As it stands the Auto Planner is pretty useless as it seems prone to scheduling flights to arrive at the same time. There have been plenty of suggestions but I think what it boils down to is simply adding a slider to adjust the time offset between stands. I know many people offset their stands by 15mins but I personally prefer 30mins, although you could allow up to 60mins max as I doubt anyone would need more than that. I’ve tried turning on the Auto Planner when I’ve already scheduled a bunch of flights using a common offset but it refuses to play along. I’m currently min-maxing and trying to get one stand per airline/plane size - so far I’ve got 12 small and 20 medium, working up to 30 medium and 16 large) and even at this stage the flight planner is getting unwieldy.
Could I also suggest adding filters to the Flight Planner and Monitor for plane size, so that I can plan/monitor a single plane size at a time? Ideally the minimum flight separation (and if implemented, the Auto Planner time offset) could be tied into this so that separations/offsets could be set independently for each plane size.
Disappointed not to see any replies to this post. As a feature the Auto Planner is not fit for purpose and thus late-game airports become unwieldy, as planning flights becomes a chore that takes half an hour or more. I was hoping that fixing it would be a priority for the devs.
The entire flight planner could use an overhaul. There is much potential. But such big changes cannot be expected. The game only gets minor improvements and mainly bugfixes.
That’s why the feature suggestion category got closed.
But may we see some of the ideas in an ACEO2 in some years.
I don’t see this as a big change. It’s a feature that doesn’t work as intended, i.e. a bug, and therefore should be fixed. I also can’t imagine that fixing it would require great effort.
Spelling as a part time programmer myself, things that don’t seem like they should take much effort are often the things which require the most effort.
What you’re talking about is a substantial logic change. I agree it should be done but I can also understand why a small dev team doesn’t have the capacity for that.
Thought want to suggest a simple solution to the auto planner issue…
Since we can now manually choose the individual stand for auto planning, I would suggest the developer to add a black out time which we can set for the particular stand
Example: at the flight planning, setting of the individual gate, when on the auto planner, we can have set the ‘black out time’
It is something like the time where the auto planner cannot set flight during the time (like before we have night flight planning)
So to stagger, we can simply set the black out like:
Stand 1: black out time- 12 mid night to 3 am
Stand 2: 12 mid night to 4 am
Stand 3 12 mid night to 5am
Stand 4 12 mid night to 6 am
And if we have 30mins gap in between, this setting would comfortable sits 4 flights per day nicely with good staggering
I have been playing this games since the game did not have any features, and have clocked over 400hours… whenever I turned on the auto planner, it turned me off because my ‘perfect plan of stagger flights is disrupted
Usually, I planned such that per day there is about 3 hours with no schedule, that is where I use the time to improve on the construction design within the terminal, eg to change the baggage routing, change the check in desks etc… I always plan such that I have a window of minimal disruption to the operations of the airport
So whenever the auto planner is on… my window disappears totally. This apparent perfect plan disappears
Hope the developer can take this suggestion of allowing black out timings to be set per stand so that we can twit the auto planner to stagger to our preference whilst allow us a ‘silent period’ in the airport for some works
But does manual Auto Planner work either? First of all, you have to enable it for all stands and then de-activate the ones you don’t want, which is tiresome when you have 45 stands and only want one enabled. Seeing as Auto Planner stacks flights, I decided to enable it on my single small international stand to limit the damage from stacking, but it has yet to pick up any offered flights.
EDIT: correction, it finally picked up a flight after leaving it for a couple of days.
I’m still supporting the create slots manually, and then auto planner plans flights on those slots. I’ll even take a look at implementing it myself if I have time.
Another issue with using the auto planner manually (i.e. only using it on a few/single stands) is that it removes the green dot notification when there are new flights to plan. I have 45 stands with only one set to auto but still no green dot to alert me that there are new flights available.