In Airport CEO we have two different systems that play a major role when it comes to person-to-object accessibility. A passenger first checks what objects (the type they are looking for) are available in the same zone area as they are in and, separated from that, they then try to find a path to it. It goes a little something like this (very, very, very simplified…):
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Determine next activity to execute (check-in, toilet, eating, whatever, depends on a bunch of different values and situation such as flight status, time, distance to stuff and then needs and moods).
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Activity is determined, now we need to find an object for that activity: What zone area number am I in? We here use an system similar to IP addresses, so if a passenger is in zone area 1.1.0.3 it means that they are in terminal 1, secure area 1, international zone 0 (0 is null, meaning no international area) and area 3 (super generic and tied to the terminal foundation space).
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Passenger is in zone area X.Y.Z.N, let’s search for that object type in zone area X.Y.Z.N and an object is hopefully found for the activity we want in the same zone area as we are in. Now we try to plot a path to that object.
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If a path is found, we can continue to execute the activity. If a path is not found, the activity is cancelled and we start over.
This is obviously complex stuff and if we were to build the game from the ground up all over again it would probably not look the same but this is what we have today, most importantly in 95% of all cases it does work very well, i.e. when you build along the lines of how it’s intended to work and how the game is designed. It’s when people are looking for very custom solution that it breaks down because, well simply, those cases are not supported and will not be supported.
Secure zones will always merge, just like international zones. Splitting with staff zone does not work, because staff zone is subordinate to secure zone as you very much see in the zone overlay graphic. This means that with no jetway configuration you will not be able to separate arrival and departure since the zone merge via the stand and for the time being I don’t have a good solution to this, separation is as of right now only supported via jetways and since we do have that support I consider this specific design request not of high priority. And as you might know by now, this zone area system is quite complex and there is no simple silver bullet solution to “just make it so they don’t merge”. These types of systems, they way we’ve built them, are complex and I fully understand that without insight into the code and how you would go about developing a game like this it’s easy to mistake things for being easy to fix but I hope that by writing this post I’ve now shed some light on why it’s not… 