Hi all – I think this bug has been reported before but I also think it was first reported a long time ago and the problem for me is getting worse. So here’s my version.
Many flights are getting delayed or freezing because baggage trucks or loaders, and baggage tasks at the stands, stop altogether and the flight won’t leave until it is manually dismissed without all its baggage. I have 30+ stands and this bug will occur at the majority of stands. So I spend most of my gameplay time trying to manually dismiss flights whose baggage trucks or tasks have simply frozen. Here’s some screenshots, all from the same game.
Here’s a flight ready to leave but two baggage trucks and the ramp agent have frozen. There is only one choice: dismiss the flight without its baggage being uploaded or loaded.
Similar example. After the passengers load and the service round is complete, the flight will be ready to go – except the baggage tasks are frozen and all the the trucks (circled in red) and their ramp agents, are in that position forever, until I manually dismiss the flight.
I frankly think this bug has been outstanding for too long. It seriously impacts gameplay since progressing through flights is the object. If you have to spent all your time manually dismissing flights, it stops being fun.
This is a very well-known bug, in several discussion threads at this point. I am sure the devs know about it (I know I’ve submitted a bug). I have noticed that this most likely occurs because the baggage cart is arriving at the stand well before the belt loader. This then triggers the ramp agents to manually unload baggage. However, when the belt loader arrives, if it does so during the manual unloading of bags this causes the issue. My hypothesis is the change in the manner of offloading baggage causes a bug and confuses the ramp agent programming (sorry for faux pas language, not a developer ). I was able to remedy by placing the my belt loader depot in the best spot that makes sure it is basically the 1st vehicle to all stands, then I place my baggage cart depot farther away.
Side note: I always have 1 depot for 1 vehicle type; i.e. all my belt loaders are in one depot, all baggage vehicles in another, etc… I know that isn’t ideal/realistic, but until we can assign specific vehicle to specific stands, you will have vehicles going all over, most likely from the farther depot, wasting time. Anytime I build an airport, I find the most central location for the depots, so that all the vehicles have the most level playing field as possible to get the their stands in a “timely” manner.
Hey, thanks for sharing. Several of these issues are being addressed in Alpha 29.5 making its way out on the experimental branch within the next hours. We’ve spent the last three days working on several of the old and well-known, as mentioned here, baggage bugs and intend for them to get properly mitigated over the coming period.
Let’s keep the discussion going here as of Alpha 29.5 and see what issues persist.
Thanks for this, Olof. I saw 29.4-4 but I haven’t seen 29.5 yet. When I do, I’ll give you details about what I see. I’m sure it’ll be much better. I apologize for complaining. I do love the game but this bug is drives me crazy. Proof that I love the game, right?
Looks like it’s working quite well for now. At least I didn’t have any problems with baggage unloading and belt loaders anymore, even when ramp agents did start to do their work before. Only thing is, in my opionion the ramp agents wait rather long to pick up baggage/belt loaders need quite long until they unload baggage (several seconds) after changing to the belt loader. But it’s not to bad, so not that important or maybe even just my impression.
That particular bug looks much better now, but I am still having serious issues with 49.5.1. After wrestling with the game this weekend, I found myself with huge inability to staff all security gates and and airport staff. It’s also showing me bogus numbers for staffing levels vs. unclaimed jobs.
See this screenshot. As you can see, I am experiencing massive delays, partly because of desk check-in but mostly because of PAX boarding. So I need more airport staff right?
Well, here’s my employee count. It’s showing something that doesn’t make any sense to me at all. First, the math doesn’t add up. Second, it’s showing I have 130 airport staff and 89 jobs claimed. So why can’t I get these planes loaded and why is it showing 0 jobs available?
And it’s showing 223 Ramp Agent jobs available? Maybe I’m doing something wrong and I’m happy to get advice but this seems like a massive bug to me.
For some reason, the game has slowed almost to a crawl for me. I have 29 gates and currently about 8,000 PAX and about 3,000 bags. I have an AMD 8320 and a Radeon HD 5700 – not the newest stuff but enough to handle most games at a pretty good frame rate. But currently my frame rate has dropped to 2-3 fps. It takes about 15 seconds to click the STAFF tab and a whopping 47 seconds to raise the OPERATIONS tab. So something’s wrong with that.
I often take long breaks with this game until I see more development and bug fixing. I am happy to play it and report bugs but waiting 15-45 seconds for menus to appear doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me.
I too am having the loading issue when it comes to the personnel tab. Can take 30 seconds or more and is a source of saving before opening. I find that it works better if the game is paused. I am wondering if it’s related to the shear number of employees I have. I had started to hire in volume recently with seeing the same errors as you are seeing. At one point, I had 7,000 janitor jobs available and it was growing fast. My airport was a disaster. I find that the game really slows down when the available jobs Qs build up.
