I know there are games like Airport Manager or Airport Tyoon but these suck imo...Bad graphcis, horrible gameplayI think there would be a market for a game like this. We have ZooTyoon, GameTycoon and so on..Why no SimAirport ? If i had the money i would develop it myself...i have plenty of ideas for such a game.So why isnt there any ?Microsoft you read this LOL ?

Claudius,It's funny because I looked at a copy of Airport Manager 3 in the bargain section of our local software store wondering if it had really improved since version 1. After reading reviews, it appears that it has not. I've bought several airport simulations over the years and they have all stunk in some way. There was a complex sim at one point but it was sooo complex that it wasn't much fun (even for an MBA). The graphical ones are nothing more than arcade games IMO.I spent almost an hour the other day sitting next to the FS9 KSEA runway with traffic at 100%, Ultimate Traffic coming and going, and HotFS providing much improved sounds at high volume levels. It was really very cool and I wondered at the time if it would be possible for someone infinitely more talented than me to make FS9 a tower simulation whereby you could control AI traffic or whether AI traffic could be used as an airport sim. Imagine picking a small rural airport with one commuter airline. Over time you build demand, invest in the airport and watch it evolve to multiple runways and increased traffic. Maybe the local landclass shows city growth as well. Obviously this wouldn't be real time(!) but as people seem to be cracking the AI code, this seems more possible than it might have a year ago. Just some thoughts!David

Sounds good to me!

David,Interesting that you are bringing this topic to light because 10 years ago, BAO (developer of FS at the time) produced an airport tower simulator. Traffic was commandable on the ground and in the air using similar graphic components found in FS at the time. BAO even developed the first photorealistic backgrounds that put FS aircraft at the gates, taxiways and runways of a background bitmap.It didn't do well, which probably explains why you don't find such a program today. You may be fascinated by the concept, but the general public never was too keen on the idea.You can try it yourself at http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?name=TowerRealize that it is over 10 years old and not up to today's stadards, but was quite an engineering achievement in its day.Bruce

Tower....I played this one into the ground (no pun intended). It was amazing as you could even sit in the cockpit on approach when using the 3d screens.I should pull it out again and see if it plays on my XP machine....I also would buy a game like Tower, only more modern.Robert

Bruce,Tower was awesome but I think it failed because BAO didn't market it well. Most of us didn't even find out about it until it was already off the market. Also, I believe the photoreal scenarios which make it so cool were added later. Thanks for the reminder. I may give this a try again. It used to work very well on multiple monitors. TrackIR might make it pretty cool too!David

Aerobiz was a cool game for the Sega Genesis system.XP Home SP2Asus P4P800-SE Intel 3.0GHZDDR 400 D/C 2x512MBLeadtek 6800GT 256MB (71.84)SB AudigyMSFF2 & X45 throttleSee you in the fence...CYYZ

I thought Tower was a good game as well ....VC

Zootycoon is all eyecandy...Like it or not, a business sim is a highly complex piece of software. I've yet to encounter one that's really good.There are some professional ones, but those require supercomputers and would bore you to death because there's no graphical output at all.I once (at school) took part in a business sim which existed of groups of students across the country competing in building factories (each team running a company with similar products and competing on the free market). Was much fun, but not for the now-generation.All output existed only as lists of information printed on matrix printers. We provided input as another information set delivered on floppy disks we sent in once a week.These were put into a mainframe computer which ran the actual sim (the software we got interpreted the data and allowed us to put in our next moves).THAT's a real business sim. Everything on the entertainment market is extremely dumbed down out of necessity. And as there's few people interested in playing business sims based on something boring like running an airport you won't find mass market ones.

From what I've seen, a tower sim within FS2004 is possible. Developers have figured out how to control AI to the point where they can be directed into holding patterns in order to smooth AI landings. Thus, it stands to reason that you could implement some sort of text interface to a program which would interpret your commands and direct the traffic. Although, I'll bet that would take a #### of a lot of time to develop.

i was thinking of an airport manager game like SimCity.You could actually build the airport the way you want it.Of course there would be pre-build parts like apron, runways and so on...but just think you could design your own luggage-system (is that the way its called in english ?) with prebuilt parts ?A game of this kind could be both: 1) building and 2) managingoh well my english sucks and i had 3 beers ROFL

Geez, you mean my job as an airport manager at KDEN is boring. Go figure.

I am not particularly interested in the business aspects of the tower simulation. For me it would be a challenge to control traffic in a growing level of realism. I would like to have an add on for FS that makes that possible for every airport of your choice. Actually I wonder why Flight1 did not develop such a product, for instance as a PRO version of Ultimate Traffic. It makes me think that it is somehow impossible to fit a module like that in the FS structure. A totally new product apart of FS would have the big disadvantage that you have to deal with two separate simworlds in your hobby. But I would certainly buy a good traffic controller as an add on for FS.Herrie

Yup, for the average punter.And I doubt you have flashy graphics in your management software :) Reams of numbers and reports aren't what the kids want, they want to blow things up (something most airport managers get to do way too infrequently :-lol ).

I used to use Tower constantly, so when I saw the above link to get it I was very happy. Downloaded from underdog site and unzipped, it installed fine, but I went to run, it stopped and said one of the .dll files needed win3.1, so I guess we're out of luck in running Tower in XP. Anyone have a suggestion on how to get it going, or is it even possible? I would really like to use this great sim again. Mike