Airport Dimension Dependencies

legomann · Post by **legomann** » 27 Jan 2007 19:36

Time goes by...

Anytimes it becomes available to buy bigger planes (Boeing 707, 747, Lockhead Tristar...) but I have no possibility to build a larger airport for them. The only available airport ist the City Airport.

1. It would be great to get the possibility to build a larger airport, if it would be needed. Otherwise it should be possible to enlarge the runways tile for tile.
Maybe it might be a good idea building the runways independent of the terminal and hangar buildings. Quite expensive but possible?!

2. The count of airports should be dependent on their dimension.
A real big airport should be available once for a larger area. Smaller airports should be available to be build more often. The LA might decide how often.
Small airports should become a facelift later in the game, if you decide to keep them available (switch). Small and cargo airports always are built by the player.

3. It would be great to switch the alignment of the airports (runways) or make available every airport in 2 directions (eas-west and north-south).

4. Planes should get an indicator for usability with different airport types.
Example: The Dortmund City Airport has a weight limit of 70 tons for planes. One of the biggest planes allowed is a short version of the Boeing 737 or Airbus 320.
So airports could have a speed or a cargo limit per plane. Weight is no part of the currently existing defined informations for planes.

5. On a too small airport it should be not allowed to build a plane what cannot serve the airport.

I'm no fan of the idea that local authorities are the ONLY builder of airports. They have to decide whether and where an airport can be built - if it's near by the city - but they should let me build an airport if there are no reasons against. If I have a bad rating I'll get no chance to build an airport. Of course.

cmoiromain · Post by **cmoiromain** » 27 Jan 2007 20:09

I also fancy the idea of building airports piece bay piece. This would be so much better, and fun to do; the larger your airport gets the best you have to adapt it to the trafic, a bit like a train junction. And you can create some more landing/take off roads (dunno what they are called in english) to compensate the number of planes...

For the size/weight limit, whay not, but the problem is, if a town refuses us to build a larger airport then you can't use larger airports.

shagademis · Post by **shagademis** » 03 Feb 2007 16:12

this is an amzing idea, i would love to be able to build apirports around my stations in a layput of my choice

Aerond · Post by **Aerond** » 03 Feb 2007 17:24

There´s a debate about that, but there´s a problem on pathfinding.

autofreaks · Post by **autofreaks** » 04 Feb 2007 18:49

i use combined airport set and it has A LOT of different airports in it. but no airport in little pieces

Its made for normal TTD but seems to work fine for OpenTTD

http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?p=521920

bulb · Post by **bulb** » 08 Feb 2007 23:34

Hello folks.

Unfortunately currently aircraft movement around an airport is implemented as a big hardcoded state machine. As it's in a data structure, it would be possible to define a method for loading airport layouts from (OTTD specific) grf files, but defining them in-game requires creating something more flexible.

The problem with aircraft is, that they occupy whole square, so you can't require that all taxiways are two-way (in reality they are not), nor does it look right for aircraft to use signals. Therefore the aircraft controller would need to contain something like path-based signalling, complicated by the fact that aircraft, unlike trains, can give way.

Ie. each aircraft would have to reserve the whole path it needs, taxi as far as there is no conflict and than wait until the other aircraft passes. Letting the aircraft that comes in first rather than the one that reserves it first would be nice, but I can't prove that it would be deadlock-free (while with the first to reserve it is, because there is a total ordering of the aircraft, so one is always first and has the way clear. This would work for queueing landing as well.

richk67 · Post by **richk67** » 09 Feb 2007 00:38

;P Guess what

bulb · Post by **bulb** » 09 Feb 2007 06:36

richk67 wrote:Draborough Transport, 25th Sep 2007.png

Did you just add another airport, ability to load it somehow, or rewrote the AircraftController thing?

richk67 · Post by **richk67** » 09 Feb 2007 10:05

Ive rewritten / minor edited the aircraft controller. The "error" in the old one was that, although the blocks were being reserved, the aircraft could not tell if it had reserved the block, or if another aircraft had.

So I have added the airport flags to the VehicleAir structure of each aircraft, and it now knows what it has reserved. This has simplified some things, and only about 4-5 lines have changed in the actual controller code. (tests in AirportHasBlocks and AirportSetBlocks).

For the LaGuardia airport, it relies on a lot of this multi-block locking. I need to create a new graphic for the crossover, and finish helicopter support. Ready soonish.

This will initially be a patch, but will hopefully be included in trunk. Im going to create a new category in the GUI for "real" airports, and add a few - perhaps 2-3. However there is a bit of support work required (eg. raising number of blocks from 32 to 64).

