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https://steamcommunity.com/app/673610/discussions/0/1729828401672508482/
I compared it to the routes in Airline Tycoon. I can tell you that back then I also got tired of setting up flights every day. I mean it's ok for one plane, but once you got ten of them, it gets annoying fast. So for fixed routes I buy a plane schedule the flights and then everything is cool.
And let's be honest here, the bigger a company gets the more your focus shifts in what you have to do. It's the same with real companies. In a small construction company the boss very often might actually also have some construction work to do.
Later once the company has enough funds to expand, he will be more busy managing the business overall (contracts, contacts, employees and so on). And once we start talking about major commpanies with thousands of employees the tasks of a CEO are completely different again.
And airport management game should take something like this into consideration. Something that can keep you busy at the start can become very annoying in late game. ACEO isn't taking that into consideration.
Could you imagine in a real time strategy game like C&C to control every single manually? So you can't select them all but you have to issue commands one by one. There actually was a game before C&C that did exactly that. It was called Dune 2. Now imagine you have to manually assign commands to 100 units on a map...
decided to see what ACEO was actually like so while it was on discount i went for it.....
WIsh i hadnt!
they have made simple tasks really complicated to implement, taxiways needing stop signs every 20 yds and if you so much as dare put one in the wrong place or facing the wrong way the whole airport shutsdown until you fix it BUT they dont shuitsown immediately, oh no, they wait til you place another 20 signs so you have no alternative to spend ages fumbling through it or wiping it out and starting it again!
pathfinder is useless!! place 2 benches in parallel and then place another in a T shape but leaving a space to walk through and the spam is unbelievable "Issac Newton cannot find a way to his destination, make sure walls....blah blah" its not the crystal maze!
I have tried allsorts of things to screw with SA pathfinder, making subways down and under and up and over back and forth round and round and nothing fazes it, the pax get a bit miffed when you close off a route as they reach the end of a very long tunnel though :p (look at some of my workshop airports)
contracts, great idea in principal, having the likes of costa coffee renting space in your terminal. pity though that the contract is usually only for 4 days the same with the flights, so you spend 20 mins - half hour signing contracts and adding flights to the plan (for each day) and by time you finish 3 of the contracts have ended so you have to start again!
After 4hrs of this you finally notice a very small check box in the top of the ui that enables your cfo or whoever to do your flight plan :S (added as an after thought and forgot to make it visible??)
once you finally get a half decent airport bringing in 300 - 400 passengers per hour you start making a decent profit so go for the medium runway and stands (gates) yeah, even more technical cr*p to go through to get it set up and the money finally starts rolling in about the same speed as your FPS drops through the floor!
I can have an SA airport with 8k (18k at one point) and still have decent fps get 2k on ACEO and you feel like your ryzen 2700x just turned into a commodore 64 (for the youngsters thats a really old computer from way back in the 80`s)
I aooreciate that both games are early access but even being allowed to have a toilet zone with a cubicle and NO WALLS and people use it happily !!!!!
sorry but SA wins hands down on all aspects
I may have some odd ideas with my layouts and probably go the long way around doing stuff but even trying to do it the hard way is a lot easier than figuring ACEO out, I even gave up on the tutorial they have as you actually need a tutorial on how to use the tutorial !!!!
I read through your remarks and can understand the frustration. However, let me make a few slight corrections:
Holding points actually are only required at runways. So I usually set holding points wherever a plane is supposed to exit or enter the runway. Holding points are not used anywere else. When used that way planes usually will find their way to the gates and runways.
I haven't really encountered any path finding issues for passengers when it comes down to benches. Usuallly place benches with at least 2 tiles between them. Even at real airports the benches are spread out with some space between them so passengers can actually move. In addition small gates only require 1 or 2 large benches to cover the amount of passengers the planes can handle.
My biggest problem in terms of path finding comes to security check points. If I only have one check point, I will get a major problem each time the shift switches. The personal leaves the station and people can't find there way to the gate as the station is not manned. This creates a flood of error messages. At the moment one has to build it with redundancies.
