Small Question About Gate Assignments

[ILSVector]

I was simming a real-world flight the other day into DFW and assigned gate C37.  That's when I realized the scenery gates are numbered differently and only go up to 32 at terminal C (similarly for the other terminals).  In your manual, you even show the gates going to C39 on the DFW terminal maps. 

Upon digging a little deeper and looking at recent aerial photos from Google maps, it looks like there are actually 28 physical gates in the real world and your scenery has 26.  They clearly squeeze in a couple gates that would make it difficult for the jetways to work properly in the FSX world.  No big deal.

My question is, why didn't the gates get numbered more closely to their real-life counterparts as it appears they've been that way for some time?  I'm just curious if there is some history of the airport there that I'm not aware of that caused them to be numbered that way in the scenery?

Little stuff for sure.  The scenery itself is great!

Thanks!
Chris Lundberg

[virtuali]

My question is, why didn't the gates get numbered more closely to their real-life counterparts as it appears they've been that way for some time? 

The main issue can be valid for any FSX airport, and it's due to how the ATC and AI engine work. In real life, there are many gates that are done in doubles, so close that they can't be operated by two airplanes at the same time. Of course, real life ATC will never assign those nearby gates at the same time.

But in FSX, even if we modeled them visually, they couldn't be activated as proper parkings in the AFCAD, both because jetways will not work, but also because AI will overlap with each other so, when two gates are too close, only one of them will appear in the AFCAD.

[ianj844]

Hi,
I am a high frequent flyer with american and happen to know from both experience and satellite images that non of the gates are overlapping the really got ride of some other gates. I have attached a image from the airport web site with a gate map for terminal
 

[virtuali]

I am a high frequent flyer with american and happen to know from both experience and satellite images that non of the gates are overlapping the really got ride of some other gates.

Fact they don't really "overlap" in real life, doesn't mean they might not overlap in FSX, so we need to skip some of them to not run into problems. We have that image in the manual too, is not that we don't know were the real airport gates are...

[ILSVector]

Umberto,

Thank you for taking the time to respond.  I'm sorry I didn't quite make myself clear.  As I said, I understand about that you had to skip some gates in order to for things to work properly.

A better question would've been, why don't the gates that you included in your scenery match their real-life counterpart's gate assignments positionally?  For example, gate C32 in your scenery should be C39 positionally.  And continuing around counter-clockwise, C31 should've been C37, C30 s/b C36, C29 s/b C35, C28 s/b C33...and so on.  Somewhere in between C2 and C39, you would skip two real-world gates as they get too cramped for AI, but the rest of the numbering should've matched up by physical position in my opinion.

In short, I think you answered my question to say that's just the way you decided to do it.  I can appreciate that. 

Thanks,
Chris Lundberg

[virtuali]

In short, I think you answered my question to say that's just the way you decided to do it.  I can appreciate that. 

Yes, of course it's because we decided to do it, it wasn't an oversight.

There's another issue too, and it's a big fps optimization feature KDFW has (there's no scenery faster than that, which is also so large), the basic structure of the main 3 terminal buildings is not made by 3 separate objects, but it's the same object called 3 times, which only the variations added. This allows for big fps savings, but it means they all share the same base shape, which forces with some compromises with the gate assignments. But I'll surely check with the scenery developer to see if something can be improved and get a better match with real numbering.

[ILSVector]

Aha!  Now that makes perfect sense.  As a developer myself, I can always appreciate the effort and compromises made for performance gains.  Thank you for the insight.