why do DLC airports have so little traffic ?

[Tullaian]

Basically makes buying them pointless unless you make a custom schedule. It was obviously a design decision at the time (simpler schedule , lower cost to make or simply the issue with so many gates spawning full) but, for premium priced DLC (airport + real traffic + real color for airport ) so many of them are a disappointment when it comes to their actual operations. 

Dallas/Fort Worth 0800-0900 in game 28 movements, IRL 85 movements just looking at today's FlightRadar. At a number of points in the schedule there were no aircraft either arriving or departing from what is supposedly the world's 3rd busiest airport.  Don't even start with poor Dubai , it is a total snoozefest to play if you don't create a custom schedule. Massive airport, hundreds of taxiways , no aircraft to use any of it. 

I knew at least Dubai's default schedule was extremely poor based on the reviews but, expected way better from Dallas based on the fact that Atlanta at least gets busy. 

Hopefully for T3DP Next Gen you look to add the feature to bring real traffic properly into the game like MS has done with FS2020 or find a way to get the schedules much more in line with real world operations for these airports. 

[DeltaVII]

Simple answer: They bought worldwide schedules including licences for redistribution as Real Traffic once, before Tower!3D came out, at what you would consider horrible cost that you only stomach once. Whatever the volume was, at that time, worldwide, that was the volume that went into Real Traffic. And ZBAD wasn't even around at that time.

Buying those data once is definitely cheaper and better to calculate with than buying the data for one airport at a time around the time it comes out. First and foremost: You as a developer have no idea whether your data source will be available at all at the time you publish an add-on, up to six years in the future, and you would have to buy them for a third-party developer publishing a new airport on their own. Microsoft can secure availability just by buying a company providing the necessary data. They would buy FlightAware, Flightradar24, AirNav Systems (Radarbox) or any other company in that field just for shits and giggles, if it safely provided them with the data they need. Do you think that FeelThere could go the same way when FlightAware was just sold half a year ago to Collins Aerospace in a multi-million dollar deal?

You want real-time traffic like Microsoft FS2020? Then don't complain when the base game already costs US$ 300-500. Or accept that things are the way they are and be grateful that there are people out here who update your $9.99 once-and-for-all-times Real Traffic purchase with real data at no additional cost at all for most of the airports (and maybe ask nicely, if anyone has a schedule he/she/diverse would be willing to share for an airport that's not in the list that @pete_agreatguy provided)...

Ooooooor you could kick-start your own software company and make a better product on your own? 🤔

Sincerely,
a software developer (not affiliated with FeelThere)

[crbascott]

 

13 hours ago, Tullaian said:

Basically makes buying them pointless unless you make a custom schedule. It was obviously a design decision at the time (simpler schedule , lower cost to make or simply the issue with so many gates spawning full) but, for premium priced DLC (airport + real traffic + real color for airport ) so many of them are a disappointment when it comes to their actual operations. 

Dallas/Fort Worth 0800-0900 in game 28 movements, IRL 85 movements just looking at today's FlightRadar. At a number of points in the schedule there were no aircraft either arriving or departing from what is supposedly the world's 3rd busiest airport.  Don't even start with poor Dubai , it is a total snoozefest to play if you don't create a custom schedule. Massive airport, hundreds of taxiways , no aircraft to use any of it. 

I knew at least Dubai's default schedule was extremely poor based on the reviews but, expected way better from Dallas based on the fact that Atlanta at least gets busy. 

Hopefully for T3DP Next Gen you look to add the feature to bring real traffic properly into the game like MS has done with FS2020 or find a way to get the schedules much more in line with real world operations for these airports. 

COVID. 

Atlanta was released pre-COVID (2017), that's why you see decent traffic volumes (despite no arrivals for hour 20).
Dubai was released fall 2019 and we can start to see the COVID impact on schedules. 
Dallas was released late 2019, same song second verse.  
 

[crbascott]

6 hours ago, DeltaVII said:

Simple answer: They bought worldwide schedules including licences for redistribution as Real Traffic once, before Tower!3D came out, at what you would consider horrible cost that you only stomach once. Whatever the volume was, at that time, worldwide, that was the volume that went into Real Traffic. And ZBAD wasn't even around at that time.