I've let the CFO schedule my flight pllan once - it looked horrible...
Regarding benches, or any other object (tried the same with plants) the pathfinder just doesnt take into account there is a gap between them
I have just found another issue with the pathfinding, I place my baggage collection near the exit and removed a wall between the existing staffroom and a bathroom, made sure the zones where removed and added a security exit leading into the corridor i had now created, nice and simple (or so you would think) every time a plane lands I get spammed with the usual "xyz cant retrieve their baggage" "xyz cant find a path to " I mean seriously come on! wall in front and to the right of them so obviously turn left and follow the corridor and they are there!
players have been complaining about the low performance for a while now, a new patch was released last night, fix the lag? or at least improve it? nah, they added WEATHER! it now randomly rains/snows/thunderstorms and each change in the weather brings the airport to a standstill as fps hits 1 !!!! (even with a very small starter terminal with 1 stand (gate) cpu usage goes from 1% to 92% when it rains!
Dont get me wrong I am not 100% against ACEO, I have spent a good 6 hrs on it today and they have some great ideas just poorly implemented them, it feels to me at least that they have a brainstorming session, hit on an idea and instruct the programmer to add it within the hour
"Faked simulation" is very offputting
Is that a bug or really the intended design, visuals not matching the numbers?
ACEO:
+ You see exactly what is going on. Is a bag stuck somewhere? You will find it on the conveyer belt
+ Exact representation of every bag in the system. If there are no bags then the conveyer belt is empty
+ Pretty realistic system in my opinion (except maybe how the underground conveyer belt is build)
- You have plan your baggage handling system carefully because bottle necks will cause delays
- Bugs like stuck bags cause major issues
- As every bag is its own entity it has to be calculated properly. This propably adds to the performance issues ACEO has
SImAirport:
+ Connect your systems properly and the bags will always be delivered to the plane on time - ALWAYS!
+ You can build complex networks without having to care about capacity
+ good performance as the bags are handled in the background
- Animation on the conveyer belt is just fluff
- I need to construct a building to actually build conveyer belts
- The way bags are delivered to the plane and taken from them is just plain unrealistic
Ok, how do I know the bags are actually 'handled' and not magically teleported though? How can a network be called 'complex' if it is all fake?
If SimAiport achieves its performance not via more optimized programming but by playing pretend, it's on a design level with "fake games" like SimCity 2013 where the entire population is faked, created with new identities every time they leave their houses.
If capacity not being a factor is a plus on your scale, then 70 people planes being able to carry 5000 passengers would also be a plus. "You just set up an air connection and the passengers will always be delivered to the other airport on time - ALWAYS! Without having to care about capacity!" - does that sound like a fun transportation setup?
However to accomplish that the lines must be connected properly. I had a situation in which I actually made a mistake with the connections and a flight was stuck due to the baggage not being delivered to the plane. So yeah there actually is a proper simulation there.
And if you read my post properly instead of attacking me you might notice that I acknowledge the advantages of ACEO as well. And if you go back to my very first post you will see that I actually wrote that in my opinion the ACEO baggage handling system is overall better even though it has some huge bugs.
I'm not forcing you or anyone to chose between either game. You can buy both or neither. I just wrote my experiences down and which game I currently prefer.
It did however become the case after the first (of two) overhauls on the baggage system. We actually completely removed all visuals of the bags traversing the conveyor systems; that animation/visual was only re-added after the most recent baggage system update, not too long ago.
Right now we simply check the network connectivity and run the paths -- but the bags are indeed 'teleported'. What you see on the conveyors (except for at the ticketing desk) are purely randomized bags being spawned; it's basically just a temporary animation / visual improvement until we have time to go back and make it be 1-to-1 from end-to-end, and to do so in a way that performs extremely well. We know exactly how to do that now, we just haven't had time to get back to it yet -- we figure you'd rather we spend our time working to apply those same concepts to passengers & objects first.
