To the LM Developers: Why haven't parking positions been increased?

[Ray Proudfoot]

To the L-M developers. I know this is probably a rhetorical question since you rarely communicate with us.

In P3D v3 and v4 there were always a large number of parking positions at default airports. But with v5 that number has been greatly reduced.

As an example, LPPR (Porto, Portugal) had 32 with Gates, 7 as Cargo and 8 as General Aviation. TOTAL = 47 in v3 and v4.

In v5 there are a grand total of 8 - 4 Heavy Gates and 4 RAMP GA Large.

This makes a mockery of using Ai packages such as AIG which contain flight plans to populate airports like Porto with a significant number of Ai. Only a fraction of those can now be used unless the user buys a 3rd party product to enhance the airport.

I was hoping this would be addressed with the 5.3 release but it hasn't. When are you going to restore the same parking positions as v3 and v4 had?

[Ray Proudfoot]

I’m resurrecting this to remind LM that the huge reduction in parking positions remains in the latest version. No statement from them as to why they’ve done this is disappointing.

It makes a mockery of having an Ai addon that injects aircraft into the sim. There simply isn’t enough parking positions at the vast majority of default airports.

Please address this!

[snoopy_belgium]

I have asked LM this question 1,5 years ago: https://www.prepar3d.com/forum/viewtopi ... 54#p224154

Their answer was:

Sorry your airport's gates are missing. Not every airport was done by the same person not every airport got the same level of detail or attention. We realize the community want's more parking spots and gates and will try and add more back in the next patch.

I'm looking at ways at importing or automating the process of adding gates based on open source data. So for example at LDSP, in OSM there are no parking spots mapped, just a few gates. I have no idea what size those gates should be without further research, looking at imagery and then I have to repeat this for every medium airport.

Similar at EDDB, OSM has the gates, but no parking position taxiways to link those to the main taxiway. so I have to draw each one in manually!

I recently went through about 5 airports and added gates back for the HFv1. Help me make a list and I'll try and get to them for the next patch.

According to LM a lot of manually work is needed to add the parking positions. Microsoft found a way to add these parkings positions in MSFS2020 and LM should do an effort to add them as well. Because compared to X-plane and MSFS2020, the lack of enough parking positions in the flight sim is a huge disadvantage. You can buy some extra payware airports, or if you are lucky install a freeware version of an airport if it is available, but you cannot do that for all airports in the sim.

Best regards,
Snoopy_belgium

[Emile]

Hello,
Is this one of the reasons why I have less AI Traffic?
Thanks in advance

[Ray Proudfoot]

I have asked LM this question 1,5 years ago: https://www.prepar3d.com/forum/viewtopi ... 54#p224154

Best regards,
Snoopy_belgium

Hi Snoopy and Emile. I find it astounding that these positions have to be added manually. But that being the case why didn't they use the data in P3D v3 and v4 to assist them? I tried replacing the APX files from v3 into v5 but there were buildings on runways and parking positions inside buildings so I had to revert to the v5 ones.

If you have MakeRunwys by Pete and John Dowson it generates a file named g5.csv. This contains every parking position in P3Dv5.

Column 1 is the airport ICAO; Column 2 is either null or Park; column 3 is the gate or stand number.

If you import that file into Excel (or better still, Access) you can easily filter by ICAO to show the number and type of parking positions for each airport.

Here's mine which includes my addon airports but some may find it useful.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/wrrefwuq ... 9jiqa3rin8

[Daveo]

[quote="Ray Proudfoot" post_id=252830 time=1642512555 user_id=119517]
I’m resurrecting this to remind LM that the huge reduction in parking positions remains in the latest version. No statement from them as to why they’ve done this is disappointing.

It makes a mockery of having an Ai addon that injects aircraft into the sim. There simply isn’t enough parking positions at the vast majority of default airports.

Please address this!
[/quote]

Yes I was pretty surprised how lax v5 parking is. I spend most of my time flying around repairing airports individually as I find them.
I find alot of orphaned parking also and alot of unconnected taxiway/ramp links that have been known to cause lockups, crashes and other issues in the past. Quite a few of them I find were done pretty sloppy to say the least.