Just a friendly reminder to update your flair when you post!

This is the third (and maybe final) part of a series of posts on my experiences of how I pushed the sim to get to 100k passengers. You can go back to look at my first post or second post. Looking back, I probably should have named my first one introduction and transportation.

In those posts, I very subtly alluded to the idea of splitting or separating things apart. Whether it was keeping the main road clear or using restrooms as a load balancer, the idea was the same. That idea is to have the sim make a decision as early as possible to determine where that "thing" is supposed to wind up. Once that "thing" has been separated out, the parts that actually move that "thing" to its destination has a lot less work to do (road or escalators).

I cannot take any credit for this. I used to play the openttdcoop which is a style of cooperative r/openttd gameplay. They have a design approach called "split then join" to help route their trains throughout the game map and I used the same approach to route luggage.

Onto some pics:

Luggage from arriving aircraft

If you visualize how to write the letter "U", first you start at the upper left, then trace the pen toward the bottom, make a curve, and then swing back up. So the first picture shows luggage from multiple aircraft all unloading at once. Judging by the luggage density on the belts, I want to say there were about 4 aircraft here. The sim has a limit of 5 producers onto a belt before it heads into a hub.

The first hub's primary job is to separate the luggage into what I call an "A" or "B" stream. These streams will lead to half of the available baggage claims. The idea is that any particular piece of luggage doesn't need to go through processing for any unneeded hub. So in the picture, you will see two 6-way hubs taking in the luggage and determining if the luggage should to go one belt or the other.

Decisions made, the second hub's (a 10-way hub) responsibility is to take in all the other hub's decisions and then merge all the luggage together. You may have concerns that some VIP's luggage is unfairly being cut off by some commoner's luggage. This is the wrong way to think about it because the goal is to maximize the luggage system's throughput and get the people to leave the airport.

Once merged, the luggage heads to the upper right hand side of the picture as streams A and B. Note also all the ways that I kept all the belts separated by having the belt go underground and brought back up to not have the belt tied into a knot.

The careful observer will also notice that the merger hubs had other belts feeding into it. That's because the first picture only showed the upper half of this luggage system. Here's a fuller picture:

Notice bottom splitter hub is putting luggage onto left or right streams.

Merger hub accepting luggage from upper and lower belts

Same concepts here, the lower luggage system (luggage coming from bottom left) separates the luggage at the first decision making hub before being merged together from all the hubs.

Enough of that, let's follow the belt to the upper right and see where it goes:

Notice how dense the conveyor belts are with luggage

If you followed the "A" and "B" streams up, you'll notice that there are also hubs here acting as mergers. In particular, it is merging in luggage from the airport's East side.

Close up of East side luggage system

Same pattern here, we split before merging. I ran out of space on the left side of the picture so I did some acrobatics to get the belts going the directions I wanted them to go. The bottom belt goes right-to-left. The one above is luggage arriving from some aircraft and it goes left-to-right. Above that one, this belt goes right-to-left. The most top belt came from passenger bag drop off and is heading to the aircraft. But also notice that I didn't use any belt transitions going up or down.

Now let's head on up the conveyor belts:

8 of the 16 total baggage claim carousels shown

The luggage is coming from the bottom center of the picture. And then they immediately head up another level. At this point, the conveyor belt is packed densely with all the different flights randomly merged together. But again, the belt is only carrying half the total amount of luggage due to splitting earlier.

Here's where we begin to unravel everything:

\"A\" stream baggage half

Luggage is coming from the bottom right. If you look closely the left belt is going up to the roof. Only the right belt is coming into the hub where this first hub splits the luggage to the top or bottom hubs. These hubs are connected to 4 carousels and will split the luggage to the appropriate one.

BUT WAIT!!! 4 carousels and an incoming stream adds up to 5! What's this extra belt coming on the left?

The answer is that this splitter also functions as a merger and is processing luggage coming from the NORTH SIDE of the airport. The pictures we've looked at so far was the SOUTH SIDE of the airport. Capacity-wise, this hub isn't going to see much action. I think the most luggage I've ever seen being processed was 3 or 4.

Upper baggage claim, a mirror of the lower

We avoid the "B" stream colliding with the "A" stream by going up a level. And from there is just another splitter before coming back down.

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Rush hour at this airport begins around 6 or 7am. All the passengers are cleared out by the 9am hour. Again, avoid busses and use trains - much less latency and much more predictability.

I hope you enjoyed this quick series of posts. Hopefully you got a sense of the scale. Let me know if you have questions or comments.

Does anyone know what the main performance issues are caused by from a hardware perspective? Is the game particularly hard on RAM, CPU or GPU?

Does anyone know a good fix for the limit of 5 producers for a conveyor belt?

Can I use my Mouse and Keyboard to play the game on my Xbox?

I'm looking for some good and efficient layouts for a mid-size airport (let's say something between 10 and 15 gates). Please hd pics and show me every level!

I just started a new game but the clock stuck at 12:15 am. Is it normal ?