In reality, once we go back and do that the change will largely be a visual one -- it'll have a minor gameplay impact (it's on the roadmap as "Baggage System - Lost bags/gameplay impact"), but mostly it'll just mean that the visual you see matches the already-correctly-computed logic of the baggage network. Until then, the bags on the conveyors should pretty much just be considered as visual flair (and, from a UX-standpoint, as an indication that things are connected correctly); the logical computation is correct and occurring, it's just a matter of adding back in the visual that precisely matches it and, most importantly, doing so in a way that is extremely high-performance.
After all, who cares if the bags are simulated both logically (already) and visually if it means getting low framerates! We'll get it done, and fast, but it's not a super high priority at this very moment. ;-)
All that said, we've gone to extremely great lengths to not "cheat" on anything -- including & especially passengers and their AI. For instance, it'd be far easier for us to just make Passenger roll a dice and decide to do "1 visual thing" before then heading to their gates to board; that's not the route we've chosen, instead we've developed (and continue to tweak & tune) a really robust and somewhat novel AI system for them that results in behaviors that are unique, fairly realistic & perhaps even bordering on emergent, which are truly based on their individual desires, their surroundings, etc...
TLDR: We don't cheat. Sometimes maybe we should and, who knows, maybe we will on something in the future (fun is #1 priority obviously!), but we've gone to great lengths to create an authentic & genuine gameplay experience thus far and we continue working our butts off every day to improve & add to it (and to make it really, really, really high-performance)! ;-)
Thanks.
P.S.: Are there communication channels you're reasonably responsive on, like something akin to email or this forum's weird PM system? Tried emailing you 1-2x at some point in 2017; and by the way you should probably take down the very outdated http://www.simairport.com/updates.html
Re: Baggage -- Yes, some level of capacity limit & planning will likely be incorporated at the bag level (ie beyond simply conveyor-port capacity limits). I suspect doing it may be trickier than it sounds however, not due to any technical limitations but due to gameplay concerns; turnaround times are already stretched a bit, and so we must be very careful to not throw in a bunch of "required turnaround services" (or tasks/chores/items to be done) which have the potential to slow it further even in the best-case. I may be wrong, and we may be able to implement it in such a way where the impact is minimal, but that's generally my chief concern on it apart from the performance side (which is now 'solved' even if not yet implemented on the baggage stuff).
In any case, it'll be coming -- and full-fledged cargo systems are even on the roadmap, though they'll probably still be a ways out yet, but you can expect similar dynamics from that system too. :)
Re: Comms Channels -- I'd consider us to generally be pretty responsive here on the forum, and we also keep pretty close tabs on the subreddit as well as our [urll=http://twitter.com/simairport]Twitter[/url].
We respond to all emails that require a response & often we respond to bug report emails with further info on the bug or to let players know when the bugfix will be deployed (and occasionally to provide a workaround save in the interim). Sometimes, especially last year as we were still neck-deep in code while working through bugs, but occasionally we'll miss an email or it'll take us longer than it should to get to them -- that's more rare these days but generally we're pretty easy to get ahold of between the various channels, email, and of course here on the forum. We read everything here, even when we aren't responding directly. :)
At the end of the day though, it's just the two of us -- myself (Arthur) and Rob -- who are handling the email/administrative & of course the development itself; our community manager Ramsis also helps us out a ton here in the forum & on the various social/media channels, but our bandwidth is a bit limited just in terms of man-hour availability. We try our best to make the most of it, though! =)
Anyways am sorry if you sent an email that we missed or that you needed a response on; feel free to send it again and will take a look at it right away! :)
Re: Updates.html -- Thank you! Got it fixed! =) Appreciate it very much!
Funny trivia, if not a bit embarrassing/bad: after launching SimAirport in March 2017 we needed to update the website but just didn't have the time to do so due to fighting off bugs, answering emails, and deploying updates. I think it took us almost two months to finally get the website updated to include the fact that we were no longer "pre-launch"!
Just post right on the forum - ideally in the correct subforum. The developers are on here at LEAST once a day, and usually much more than that. They're the single most connected devteam I've ever seen.