Summary
The British Isle’s Address Package is unfit for usage for large parts of the UK and is missing several thousand locations and addresses. To the amount that it is unfeasible to manually correct.
NOTE! This is a similar problem as reported by officerunit10 and shows evidance of this affecting other parts of England as well. Address Mismatches - Bugs - SIM Dispatcher Forums
Steps to Reproduce
- On a control room (New or old), go to 1. Start > Control Rooms > Administration.
- Under General - Address Package. Click Address Packages Details…
OR (With a control room that has the Address Package selected as British Isle)
- Add areas such as Surrey, Sussex and Kent
- Launch a simulation of the area
- Create a new operation and start typing addresses in the “Location by ADDRESS” box
Expected Behaviour
Addresses should be correctly populated. For example, the following postcodes should appear as follows in the Address Package:
- RH10 9BG: British Isle - England - West Sussex - Crawley - RH10 9AS
- KT20 5NS: British Isle - England - Surrey - Reigate and Banstead - KT20 5NS
- TN12 6BB: British Isle - England - Kent - Tunbridge Wells - TN12 6BB
- PL31 2GR: British Isle - England - Cornwall - (Bodmin) PL31 2GR
- BN2 4SA: British Isle - England - East Sussex - Brighton and Hove - BN2 4SA
And in a control room with the british isle pack added, addresses should appear as follows
- Constable Close, Epsom, KT17 1AY
- Julian Smith Lane, Ashford, TN23 3SX
- Correnden Road, Tonbridge, TN10 3AT/AX/AU** (Multiple postcodes can exist for the same road)
Actual Behaviour
- RH10 9BG - Not populated in database
- KT20 5NS - Not populated in database
- TN12 6BB - Not populated in database
- PL31 2GR: British Isle - England - England - Cornwall - (Bodmin) PL31 2GR
- BN2 4SA: British Isle - England - England - Brighton and Hove - (Brighton and Hove) BN2 4SA
Note the missing addresses and England appearing twice (As an administrative area)
In addition, the addresses that do exist in the database are populated as follows:
- Constable Close, Epsom and Ewell, Surrey, England, KT17 1AY
- Julian Smith Lane, Ashford, Kent, England, TN23 3SX
- Correnden Road, Tonbridge and Malling, Kent, England, TN10 3AN (ONLY)
(Note TN10 3AN is assigned to London Road, Tonbridge. Not Correnden Road)
Impact on Usage
Minor: Small / cosmetic impact.
Moderate: It disrupts some workflows.
Critical: I can’t use the platform at all.
The poor implementation of UK addresses in SIM Dispatcher is a severe barrier to the creation of control rooms in England (and I believe other UK countries as well) and affects the creating and gameplay of:
- POIs - We are unable assign real world/expected addresses for most/some locations. And are therefore only searchable by the Name of the POI.
- Set Address (Control Room) - Jobs not appearing at expected addresses. For example, at RH10 9BG exists the real world Emergency Operations Centre for South East coast ambulance service[1].
- Addresses - Real world addresses are not available in the game and where they are in the database, tend to be wrong.(See Correnden Road example)
- Entering address for Missions when playing - ONLY being able to enter the road name as where postcodes are missing, cannot enter another postcode.
- Towns/Districts of addresses - Have unexpected location names which do not apply to real life implementation. (See the UKs National Mail postcode finder[2] for correct addresses as well as checking on OpenStreetMaps)
Footnotes
1: South East Coast Ambulance Service HQ (543863283) | OpenStreetMap
2: Postcode Finder - Find an address │ Royal Mail Group Ltd