By my math, 29 x 2 (assuming you would have all passengers present and all passengers offloaded) = 58 x 120 (all very full 787800s…) you should have no more than 6500 passengers… but those passenger volumes never happen on all aircraft. I have also found that when the airport functions appropriately, the bag to passenger ratio is something close to 50%. You’re numbers are both distorted, which seems like you’ve got a thousand or more passengers lost in the airport…
Once they fix the bug of the NAN, I will have very small (8 person) staff break rooms next to each gate (for airport staff and ramp agents only) to prevent as much as possible the employees being all the way across the airport. I found that putting an airport staff only break room outside security for airport staff took care of a lot of the check in desk problems. I also found that a large security break room right by the security check points has permanently eliminated my security staffing problems. The next step that seems to have been hugely helpful for security was getting rid of all the useless security (low logic and low stress) skilled people made a huge difference in my efficiency of each checkpoint. There’s a post on that somewhere here really recently.
It also appears sometimes that those backlogged job requests are from previous flights that have since departed or tasks that the game will really struggle to power through while working through the newly generating work requests.
29 medium gates need at least 116 ramp agents for full service, and 145 if you account for brakes.
Then you still have to staff your baggage belts.
So, say you have 8 baggage carousels, then you need another 128 on shift and 160 accounting for brakes.
So, you would need at least 305 ramp agents.
Not accounting for them moving around.
Security agents
Say you have 15 medium security stations, you should require 75 security agents and maybe some of them for small secure stations and baggage stations, so about 110 total.
It seems here tasks are called in a non logical fashion.
Airport staff
Try looking at gate level where the staffers for a trouble gate are located, do this by clicking the boarding desk and then finding the 2 yellow staffers that are on the way to the airport.
Janitors
This is normal, the color scheme of Janitors do not have a work-queue color. Same goes wrong in most political healthcare prognoses in the Netherlands… dont worry about it to much.
Blockquote29 medium gates need at least 116 ramp agents for full service, and 145 if you account for brakes.
Then you still have to staff your baggage belts.
So, say you have 8 baggage carousels, then you need another 128 on shift and 160 accounting for brakes.
So, you would need at least 305 ramp agents.
That’s pretty fairly in line with the numbers I have encountered. I think I have fallen behing quite a bit, because I am working at opening up 69 gates now with 12 baggage babys and have ~400 airport staff… I’m just so hesitant to click on the employee button right now as it hangs the game for minutes.
Ratio for ramp agents per gate then would be 5.5 (can’t have half people) 6:1 per gate
Ratio for ramp agents per baggage bay would be 12:1
Quick excel math shows me needing 558 ramp agents…
The start of an excel calculation document for anyone interested. Clunky for now.
valid point. Hadn’t thought about that because I have my office 365 account on my phone. it’s really rudimentary for now. I also don’t like the clunkiness of google sheets compared to excel. personal preference I reckon.
I think we’re talking about different things. I agree you have to have the right number of staff for the number of gates. That’s not the problem. The problem is, even if I hire way to many staff, they often refuse to do jobs.
See this screenshot below. The game reports that I have 145 airport staff and only 36 claimed jobs. That means I have an extreme surplus of staff – way, way more staff to do jobs than I have jobs for staff to do. But look up a little at the same screenshot. If I have a surplus of airport staff, why are all these airport staff jobs delayed?
When I took this screenshot, there were dozens of airport staff sitting in a staff room. I clicked PRIORITIZE a dozen times on job to staff the boarding desk for a flight, but the staff never showed up to board the passengers and I had to dismiss it. So, it’s a bug and doesn’t have much to do with figuring out the right number of staff. Even if I had 40,000 airport staff, the flight would still just sit there until I dismissed it and the passengers went home.
Massive amounts of delayed jobs with a surplus of that associated staff type (ususally) means that the job task dispatchment system has broke due to an uncaught null reference. We had a few of those with the ability to assign vehicles to stands (since that’s very much related to the job task system and required additional logic there). There was also a few bugs related to the new job task system which still are present on the default branch (since the system is pretty new) so I guess the main question is: What branch are you playing on?
@Olof, I recently noticed that baggage trucks can now get stuck just before entering a stand. I had this happen in Alpha 6-0 last night, and I think it happened when the truck was at the baggage bay and there was a ramp agent shift change during its loading process, after the ramp agents all changed over, the truck just remained in the outgoing baggage area of the baggage bay, never to move. I dismissed the aircraft, and the truck would move, but would never re-enter its assigned stand. Instead it just stays parked on the road of its assigned stand. After opening vehicle tasks, it says this specific vehicle is performing a task, but there is no flight currently at its stand. I then tried to reassign it to a depot and reassign a different truck to the stand, but nothing happened. Save and reload did not work either. I fear that this save is now lost?
Pretty sure that it is still happening in the new version. I had a two baggage trucks that were supposed to be getting loaded and neither were. The first truck in said it was loading when I clicked on it. However, it just sat in the baggage bay area waiting to be loaded as the ramp agents just stood around doing nothing. Could be that I’m just doing baggage wrong so I’m building a different airport to see if it happens on that as well.
Not necessarily, could very well be a bug. Did you file a bug report and if so what number? If you’re coming from an earlier Alpha 29 save on the experimental branch it could be a bug persisting from an older version but since we never know I’d like to take a look at it.
). I was able to remedy by placing the my belt loader depot in the best spot that makes sure it is basically the 1st vehicle to all stands, then I place my baggage cart depot farther away.
