Strange Happenings

[Quickmarch 488]

Strange thing happened in the PNW today: One of my AI pilots arrived at home base with a load aboard, advertised in OPS that she unloaded, then somehow didn't! Unload, that is.

 

I noticed that the Skylane was listed as having cargo onboard. "Strange", I thought. I'd swear on my sainted mothers teapot that she unloaded that stuff. Checked - no credit. In fact, no record of the unloading at all. There's a note in the Activity Log showing that the aircraft loaded at source. Then there's a note that the aircraft landed at destination. End of story. That's in the log. The OPS board showed the arrival and the unloading process. Once that's completed, however, the notation disappears except for the entry in the log.

 

I tried numerous things to shake the stuff out of the plane and finally resorted to cancelling the job as it seemed the only way to get rid of it short of flying back to source with the load aboard and starting over.

 

I'm going to make a suggestion (or, at least try to research whether or not someone already has) in the AH "Suggestion Box" that: If AI pilots can adversely affect your reputation, isn't it only fair that they should contribute to it as well. Even a measly 1/10th of a percent would be something on a completed AI job. It might cover these types of goof-ups.

 

Other than that - any day where my AI pilots bring my airplanes home in the same condition I sent them out, is a good day.

[Gunner 69]

Was'nt that cargo a full batch of Super Glue?? Sorry... . I remember that it happened some time ago to me,  when i opened AH, it said "There is cargo onboard in this plane" -or something like that, but when i checked, it was nothing in there.

 

Eddie

[allardjd 1,853]

You couldn't manually unload the cargo?  I'd have tried "Fly Plane to Airport - Self" from the Fleet screen, then when you get to the Cargo Loading screen, manually unload it (no need to actually fly anywhere unless it was not at the correct destination for delivery of the cargo).  If you tried that and it didn't work I'm a bit surprised.

 

There is are many comments in the Suggestion thread and elsewhere in the AH sub-forum at AH re the topic of AI hurting reputation and not helping it.  Slopey has been pretty adamant throughout that his vision of the game is that you can only gain reputation through your own efforts, not those of the AI. They are a means to an end and generating reputation is not within their purpose for being.  You'll find many who agree with you, and some who don't, but only one counts - the guy who writes the code. 

 

John

[Quickmarch 488]

Good point.

 

I never thought to get into the aircraft and fly it to where it already was. I went looking for some method of manually unloading the airplane - doesn't seem to exist. After all, it was sitting on the ramp, listed as 'Idle" but with the load still aboard.

 

Slopey likely has a different way of looking at things. I like to see thing balance.

 

Small point - the AI pilots, despite being a bit hard on equipment are, by and large, good contributors to the bottom line

[allardjd 1,853]

Small point - the AI pilots, despite being a bit hard on equipment are, by and large, good contributors to the bottom line

 

...and that is EXACTLY what they were conceived for, however they do require some management and oversight.  It's not a free lunch by any means.  The intent was to provide a way to get people who wanted to fly big iron to that point fairly quickly.  That's one of five things that were put in place in AH to help out with that.

 

"Getting in the aircraft..." via the Fleet screen "Fly to Airport - self" button is just a way of getting you to the Cargo Loading screen, where you should have been able to unload the cargo, assuming the AC was still at the airport where the cargo was to be delivered. 

 

John

[Torpedo Air Cargo 0]

This whole 'AI being blithering idiots' occasionally has been discussed ad nauseam in the airhauler forums. Let's just say Slopey's attitude toward that is fairly firm and not one that any of my employees would confront me with and still have his job the next day. 

Basically the only thing you can do is keep in mind that they sometimes just land the plane and bugger off in the belief that the cargo unloads itself by osmosis. To counteract this I usually don't give jobs to AI that don't still have 12 hours+projected job time left. This way I sometimes lose lucrative jobs, but at least I can react when the AI acts like someone, who roams the streets at night licking windows. 

Reputation is just too hard to come by to risk it by AI pilots, who have been delieberately programmed to be unreliable. 

[Quickmarch 488]

Thanks John, I'll give it a try if it happens again. 

 

@Danilo - I think this one was pretty close to the wire time-wise. But I usually check time and add one hour plus the flying time for loading and unloading before accepting and assigning the job.

[Torpedo Air Cargo 0]

An hour is is cutting it pretty close. They can lose as much time just loading and unloading (if they do that in the first place). Sometimes they wait 20 minutes for no apparent reason before they even start an assigned job. The only thing that in my experience is pretty reliable is the airborne time. Funnily that is the only thing where random delays would be plausible 

[Bobby 0]

Danilo....good point. I sometimes think my pilots wait till I go to bed at night before starting to goof off. Figuring that I run a 24/7 company; I'll schedule them overnight and get up in the morning to find a busted up airplane on the ramp or a late delivery. They never seem to mess up when I'm flying with them during the day. Slopey has some interesting code written into those pilots

[allardjd 1,853]

Don't forget about those 100 hr. inspections too.  If you assign an AI several jobs on a tight schedule and the AC clicks over 100 hours since the last inspection somewhere on the route, your AI will have to sit out the delay while the inspection is performed and will probably be late.  I think it's usually about 3 hours.

