I’ve found that if you make two separate security and passport control areas in the same terminal passengers can (and will) choose to go to a passport control that they can’t actually get to. They then get stuck after security and don’t go anywhere.
For example, on one floor in my terminal I had security followed by passport control (also, from what I can remember every international airport I’ve been to, does passport control before security, so not sure why it’s implemented the other way around in the game). The security was getting overloaded, so I built another security and passport control area on the floor above. However I found that after passengers passed security a significant number of them (around 50%) decided that they needed to access a passport control on the other floor. They then just stood there.
Putting an escalator between the floors (after some rearranging) fixed the problem, but this shouldn’t be necessary.
The screenshots only showed the fixed problem, but if I remove the escalator that’s after security, half the passengers will get stuck.
This issue is almost always caused by failing to segregate secure zone areas. I’m suspecting that you have two “separate” terminals that in fact share the same secure zone number, is this correct?
It looks to me that the pax are wanting to go to the closest passport control, which is right above them. When by design you want them to go to the one on their floor.
It’s all one terminal. They are infact right on top of each other, so can’t be different terminals. I have double and trippled checked the zoning to make sure there’s nothing funny there.
When I click on on the stuck passengers, it shows them wanting to go to the controls above or below them.
I suspect what DavidMarlor says is correct, there it’s picking the closest and not considering vertical separation or accessibility.
I’ll remove the escalator and take some screenshots. The screenshots taken above only vary by the floor (i.e. they’re positioned in the same x,y coordinates).
It really does look it depends on which security point there go through, and then they pick the closest passport control without considering the floor. Which is good news, since it means it’s only broken for this specific layout, not just it picks any passport control.
So far I’ve always saw that they split up to any available passport check which leads in to the int. zone they want to go. So if you have a big number of passengers running at once to the passport controls, it might be that some of them looking for alternative ones which aren’t the closest.
But that was on early A35 stage, may it has changed.
So the issue in your screenshots is indeed that those areas share the same secure zone area number (2) but there are no accessible paths between those points. If you want passengers to use those areas distinctively from each other, they have to be separated by secure zone numbering so that one area is covered by for example zone 1 and the other zone 2.
And when the passengers want to go to same gate area, which presumably is the same zone as a target, then what? How would I separate these control areas to 1 and 2 but have the passengers go via them to same gate area at the end?
Could you consider doing some simple manual about this as the logic behind zones and AI isn’t that clear at all. New tool isn’t much of help as it shows, “yeah, crap happened, can’t go there” but doesn’t show why. Path finding also seems to fail between 2 adjacent tiles sometimes, and tool says can’t access this, even if they really are just 2m apart. Without any explanation why.
I had this case too when Alpha 35 came out. In the example below I implemented passport control directly after the security check. Immediately, passengers from the left side wanted to go to a passport check on the right side and passengers from the right security check didn’t found a way to the left side security check. So I had to build a path where they can exchange.
Reason: Passengers wanted to go from Security Check 1 (left) and Security Check 2 (right) both in to International Zone 1 (top). And to go to international zone 1, they split up tp every passport check which leads in to that zone. There is no check if the path to that desk is possible.
Olof, I don’t want them to use the different areas distinctly. It’s one big area with all the gates, shops, etc. What I wanted to do was to have two different security and passport areas that lead from the same place, and to the same place.
The issue is that passengers pick passport controls that aren’t accessible to them after they pass security.
right now you need to ensure that for each secure zone, if you have more than one security checkpoint and passport controls, you can get from any security to any passport for that zone. I think this is good design anyway.
I wonder though if passport could be linked to security - same way a gate is linked to multiple boarding desks. Though in this case multiple passport checks would need to connect to multiple security. That would solve it, though I think unnecessary as it is only addressing a design issue.
Sure, but I don’t really understand the functional case behind this and I don’t think I’ve ever seen this at an airport, two separate streams into a specific section of the terminal that are sealed off from each-other. Why?
That sounds strange, could you bug report a save where this happens with specific instructions on how to reproduce it? I’d be happy to take a look at it.
The areas that the passport/security are going into aren’t sealed off from each other. Just the small space between security and passport are sealed from each other.
To relate back to a real airport. You might have two separate passport / security areas at each end of a long terminal. They both go from the unsecured area to the secured area, but it’s not possible to go through security in one area, and then the passport control in another area.
Heathrow terminal 5 has such an example. In the image below each of the areas with the red box is a passport / security zone, and passengers can choose to go through either. But you can’t swap between them mid-way through.
Yep, that layout won’t work ingame unless there are two separated international zones.
At the moment passengers think “which passport control both brings my in int. Zone X”.
But they need to think “which passport control to int. Zone 1 is accessable from my current position” … which is sadly the same security zone, so the effect is the same.
Thanks for the explanation. I see what you mean, the passport controls are all in the same secure zone, even if part of that secure zone isn’t accessible to passengers.
I completely understand that it’s an edge case (and lower priority), and once it’s known how it work you have to work around that limitation, still I think it’s surprising behaviour that could be fixed (here’s my naïve suggestion) by the passengers selecting another ‘equivalent’ object if there’s no path to the one they selected.
That is one way to do it, however with such a solution we might risk a huge pathfinding overhead as they will simply need to pathfind to each and every object before selecting it which is not a good trial and error solution. What we need is more precise addressing internally, however this is very difficult and will require a lot of dev time and as you said this is an edge case that at this point simply does not motivate that.
