774,12:00,17:00,1,BA

(you need a departing plane to start the schedule)

AFAIK, all the gates on gatwick can handle a Airbus 320. So I used this, and made sure all Terminals in the Terminal File had BAW added..or actaully, only BAW.

I started  a session, took note where the arriving plane was going, and then removed BAW from that terminal, rince and repeat. That way I got a Terminal Priority for arriving Planes on Gatwick... for those who want to know:

S3>N4E>N4W>N5S>N5N>N6>S2N>S2S>S1>NWN>SWS>CARGO>NORTH>PW>PE>GA>N6SP

I already knew there was a priority somehow from LFPG, see my remark from the above schedule post ((I would have loved that 1remoteS would have been after the rest of Terminal 1, so I could use it as overflow, same for padH, would loved to have used that as overflow for padQ. But it seems the game has another priority.))

From all this I am inclined to draw a conclusion:

Using Gatwick as an Example, an arriving plane will check if it is assigned to Terminal_S3, if not, it will check Terminal_N4E (see list above), this will continue until it finds a Terminal it is assigned to. It will then check if there is a gate available for that plane-type, and then assign it to the lowest numbered gate. If no gate is available, it will check the next Terminal continuing till it finds a Terminal with a gate available where it is assigned to. 

 

So.... for Heathrow / EGLL, my request is that in the list Terminal 5 has a higher priority as Terminal 3, for the before mentioned reason that if it is the other way around, BAW will just fill up T3 and pushing non-BAW flights out of the schedule

 

aaargh.. and I was just happily playing KPHX before doing this stuff 😛

[hexzed]

Nice testing procedure.

The question is whether the priority can be programmed.

Talking to a few beta testers they don't believe this is a thing that can be changed at gate level.

However this can only be definitively answered by @FeelThere

I myself will not be holding my breath, but am happy to be proven wrong 😉

[WildCard]

Terminals are stored in a list and iterated over from first to last until a free terminal is found for that aircraft type and company. The list is most likely generated when loading the XXXX_terminal.txt file, so it may be possible to prioritise terminals by changing the list order. Higher on the list = higher priority.

Edit: nope. After looking a bit further, it looks like they are added in the order they are loaded from the airport xml file ie. node order. So essentially random, the order could change everytime the airport is modified.

On the other hand, after loading the airport it would be a neat feature to sort the terminals by the order they are in the teminal.txt file. feature request 😇 

[andredragt]

8 hours ago, WildCard said:

Edit: nope. After looking a bit further, it looks like they are added in the order they are loaded from the airport xml file ie. node order. So essentially random, the order could change everytime the airport is modified.

They don't seem to be random. and it is indeed not determined by the order they are in the terminal-file, that would be to easy  🙂 As far as I can tell, it is preprogrammed what the order is.

[WildCard]

31 minutes ago, andredragt said:

They don't seem to be random. and it is indeed not determined by the order they are in the terminal-file, that would be to easy  🙂 As far as I can tell, it is preprogrammed what the order is.

They are not random each time you play the game, they are in the order that the nodes have been saved in the xml content for the airport. What this means is, that if the airport gets edited, then the nodes could be saved in a different order to what they are now ie. random.

It would, however, be possible to sort the terminals node list into a specific order once the airport's information has been loaded.

I'm not guessing 😉 A simplified version of the current code is: foreach xml node. load road. if road is terminal then add to terminals list.

[FeelThere_Vic]

I hate to ruin it, but the current engine is not supporting Terminal prioritization. Accidentally it might work, but that is pure coincidence.

 

Vic

[andredragt]

1 hour ago, FeelThere said:

I hate to ruin it, but the current engine is not supporting Terminal prioritization. Accidentally it might work, but that is pure coincidence.

 

Vic

So, how come planes go to S3 first in gatwick and not S1?

(btw, I am not asking for an option to do it ourselves, just that it is coded like that)

[WildCard]

Because the last time the airport was edited and released, the pc they were saving it on flipped a coin and decided to serialise the node tree containing S3 out to the xml data file before serialising the node tree containing S1. So when the airport gets loaded from the xml data file it reads in the data containing S3 first and, hey presto, it's now first in the terminals list.

Ok, it's probably more complicated than flipping a coin and probably involves linked lists, hash tables, hash trees and maybe even some hashish, but it basically means that if the data changes then the order in which the nodes gets serialised can also change. The order is not something that is set by the developer.

[winsaudi]

So, going back to the original request by @andredragt to have the vast majority of BA traffic at T5 with just a few from T3, as in the real world, is it not easier to allocate just a small number of T3 gates in the airport coding only for BA? Such as:

Terminal 3: AAL,ACA........ etc

Terminal 3BA: BAW

That seems a workable compromise.
Now, how do you get the BA domestic flights to use the correct callsign SHUTTLE while still keeping  BAW/BA codes and not getting white aircraft?

[WildCard]

change the line in the XXXX_Airlines.txt file from
 

BAW, BA, SPEED BIRD, British Airways, United Kingdom

to
 

BAW, BA, SHUTTLE, British Airways, United Kingdom

Of course the International flights will then be called 'Shuttle' as well, but then, you probably already knew that 🙂