 

John

[Quickmarch 488]

More and betterer..................new "Strange Happenings", in the office this time. I posted the following to the AH site and thought I'd share it with my fellow MH'ers first hand: Here's the text of the post to AH -

 

***********************

 

Hello All,

 

Strange thing happening to the Finance Page in my AH. I'm convinced the accountant is making off with the proceeds.

 

The "Balance" column in the Cash Book has reversed relative to the other entries.

 

On the left I have incremental dates (today at the top). Descriptions, Codes, Debits and Credits all match the day that they were incurred. But - the last column is showing the current cash balance completely reversed, so now it has gone negative and continues to do so. The correct cash balance figure appears on the first (lowest) line, beside the Opening Balance item on "Day One".

 

Any ideas as to how to correct this?

*********************

 

Let me know if anyone has had a similar experience. I'm about to call the cops and sic them on my (part-time) accountant.

 

I'm not sure when this happened because I tend to look at the "Finance Graphs" Tab which gives a summary and lets me know how much Lauren is spending on aircraft repairs as a percentage of the total.

 

I've got backups, as suggested by J Allard, going back to 22/02/13. But, these are locked DB files and I've no way to read them.

[Torpedo Air Cargo 0]

Can you give us the nominal value of the inversed cash balance? is it something like 256, 32768 or 65536? In that case we would look at a signed integer overflow (and a lot of egg on Slopey's face).

[Quickmarch 488]

$693,027.62

 

First line:

 

10/02/2013|Opening Balance|Opening Balance|-|$100,000|$693,027.62 

The lowest line now shows: 

01/04/2013|Pilot Wages|Wages|$1,857.77|-|-$1857.77

 

Note: the " |-| in the above two lines are blank fields on those lines. In the first it is the Credit field and in the second, the Debit field.

 

J Allard got back to me on the AH forum, suggesting I try reversing the dates column. Unfortunately all that does is invert the entire sheet - including the (already) inverted Balance column.

 

**HOLD THE PHONE!**

 

J Allard is right - If you reverse the dates column so that the opening date is at the top of the sheet, then hit the "Refresh All" button, the sheet is correct.

 

As soon as you reverse it again, ie: latest date at the top, it screws up the whole sheet.

 

So it appears that you can display the sheet any way you want - as long as the Opening Balance is at the top. Kind of a Henry Ford approach to accounting.

 

Maybe to the accountants out there, this is the "right" way to read the sheet. I wanted the latest first display and it appears you can have it provided the balance column is ignored. That's what happens when you send a boy to do a man's job.

 

Thanks John Allard.

 

 

[Torpedo Air Cargo 0]

That's a rather emberassing massive cockup in the population routine of the grid, but as long as it is only a display problem, rather than wrecking your accounts for real  it's probably ok

[allardjd 1,853]

Each line in that table is a record - if the table is re-sorted, everything in that line, including the Balance field, moves together.

The last field, Balance, is not dynamic and does not re-calculate if you re-sort the table.  It will not make sense if it's sorted any other way than by date, earliest at the top.  

 

If you want to get fancy with the Cash Book, press the button to export it to an Excel spreadsheet and have a ball.  AH does let you look at the table sorted in different ways, but the Balance column is an anomaly and should be ignored unless the default sort order is the active one.  AH does not attempt to be Excel.

 

John

[Quickmarch 488]

That's confusing though, John. If each line is a record, then the balance - which is really only the end of the line (related to the date) should invert with the rest of the table.  Any line should be static. If you sort on income, then the entire line associated with each (separate) income entry should move with that entry. I realise that the only way the balance column can add up is if it is in date order.

 

As you can probably tell, I'm not an accountant. Double entry sounds to me like "Double Dealing".

 

I was not trying to use the table as a spreadsheet. I was merely trying to display the information in a more pleasing, to me - latest first, way.

[Quickmarch 488]

@ Danilo,

 

No nothing is screwed up. But it sure got my knickers in a knot, this morning when I checked the balance (April 1 is not only April Fool's Day, it's also AI Pilot Payday, Aircraft Lease Payment Day, and Insurance Premium Payment Day).

[Torpedo Air Cargo 0]

That's confusing though, John. If each line is a record, then the balance - which is really only the end of the line (related to the date) should invert with the rest of the table.  Any line should be static. If you sort on income, then the entire line associated with each (separate) income entry should move with that entry. I realise that the only way the balance column can add up is if it is in date order.

 

As you can probably tell, I'm not an accountant. Double entry sounds to me like "Double Dealing".

 

I was not trying to use the table as a spreadsheet. I was merely trying to display the information in a more pleasing, to me - latest first, way.

 

I wouldn't get too confused by it. I've checked it myself this morning and your observation is correct. The last item in the grid isn't properly updated. That's not exactly a badge of honour for the programmer, but thankfully it doesn't do any harm to the data itself. Basically, if you need the balance data, you'll have to use the one sorting that actually works. Not nice, but it sort of works.

[Bobby 0]

As long as the bills get paid and there is coffee and donuts in the ramp office......I'm easy.

[Gunner 69]

I hope that i look at the same thing about you are talking, click on the "date" to reverse and forth ... everything should jump back at his place.

 

Eddie