I saw a post by Bridg3s years ago and thought I would report his lost about things to add as well as some of my recommendations

being able to rotate the camera so you can assess things 360 instead of face on

•when you place an object say you misplace it or facing wrong direction why not make a edit feature for items not currently in place instead of cancel then replace

•for those who extend the roads why not a bridge in which they walk over instead of walking across the road in front of traffic

•A small multi player mode that allows you and one other build an airport together just give them more challenges or make it harder to satisfy passenger but allow them double the starting funds

• I find it hard to satisfy the passengers from being bored so maybe some TV to put on the wall, arcade machines etc.

•instead of just lights that are on poles what about lights you can attach to the building like spot lights in which you can face onto the terminal tarmac, you can save space not that the outside flood lights use much.

• you already have a phone charger station but what about other devices like laptops etc, a work bench which allows people to put laptop on charge sit are use

• Internet/WiFi again it’s a way to war money charge people $5 for access but also make it that it cost a hefty chunk per month.

• maybe add objects which would works as a risk/reward system, like Internet mention about say $5 per person to use it but say it cost I don’t know £1500 a day to have it or something.

•cctv camera for extra security and requires a security room.

•sign post to tell people where their gate is, or maybe toilet, the cafe.

2nd floor drop offs/ pickups

Parking garages/ charge for parking (I know this is a feature but garages aren't really

Multi level boarding for the a380 like real life

Customs

Make your own flight routes?

More stuff for the lounges like buffets and coffee machines that don't need to be placed in cafe zone

Private jets, private terminal and hangars

Sports teams could be cool

More aircraft models (I know we have a lot of good ones but like the a320. Maybe even variants like the 737-800)

Traffickers and smugglers sounds like a dlc

I'm sure I have more that I'm not thinking of right now, but that's all I can. If you have more comment them and if some of these are in the game lmk.

Edit: queues. These things are supposed to make things more efficient but actually ended up delaying my planes

https://preview.redd.it/0e0hrq3rwddd1.png?width=783&format=png&auto=webp&s=81d9e59993d1746078e569f6c43f6d59c32a0dfb

god this is a mess, dont even mention my pickups.

I posted my original post a couple of weeks ago. On u/HijinksNYK's request, I want to talk briefly about ticketing & security.

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There's probably not too much interesting going on. Both ticketing & security are one of those things where passenger flow increases greatly the more you add.

The ticketing mod used is modair's Modern Self Ticketing Kiosk with Baggage. I further modded it by changing it to each handle 1000 passengers. It's probably overkill. Next, I exploited a bug in the game where it doesn't look like it checks if these objects can stack on top of each other. The object normally takes 2x1 squares, but stacking them allows higher density. The conveyor belt also has a limit on how many objects can feed into it. You can get around this by cloning the kiosk multiple times onto the belt. Finally, it seems easiest to make the belt into a single line so that all the kiosks can feed straight into it. There is a conveyor transition down at the end of each of the belts. So with stacking, maybe re-modding the kiosk isn't needed.

Security follows the same ideas. Modair makes some good objects, so no reason to switch away from what he's done. I combined Metal Detecor small without Staff, Automated ID Check, modded remote bag scanner, and security_remote_monitor_without_staff. Like the ticketing area, the more you add, the faster everyone gets processed. I think the key thing to do here is to be consistent with the layout. Once it's consistent then you can copy and paste the layout to scale up. The other conscious goal was to ignore using body scanner machines. Yes, there's a higher percentage of passengers getting re-screened, but there is so much screening capacity that it doesn't matter. I would rather keep the smaller footprint.

Other random ideas:

You'll also notice in the middle upper right that there are escalators heading down. This is actually the centralized, secure zone exit. Saintduiex's has these passengers go underneath the security screening area and then come back to this level at the middle left of this screenshot. The passengers then go up another level to their baggage claim area. It's a clever way of moving traffic around without everyone jamming into each other.

My contribution here was to add restrooms just prior to the exit. Apart from the obvious filling of passengers' needs, this also functions as a load balancer so that half the passengers go to the upper escalators and the other half go on the lower. I don't know if this ultimately makes a difference but I would prefer that they don't all just make a single beeline to the escalators in the middle.

There are no buttons mapped to get to the different levels, even though that should be a feature, could be fixed by mapping Y/B on Xbox and triangle/circle on PlayStation to change levels, or the game is two-dimensional on console and three-dimensional on PC

I have tried every single button, even pressing on the up and down indicators on the GUI, but it does not work, how do I get to different floors?

My large planes apparently only have a 15 minute window, surely this can't be right... I can't find a way to change it at all

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I've been wanting to write this for a while mostly as a place to journal my thoughts and share my experiences to anyone who is interested. My goal is to create/modify an airport to be able to process as many passengers as possible. As you can see from the picture, I can regularly achieve 100k passenger throughput. Of course, I didn't achieve this using normal means. I quite honestly used any available trick to push it this high. I find enjoyment in pushing the game engine to its limits and then finding ways to improve on that.

