"In other words, you must be able to meet/process full capacity in the assigned private terminal for all passengers on a given flight that has that terminal assigned, or the flight will be cancelled. The "overage" of passengers will no longer be handled by AS standard handling. So it will be one or the other (private or AS), with full capacity required for a given flight."
Is that really so ? I am sure that in real life the airline would not cancel the whole flight if a situation arises that the handling agent cannot handle one pax for whatever reason. They would simply bump that one passenger, ie. the flight would leave with some empty seats.
I agree, that the overage should not be handled with AS standard handling, it should be either or. But cancelling the whole flight because of one pax is a bit of an overkill.
First of all, comparing this particular rule with reality probably doesn't make a lot of sense. Of course in reality the limits are essentially "soft" ones...you can handle a lot more passengers than the architects anticipated, but the facilities will feel crowded, quality levels deteriorate etc. At the same time, gate and terminal sizes already take into account the amounts of passengers to be expected, so if you schedule an a A320 to a terminal and there's a "slot" available at that terminal, you can assume that the passengers will be handled somehow.
Obviously, AS doesn't work like this at all (yet). So where do you draw the line? As it works right now, you can benefit form the better rating of 5-star terminals by assigning a contract that doesn't provide the required capacity. When the flight operates, it falls back to AS handling, but the rating is generated when the flight is booked into the system. If the limit isn't 1 but 100 passengers, it's just the second flight that's getting cancelled instead of the first. Equally annoying.
Two things of note here:
I've built a special tool for quick and easy terminal assignments that should make it easy to avoid cancellations due to overbooking. I'll probably do a short video about that later this week.
I intend to gear the ground handling part of the game towards more realism in the future and change the way ground capacities are managed. My problem at this point is that anything that would make it more realistic in terms of "capacity definition" more or less boils down to "terminal slots". And having a second kind of slots in scheduling would make things...tricky. At the same time, it would add a lot of depth. So, the usual dilemma of AirlineSi...
Will you still implement a "roll-in" period, meaning a period once the new interface is released, but where flight cancellations are not yet effected, the way you suggested in web dev session?
Also, when is the new interface and terminals coming live, do you have a fixed release date already?
Will you still implement a "roll-in" period, meaning a period once the new interface is released, but where flight cancellations are not yet effected, the way you suggested in web dev session?
Also, when is the new interface and terminals coming live, do you have a fixed release date already?
Re 1.: I haven't decided yet.
Re 2.: Progress on the redesign is coming along nicely right now, but I'll have to work on somewhat larger customer projects next to AirlineSim over the last two months of the year so I can't promise anything, let alone fixed dates. All I know is that I intend to release it in 2014.