Bought worldwide schedules once? Is this a fact or just an assumption? Why buy something when it is freely available? 

Isn’t the simple explanation that COVID caused low traffic volumes in real life and with airports being released during COVID Real Traffic just reflected what was happening in real life? This is the same reason custom schedule creation has declined - not worth the effort due to low traffic volumes.

[corrigancr]

I feel you. I bought WSSS back at the beginning of December and still have yet to play it because I'm putting hours and hours into creating a proper custom schedule first lol.

[Tullaian]

14 hours ago, DeltaVII said:

You want real-time traffic like Microsoft FS2020? Then don't complain when the base game already costs US$ 300-500. Or accept that things are the way they are and be grateful that there are people out here who update your $9.99 once-and-for-all-times Real Traffic purchase with real data at no additional cost at all for most of the airports (and maybe ask nicely, if anyone has a schedule he/she/diverse would be willing to share for an airport that's not in the list that @pete_agreatguy provided)...

 

I am not sure where you bought your copy of MSFS2020 from but, mine only cost $69 and comes with support for global real world weather and real world traffic , which is less than the cost of T3DP+ single DLC airport+Real Traffic+Real Colour purchase. 

You seem to have ended up on your high horse for no reason. 

The value of the DLC IS poor unless you create a custom schedule for it, that is a view consumers are entitled to have surely? The DLC is not sold for a reduced price to reflect that schedules are based on a time when global air traffic was reduced due to COVID. There is no advertising on the DLC that indicates that schedules provided for the airport will be less than 20% of regular volume and that the only way to fix this will be to fix it yourself. There are hardly any reviews for any of the DLC so the state of the schedules for each one are unknown to a consumer unless you've been following along for years and know when each airport was released. 

Fortunately, there are people like @EliGrim who have created tools to allow for custom schedules to be developed to fix this gap, which is also a true statement and for which I am thankful as well as to the people who have hand crafted real world schedules per the forum list. Schedules are publicly available from a number of free/open source locations for those who would like to increase the accuracy of operations for an airport. 

I simply asked the question why the default schedules provided for the DLC airports are so terrible (in terms of volume and accuracy of terminal assignment) to which @crbascott has provided the answer. The schedules were created at a point in time in the middle of the pandemic impacted flight frequency. Given the DLC is still sold at full price updating the schedules once to provide even something roughly 'normal' traffic might be something to be considered. 

Finally I said it would be good for their next game, in my view,  (no request to put it into this game for free at all) to cater much better for real traffic and operations given what MS have now demonstrated is possible in terms of correlating real world traffic and airport operations. 

 

[crbascott]

For the record, live traffic in the next version is not a new request. I do not recall any controversy when posting this 2+ years ago.

Wishlist #47 from the discord server. 

 

[FeelThere_Vic]

Happy New Year Everyone 🙂

Please let me try to answer since there are a few good points above and some of aren't so good.
The current Tower game use a global traffic database so you are right at one point back in time we had to buy a global traffic database. It wasn't cheap and we could not afford it to update with each airport's release. This is why the default traffic is low at certain airports.

As far as I know Gabor picks a certain day for his RC/RT releases and grab every single flight that day manually (I'm sure he uses some script, but the idea is the same). Releases during Covid had lower traffic volumes because the real airports had lower volumes too.

In the upcoming Tower! Simulator 3 we will not use a global database. We offer so many customisation that we thought it would be more useful to save everything on an airport level so it will be much easier to modify, and share.

Thank you

Vic

[Tullaian]

Thanks Vic. 

While understandable, (and I work in aerospace , the business impact of COVID to all aspects of aviation have been great !) it is disappointing to fire up a new DLC only to find there is almost no traffic. 🙂The attraction at least for me in buying the DLC airports is to buy the 'busy ones' as after awhile playing at 100% the medium and smaller airports aren't really 'hard' enough to stick with and play repeatedly. 

Hopefully with your plans for TS3 you will include the ability for easy modification/update of schedules and terminal assignments to allow the community the ability to help you keep the content current.