Isn't It Time to Renew The Design of Default City and Metropolitan Airports?

[EG0611]

Isn't it time to renew the City airport design which has been same since the Era of Transport Tycoon from 1993?

With development of Openttd in 2000s, game gets many new airports named Commuter, Metropolitan, International and Intercontinental. However City and its modified version Metropolitan airports have always had design issues which causes them to not handle the traffic very well.

That's why I have these improved designs for following airports:

- New design has all required facilities; runway, tower, hangar, radar etc... in 6x6 area.
- New design uses the 6x6 area more efficient. With this, 2 more gate areas are created.
- Traffic flow now has one way which is anti clockwise. (except when a flight at gate gets ordered to go to hangar which is player controlled thing and it doesn't occur much. Also arrival flight can go to hangar without interrupting operations like in International and Intercontinental)
- Airplanes don't need to wait each other anymore. This is also a benefit on design of International and Intercontinental airports.
- NOTE: You can say that "then use international or intercontinental airports" however these airports have high noise level, their size is 1.5 and 2 times of City airport, expensive and not available until 1990s and 2000s.

[odisseus]

There are many ways for the developers to increase the throughput of airports. One of them is just letting the planes pass through each other like boats do. Another one is providing an absurdly large airport with 10 runways and 50 loading areas. The question is, do they need to?

In my opinion, airports are intended to have limited throughput. Otherwise planes would trump trains as the most efficient mode of transport.

Therefore, I think that the standard set of airports doesn't need any improvements — it should remain just like it is. But I acknowledge that there are some players who want to have gigantic airports that can compete with train stations.

What the game actually needs is a way for GRF authors to provide custom airports. This has been suggested many times, and there even seems to be a patch that does that.

[EG0611]

What the game actually needs is a way for GRF authors to provide custom airports. This has been suggested many times, and there even seems to be a patch that does that.

Yes you are absolutely right. There suppose to be a patch that provides custom airport either via NewGRF or either as modular in game:

[BW89]

There are multiple attemps of achieving something like that.
one guy worked on modular airports, but the topic is death since over a year
viewtopic.php?p=1189256#p1189256
Than there are Terminus Airports, a Patch that provides 13 additional Airports
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=73976
And finally there is this old patch providing two bigger Airports
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=56933

Personally i would rather have the solution with the modular airports, so everyone can build Airports like they need them

[EG0611]

I really wish OpenTTD developers get slightly interest into this thing. All this community need is a possibility of NewGRF input on airports so modders can work on them.

What hakes me sad is there are 2 major airplane NewGRF mods (WAS and av8) and yet we are stuck to use default OpenTTD airports which deadlock after x2 amount of flight than their number of gates.

[andythenorth]

What hakes me sad is there are 2 major airplane NewGRF mods (WAS and av8).

Don't be sad! Be happy! Life is better!

It's just a game...

[Gadg8eer]

I've decided in the past two years to not continue using PlaneSet, WAS or av8/9.8. You can easily scale down the cargo capacity of ships to give the appearance of small waterbound vessels, but you can't scale up planes without scaling up the runways at airports, which is obviously much more complicated.

The only fix is to create a plane set with realistically-sized small arcraft, but I am terrible at graphics so I consider a GRF of small aircraft, each with a fuselage the size of a bus, to be a pipe dream.

I understand that OpenTTD isn't meant to be realistic, but I consider OpenTTD to have a cartoony scale of it's own. Each bus from the vanilla game is, to me, 35 feet long, despite the width of the buses not matching this scale. Therefore, in its own weird cartoon way, each tile in OpenTTD should be 70 feet by 70 feet. Using this scale, one can create "realistically"-sized maps for playing huge games on. As I've said, ships can be considered to be small vessels of the same basic type, but aircraft not so much.

As a result, I only use the Hot Air Balloon, OpenGFX Mars Aircraft and SpaceY GRFs. None of these are meant to be scaled in any form to begin with, so I can pretend that the windowless blimps and rockets are in the scale I imagine the rest of OpenTTD to be in.

Not that I would mind the addition of modular airports, keep up the good work!

[Wuzzy]

I agree with odisseus in that there's a good reason why airports have a limited throughput. City and Metropolitan Airports are fine as-is.

[EG0611]

I still hope that one day OpenTTD developers will consider this idea.

[OzTrans]

Of course, it would be nice to have better airports. However, from a GRF development point, airports are the worst feature in OpenTTD. You need to bend over backwards to get something done.

We can create our own airports, but only with horrendous technical limitations. The available properties for airports and airport tiles are pathetic, so are the variables. There is no related object for airport tiles; these do not know on which airport (by ID) or which airport view they are on.

The major drawback, is there is no pathfinder for aircraft on airport ground. Everything is hardcoded for each and every OpenTTD airport. To create an own airport, we must first choose an OpenTTD one and then place all important bits (i.e. hangar, taxiways, runways and aircraft/helicopter pads) on the same spot.

I have been working on airports for the best part in the last two months. Here the result so far ... everything is still a work in progress (snowy version only partially done) ... but it is fully functional handling 16 aircraft from 4 distant cities with ease.

Toronto Pearson International Airport (replacing the OpenTTD Intercontinental) in both temperate and sub-arctic landscapes and snow aware too. The Airport core is the 90 deg rotated OpenTTD Intercontinental bounded by the runways. it has a size of 17 x 17 tiles with plenty of room for connecting services, like rail, tram, bus and trucks as well as car parks or whatever fancies you. Then there is, too, a City Heliport and an Emergency Helicopter Landing Site with more to come. The GRF is being developed as part of the Canadian Theme Pack ...

Toronto Pearson International Airport.png

Toronto Pearson International Airport

(1.65 MiB) Not downloaded yet

Toronto Pearson International Airport[snow].png

Toronto Pearson International Airport (snowy)

(1.29 MiB) Not downloaded yet

[fridaemon]

I hope for that with new OpenTTD NewGRF Competition. That was the reason why I choose theme Airports and Planes. GarryG, me and maybe someone else bring airport terminals. Maybe it helps ...

Them look very nice

[jfs]

Yes right now you can only make new airport graphics, you can't make new airport layouts. The existing layouts can be rotated too, but they're still fundamentally the same.
The big dream is of course to make completely custom airports built from components, rather than fixed complete layouts.

[OzTrans]

I hope for that with new NewGRF Competition. That was the reason why I choose theme Airports and Planes. GarryG, me and maybe someone else bring airport terminals. Maybe it helps ...

A good theme, but I doubt there will be many takers. It is a challenging theme, if you want to get it right with all the landscapes, snow and all to take care of.

What we need is a Pathfinder for Aircraft Ground Movements together with a series of properties and variables. That would enable GRF developers to come up with something more interesting.

What is desperately needed is a variable for airport tiles to know the airport (ID) and the view they are dealing with. There is no related object for airport tiles !! Permanent registers for airports would be helpful too.