Whether this moves the airport building by placing individual pieces any further, Im not sure. The state machine for this one is quite complex, and I doubt it would easily be done in pieces. But at least we now have path based movement.

Ben_K · Post by **Ben_K** » 09 Feb 2007 11:51

bulb wrote:The problem with aircraft is, that they occupy whole square, so you can't require that all taxiways are two-way (in reality they are not), nor does it look right for aircraft to use signals.

Well, in reality they are '2-way' but in the same axis. You dont have aircraft able to access every axis through every square unless its a junction. In fact, most airports work rather like trains do in TTD. The airport company decide where they want taxiways and mark them on the ground.
If planes in the game could only go one direction, it wouldnt be so bad as it will at least start making airports a realistic size too

richk67 · Post by **richk67** » 09 Feb 2007 12:02

bulb wrote:
richk67 wrote:Draborough Transport, 25th Sep 2007.png
Did you just add another airport, ability to load it somehow, or rewrote the AircraftController thing?

Hopefully you also noticed that the airport is not a rectangle. I have now created a way of "knocking out" tiles from the airport pattern, so you can have irregular shaped airports. (Currently the catchment area is still rectangular around the airport base.)

Celestar · Post by **Celestar** » 10 Feb 2007 01:25

RichK had done some great coding on the Finite State Machine here and I've done more testing on this idea of ours and it works great. Hopefully we can include this soon, but it will render a good deal of airports useless, because it in fact seems to outperform the international airport in some configurations.

Just in case someone is wondering why we called this airport the LaGuardia airport:

http://www.airliners.net/open.file/0418918/L/

Celestar

Ben_K · Post by **Ben_K** » 10 Feb 2007 16:02

It really knocks the (incorrect) scaling home when you see those pics doesnt it!

cmoiromain · Post by **cmoiromain** » 10 Feb 2007 21:58

oh I love you guys! really looking forward to see this function in the main trunk!

Octopussy · Post by **Octopussy** » 11 Feb 2007 09:35

In Sim City 2000 you have this possibility.

When you build an airport (or a port or a station) you define only the surface and after the buildings are growing by themself with a proper algorithm.

It would be great there were the same in OppenTTD.

Mchl · Post by **Mchl** » 11 Feb 2007 11:57

Yeah. I remember, that when I played SC2000 for the first time, I built an airport as big as a quarter of map or so. I liked it so much.

Then I had to demolish it piece by piece to get more place for city (I wanted to have acrologies).

richk67 · Post by **richk67** » 11 Feb 2007 15:00

My view (and since Im probably the guy who has to code it, my view counts

):

Placeable airport tiles would require a TON of really complicated stuff. Effectively I would need to teach the game how to construct a finite state machine from just the placed tiles.

I have enough problems trying to do this by hand: I have now recoded several parts of the state machine to allow for "if route A not possible, go route B"... where the old one did "if route A not possible, wait", and other things.

My preference, is to create a larger suite of different tested airports. Current project are airports based on some real-life ones. However, I will think about how to do placeable tiles, but it wont be easy. Placeable components may be - eg. place a 6 tile runway (direction North). There would inevitably be limits.

lawsonuw · Post by **lawsonuw** » 06 Mar 2007 05:40

On the subject of building airports in game. All airports I've seen have yellow lines marking the center of taxiways and preferred routes across loading/unloading/parking areas. Also at major junctions all the taxiways have coded lines crossing them. (one that's seen a lot is the "hold short" set of lines when a taxiway crosses a runway.) How about letting a person building an airport lay out these center lines and "signal" lines just like track for a train? Add to this a runway block that would come with a preset approach and departure pattern. Also the runway block would have fixed entrances and exits. Add a depot block, terminal block, and various decorative blocks and custom airports should be possible. (give the terminal block an implied two-way pre-signal exit signal like depots have to simplify the signaling needed)

My 2 cents,

Ben_K · Post by **Ben_K** » 06 Mar 2007 18:04

I think your two cents is echoed by many people here and Im pretty sure its already been thought of. The problem is changing the game code to support such actions. I cant wait to have this option (If it ever becomes available)

(Oh, and a 'Hold short' is called a 'holding point'

)

Aracirion · Post by **Aracirion** » 15 Mar 2007 17:37

um, hope this is the right section to post this. Given that current plane sprites are bigger than one tile already, and we often see planes driving through eachother like this:

would it not be possible to have large planes take 2 tiles? Airports would not be so much larger if space were used intelligently, and now that transfer orders work it is not necessary anymore to place the airports downtown either. An efficient city airport could look like this, for example:

I can't code, but I could render some graphics if that would help.

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