How did I achieve this? Unlimited money, for starters. It doesn't make sense to me to be limited by money if I'm just aiming for a high passenger count. The same applies to any object in the game. I didn't hesitate to remod a mod to squeeze out performance (things like modair's ToiletPack shower stall that fulfills the bladder need, but can handle 1000 people, for example). I also used the excellent Flight Plan Manager by qcs2017 because there's no sense micromanaging flights. Fast Escalators by TBFlash was also a huge help.

Probably the most positive impact was forcing the passengers to use the rail system (using S-Bahn by joscha999) as much as possible. The biggest problem I see with using busses (aside from limited capacity) is that they can quite often jam up the road. So one late bus will cascade to everything behind it. And some of that is caused by passengers taking a long time to board the bus, for instance. Initially I tried removing all the dropoff and pickup zones. Unfortunately the game "requires" these zones otherwise the airlines refuse to land. I eventually settled settin

g a single square to handle pickups, except that I put up walls surrounding it. A staff door as well as a one-way path leading out of the zone forces all the passengers to use the rail line. So now the staff are still free to use the zone, the passengers think they can access it, and the game works fine. I left the dropoff zone to continue to function normally because they all seem to take a consistent amount of time exiting the buses. I also built a road to the west of the rail line to further reduce traffic on the main road.

So I started out with playing a scenario by saintduiex called Silver River Ford International. The scenario seemed like a good place to start since the build out is quite good. I kept most of the ground level the same. I made a couple of land purchases to add taxiways and I added a couple of standby gates.

No harm, no foul, if this isn't your style of play. Please go enjoy the game however you like. I know I didn't cover much and I'd like to post more. Life has a way of getting in the way. Maybe the bigger issue is that I don't know the best way to keep writing. Should I keep editing this post with additional comments and pictures? Should I start a new post? Should I just do a AMA-type format? I'm open to suggestions, but, again time. Don't let that stop you though.

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I realize this game has died from the development standpoint, but if anyone figures out how to blow past the land limit, I'd happily donate/pay for your expansion.

I've noticed I have way more missed departures than made ones, so I check to see what pax were doing before their flights. Turns out about 2/3rds of pax will loop through the baggage claim and ticketing until either they have missed the flight, or they 5 minutes to to go a mile of airport walking. I'm not quite sure why this happens, and it happens for every flight, no matter the terminal, but each flight does have some passengers make it, but its quite inconsistent, going from 10%-90%, with the same flights or different days. I've already tried removing any and all forms of food. seating, and bathrooms before security, and it did not help. so I've added them back already. Any ideas?

Making my save unplayable and the game unplayable... how would I go around solving a contansat flow of delivery trucks - that don't end up actually delivering anything. It's blocking busses and other traffic

Example: https://www.xbox.com/play/media/gqPWftw4aq

My storage site: https://www.xbox.com/play/media/RTqBLnhRH2

Any help would be massively appreciated. It's very annoying as this game has tons of potential, yet minor things keep preventing it from being played.

Trying to change floors on Xbox. Yet there doesn't seem to be a way. Tried clicking the button on the side of the screen yet that doesn't do anything. Please help - the games unplayable without it

I've got a pretty decent sized airport, and i thought things were running ok. But I'm realizing that at one terminal absolutely 0 bags are being loaded. I have baggage carts sitting around idle at the hangars. I've tripled checked that conveyor belts are aligned correctly. Bags are all unloaded and sent to the carousels, but literally no bags are being loaded. It's a decent hike from the ticketing counter to the terminal, could the belts be too long/slow to get loaded? I'm running out of ideas here other than to rebuild a closer ticketing desk.

Also, how does 0 bags loaded impact the game? the planes still seem to leave on time just without any bags. i imagine everyone's pretty pissed off when they land, but hey that's the other airport's problem.

Any tips for getting passengers to head through security and to their gates faster? I have noticed some pax linger getting food and taking a bathroom break outside security, and never even head towards the plane until boarding has already begun. I have largely resorted to having no services outside of security hoping to convince the AI to look for services on the secure side. I don't like losing the realism though.

I have a problem where I have a perfect airport with everything in it but I always have a problem with PAX frustration. It's always 100+ PAX very un-satisfied. And since I want to have overall PAX satiscaction at 100%, It's kinda a problem. I just want to know what's wrong with my airport so I can fix it quickly.

https://preview.redd.it/21fnz7dsle4d1.png?width=446&format=png&auto=webp&s=f6e9e4c2bb4976280fb7b4d0e97c2f4d9414d08d

I have played over 500 hours in this game and totally love it. Today i scrolled through this sub and discovered there is a DLC Frequent Flyer. and this dlc is from 2020?!?

i have never seen any ads for that DLC und would gladly throw my money at the dev. maybe in the future have the news in game or pinned in steam.

edit: just bought it as a thanks für the dev!

So I've been having a problem where almost all the flights wait at the gate even when they've are like 200 minutes late. It cancels all of my other flights that are assigned to that gate. I need to somehow automatically force departures when the flight is late. Is that possible or is there some other way to prevent this?

My game is running really slow as I have expanded my airport. Any settings I could change?