Especially when problems occur, some out-of-the-box thinking from not directly involved people can lead to great new ideas. Of course only, if the ‘expert’ allows and commits.
Just generally spoken 
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It is an interesting concept to see international arrivals and processing in our game, and to see how different countries and airports handle them, here in the United States, you arrive, deplane, and are sent into a “sterile corridor”, which takes you to passport control, international baggage, customs, then if you are departing the airport - off you go, but if you are connecting to another flight, back through security. If you are curious, here is how Japan Airlines describes arrivals at LAX: https://www.jal.co.jp/en/inter/airport/lax/info/
New Record! 115 posts and no bug fixes.
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refresh refresh refresh… devBlog page
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Baggage claim can never be in the secure zone. It should be after secure zone and before customs. I really like the idea about the jetways but I also want arriving passengers to go straight to baggage claim in domestic terminals too. Maybe to have both things at the same time would be the best solution without one-way doors.
I think it shouldn’t be one way doors but more as zoning arrivals and departures. I don’t really understand the issue with another layer of zonning. Also there is still this small area that both arrivals and departures can “meet” when borarding and deboarding the plane, I suggest like in real life that staff will unlock the boarding door just before boarding start. I really would like to see a feature like that implemented.
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I dont really understand the issue either, we are already accustomed to multi-layering zones; secure staff zones, restaurants and shops in secure zones etc. Appreciate the inclusion of international zoning would add another layer but I think this extra thought process is minimised as, according to the last dev blog, they can only be zoned in secure zones. 
Will international zones segregate passengers between international and domestic? Like Istanbul airport? Or will passengers still be able to walk between domestic/international at free will, regardless of where the zoning ends? Because if the former is the case, then that is a form of successful passenger segregation, which could be applied to departure/arrival zoning.
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I think we need a clear and final answer from developers about the status of one way doors. However they are focused on development and they can’t even find time to write bi-weekly devblog.
My personal idea; Yes I want to see one way doors to manage the flow of passengers BUT there is nothing we can do if game engine is not capable to handle it. We can get a bad game experience just because a fancy looking feature.
There is also the fact that not every indie game players have knowledge about airports/airport architecture or how airports got handled. So game needs to be simple enough for these kinds of players to play it and get fun from it. I am also following a fan-made ACEO facebook page and some people ask very basic questions about game who don’t even know the knowledge of this forum. There are also tons of support tickets on Steam page.
One thing that makes me sad is some people are like “development of that thing we want is easy why they just don’t do it, it is just a couple of lines of code how hard it can be”. Please be aware that this game has only 3 full time developers and before new features, there are many bugs from past that need to be fixed. There is also a fact that developing a feature can cause problems in other parts of the game so please don’t be rushed against developers and development. It is like cooking a dinner, if you overheat your oven to cook it faster, you get a burned dinner.
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To quote Olof:
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But international zoning is fine? I mean, can you layer a secure zone, staff zone and international zone atop each other? Just curious really.
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Well, as I’m kind of “expert” in building huge airports, I can tell you, that zoning always stresses my (quite powerful) machine heavily…
So I appreciate, that devs think this through very very well, as performance all in all already is not best…
Edit: To answer your question: As devs introduced international zones, laying all three zones above each other, if needed, is intended…
And this will compromise game performance?
This question only devs (or live-testing) can answer…
From my experience till now, I expect a performance drop in the first step, and afterwards devs optimise… So in the end performance will be at least the same, or even better…
But in all games like this, where thousands, or millions or more “agent tasks” (behaviour, pathfinding,…) have to be calculated at the same time, performance can easily drop to “unplayable” - we have already experienced that here in games early stages…
Especially as they are not targetting “high-end-machine-users” only, devs are doing a great job, considering this very well, for now. IMHO.
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I agree definitely. I play this game on a basic MacBook pro and am amazed at how well the game performs already, considering how massive and detailed I like my airports to be! Can’t wait to see all the new content additions.
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When’s the dev blog?
When’s the dev blog?
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It’s hard to adjust to the time in Sweden
Again a lot of good discussion here on the intricacies of game development versus realism, what ACEO is and who it should appeal to. I’ll again try to shed some light on our reasoning:
Easy if you want, hard if you can.
This means that we’re trying to build a game that appeals to both the mass market but also to passionate hard core simulation fans. This is in part because after all this is a business and the only way for us to keep doing this is to sell games that fund our salaries so that we can work with this full time. But we also want to make games that we ourselves want to play, hence some very detailed aspects of the game because we are in fact too hard core simulation fans. So what happens when you build games that are “easy if you want, hard if you can” is that casual players who are interested in the title and quickly get pulled in thanks to good game design and a good learning curve increase the number of sales which help pay for the development time of more intricate features. If we were to only appeal to the very niche hard core segment we would ultimately probably build a very “hostile” game that would not generate a lot of sales causing us to not be able to focus on this full time. It’s in a way sort of a similar idea as to Elon Musk and his cars, build a luxury car to fund the development of average cars, but the other way around, i.e. build an accessible game to fund it’s complex features.
This is why we the base game needs to be easily understood and interacted with across all features, partly because it’s good game design and a better user experience but also because we will simply sell more copies and fund the development of this title and the next.
Now, on to some technical Q&A of the most common questions here:
International zone cancels staff zone as they are both specific (and only one can exist at a time). Employees do not care about international zone transitioning as they can pathfind through international zone per default.
It’s performance intensive and feels unintuitive with three layers of zone. We simply do not like that solution.
It’s not a bad idea but it’s not good enough. Yes, there are real world examples of it but it would be a bit tricky from a render perspective given ACEO’s, well, perspective, and would force you into a dual floor construction. Might also mess a bit with transitioning from a jetway to a non-jetway stand so… there’s a few issues there and we have a better solution in mind.
Well, this is not the Alpha 34 topic so… 
Agreed, it’s time for a Compromise™. There’s a reason why were reluctant to give definitive answers to tricky features existence or non-existence and that’s because, as I wrote earlier, solutions emerge as you work on stuff. One-way doors and one-way escalators are for the time being out, yes, and will most likely not be something we include before full release depending on all of the other factors that guide development. But reading in this topic, what most of you want to achieve with one-way doors is segregation or arrival and departure and that is, with a lot of new passenger AI behavior code in Alpha 35, an easier problem to solve. So here’s the compromise:
The jetway entrance length is extended from two (x) to four (x) and baggage claim can now be built in both secure and open zones. This allows for a full end-to-end segregation of arrival and departing passengers, but only if you want. You can shield off the jetway’s arrival point with walls and immediately build escalators or stairs if you want to create specific corridors, which is why we think departure and arrival on the same floor is an easier solution. Baggage bay connections with baggage claim areas cannot be mixed to further guide to construction, i.e. baggage bays will be forced to either connect with only non-secure or secure baggage claim areas. This feature is relatively easy to implement with the changes in Alpha 35, it doesn’t utilize any new complex pathfinding or zone stuff but instead relies on the proven core of our current systems. Will probably share a few pictures of this in the dev blog once that drops.
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Once again, I really appreciate not only what you are doing, but how you communicate with us, ‘the community’!
Looking forward to this IMHO perfect compromise!
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Thanks for these deep insights and clear words. I’m looking forward to Alpha 35 and what it will bring. What I can’t really imagine right now is how to “shield off” the jetway’s arrival point. I hope this will become clear once the new content is released.
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