tower!3d pro How timetables are made from schedules

[WildCard]

I thought that a more detailed description of how timetables are built may be useful for people making custom schedules. Times are stored as a percentage of the day ie. 0 to 1

• The game loads the schedule in order from top to bottom.
• It the goes through the list in order and creates all incoming flights from the start time minus 15 minutes until midnight or start time plus 12hrs. (It could easily do the full 24hrs just by adding 1 to flights that are too early, but doesn't)
• It then goes through the list in order and creates outgoing flights using the same time period
• As each outgoing flight is created it checks against the incoming flights to see if it can reuse an incoming plane for the outgoing flight.
• The criteria for the match is that the plane must be scheduled to arrive at least 30 mins before the outgoing plane and must be the same plane type and be from the same company.
• It matches the last flight it finds in the list that meet this criteria.

This means that in order to get the optimal restarter matches:

• Incoming/Arriving flights should be ordered from the last flight of the day to the first flight of the day.
• Outgoing/Departing flights should be ordered from the first flight of the day to the last flight of the day.

Multi-player games do use restarter planes.

Now that I've written this out, I'll also post this information where it can be useful to others. 😃

Cheers,

Daniel

[WildCard]

What do I mean by optimal?

If I have a 8 hour schedule where both Arrivals and Departures are sorted from the the start of the day (morning) to the end of the day (afternoon). Then a plane that arrives at the start of the schedule will match with a departing plane near the end of the schedule. This means that the plane will arrive and sit at the terminal for nearly 8 hrs, stopping that gate from being used by other planes.

Using the same schedule, but having the Arrivals sorted from the last flight of the day (afternoon) to the first flight of the day (morning) (ie. backwards), and the Departures are sorted from  the first flight of the day (morning) to the last flight of the day (afternoon). Then a plane that arrives at the start of the schedule will match with a departing plane near the start of the schedule. This means that the plane will arrive and might only sit at the terminal for 30 minutes before departing again, allowing other planes to use that gate.

More gates open = more planes coming in = more fun = more penalty points? 🙂

[crbascott]

Obviously it would make more sense if the game engine did all the appropriate sorting, but we all know that is not going to happen.

Arrival times and how the engine determines the landing runway are also a factor on seeing the schedule utilized to its fullest, but in the case of the latter there's not much we (except maybe for @WildCard) can do about that.

[707FAN]

@WildCard Thanks for the info Daniel.

To add to your information I guess the easiest way to re sort the arrivak times is to import them into an Excell spreadsheet. Sort the times  latest to Earliest, then save as a c.sv file, then rename as a .txt file.  Does anyone know a way to sort notepad++ files not by the first entry in a line. i.e be able to sort the file by arrival time??? This would make it mush easier

Kev

[hexzed]

Hi Kev

Select the start of the time with your mouse while holding alt

Then select all of what you want to sort, then sort via line operations > sort lines lexographically ascending

You will need all the times in a perfect column though

However excel is probably still the cleaner way

Ben

[707FAN]

Thanks Ben, I see what you mean about keeping them in a column to get it to work properly. I think I will stick to excel.😃

Kev