it would be great if the game only allowed for a single spawn at a particular parking bay or gate. It is extremely frustrating to be sitting there and suddenly find yourself inside another craft at the same place. Not to mention it is nearly impossible to direct ground traffic when you have three craft on exactly the same parking slot! If there is no space - the airport is full… Move on!
Another feature I’d like to see is a flashing prompt over aircraft that have requested instructions from ground in the runway/parking tower view screen. Sometimes I am trying to observe ground traffic but get a request from another craft, so have to go back and forth to respond-check position, etc. better still, have ATC functionality from the tower view mode as opposed to map mode.
Con you imagine the implementation headaches? As I’ve said many times before, implementing a “Occupied = [true/false]” logic into individual parking stalls isn’t difficult, but if two people load up at an available spot at the same time, it’s impractical, if not impossible to halt the load and kick the player from their session when they are in the middle of loading. Further complicating that problem is that some players I’ve observed have >200ms ping times, having an actively changing list of available slots in the load screen with that kind of ping times will not be accurate, and kicking may not occur until after loading, that would be awkward. The developers might be able to explain in more concrete terms about the problems they face, but these are the problems I see with an implementation of such a system.
Great point Dan. I fully understand the limitations of implementing such a feature. The way around that is to have a ‘universal time delay’ code. That means that there would be a ‘deliberate lag’ between request to spawn, and actual spawn. In the interim the server could allow, reject, or reassign the spawn location. Up side is that it could be set to cater for different ping rates, (probably the lowest) but the downside would be that everyone would be set to that ping rate by default. Realistically speaking, it would come down to the difference between an immediate spawn, or one one that took a few seconds to achieve. Ultimately, it would come down to the speed of the servers ‘refresh’ time. As it is the refresh rate is such that at high peak times, the lag between request and actuation is so extreme that there already exists lag issues. Have you not noticed a vacant spot in ATC, jumped in, only to find it already occupied? The feature is ‘doable’ but with concessions. As most people have a ‘taste’ for ‘immediacy’, I doubt this will be a reality any time soon.