-
There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.
If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.
Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.
The Staff of SOH
Addon Maintenance regimen?
- Thread starter RyanJZ
- Start date
Nothing that I know of that will add it to all existing airplanes, aka RealEngine.
Personally, the release I'm looking forward to the most out of anything by any developer is the Turbo Porter being done by Marcel Felde. His 4X DA20 is one of my absolute favorite FSX aircraft, due to the very in depth maintenance and wear n' tear simulated, and bringing this level of simulation to a PT6A will be nothing short of amazing, I'm sure.
Personally, the release I'm looking forward to the most out of anything by any developer is the Turbo Porter being done by Marcel Felde. His 4X DA20 is one of my absolute favorite FSX aircraft, due to the very in depth maintenance and wear n' tear simulated, and bringing this level of simulation to a PT6A will be nothing short of amazing, I'm sure.
Daveroo
Members +
i went to his website,saw the DA20 and the porter pages...the DA20 has been reliesed? if so..where can you get it?...looks fantastic.
The DA20-100 has been out for a few years now...
http://www.aerosoft.com/cgi-local/us/iboshop.cgi?showd,7113074560,11977
It's seriously one of my favorite aircraft in the sim. Every bit a match to the A2A GA fleet, but in a slightly different way. Also, a complete joy to fly, albeit a little slow. Very light on the controls, feels very precise; the lightness of the aircraft translates very well in the sim and makes for a challenge when flying in windy conditions.
Bjoern
worst developer ever
Been toying with the idea for something like this, but the result would be as generic as possible to ensure maximum compatibility between aircraft.
Engine:
The engine would start to wear out as soon as its running. Higher throttle settings would acelerate the process. No specific turbine temperature limit or other things.
Flaps:
Every flap movement and flying with anything but retracted flaps would put strain on the flap system.
Gear:
Cycling the gear wears it out as do hard landings (not entirely sure how to implement that yet). Brakes would wear out especially fast if applied for a long time.
Airframe:
Could be dependant on G load.
Maintenance:
There could be regular maintenance intervals (A, B, C check) and irregular visits to the shop should one of the above elements be worn out prematurely.
Failures:
Engine and flap failure is pretty obvious, gear failure could maybe manifest itself in brake failure or refusal of a gear part to extend. Airframe failures could be aileron or elevator or wings or so. In any case, the plane would become uncontrollable.
Finances:
To make things more interesting, a very simple financial model could also be implemented. Income would be calculated by airborne hours and passenger/cargo load and maybe pilot/airline reputation. If you have a, say, 50 seat aircraft and you're just starting out, your payload would be limited to 25 pax (or 50% of the allowed cargo), increasing as you put in more and more flight hours. You'd have to set the airplane's pax/cargo capacity manually, but the gauge would spit out an appropriate number to put into FSX' payload manager.
There are means to do the loading automatically, but as aircraft add-ons come with all kinds of payload station configurations, the manual route is the safest bet. Same for fuel and fuel tanks. The total amount of fuel can be easily tracked, but it'd be up to the user to put in the exact amount that was "bought" in the gauge.
The financial stuff thus is subject to self-discipline, but could, on the other hand, avoid frustration as one can simply put any amount of fuel into the tanks.
Balancing/configuration:
This is the worst aspect as balancing needs to be done fairly carefully to ensure that users can pay for fuel and maintenance or repairs with a feasible amount of flying or a feasible load factor. It would probably result in a configuration file that can be edited by everyone.
In any case, any aspect of this gauge would be persistent for the given aircraft by making use of the XML Config or Logger gauge/module.
So basically, you'd have an extremely simple XML-based version of FSPax/FSEconomy.
Oh well, maybe I get around to program this one day.
Engine:
The engine would start to wear out as soon as its running. Higher throttle settings would acelerate the process. No specific turbine temperature limit or other things.
Flaps:
Every flap movement and flying with anything but retracted flaps would put strain on the flap system.
Gear:
Cycling the gear wears it out as do hard landings (not entirely sure how to implement that yet). Brakes would wear out especially fast if applied for a long time.
Airframe:
Could be dependant on G load.
Maintenance:
There could be regular maintenance intervals (A, B, C check) and irregular visits to the shop should one of the above elements be worn out prematurely.
Failures:
Engine and flap failure is pretty obvious, gear failure could maybe manifest itself in brake failure or refusal of a gear part to extend. Airframe failures could be aileron or elevator or wings or so. In any case, the plane would become uncontrollable.
Finances:
To make things more interesting, a very simple financial model could also be implemented. Income would be calculated by airborne hours and passenger/cargo load and maybe pilot/airline reputation. If you have a, say, 50 seat aircraft and you're just starting out, your payload would be limited to 25 pax (or 50% of the allowed cargo), increasing as you put in more and more flight hours. You'd have to set the airplane's pax/cargo capacity manually, but the gauge would spit out an appropriate number to put into FSX' payload manager.
There are means to do the loading automatically, but as aircraft add-ons come with all kinds of payload station configurations, the manual route is the safest bet. Same for fuel and fuel tanks. The total amount of fuel can be easily tracked, but it'd be up to the user to put in the exact amount that was "bought" in the gauge.
The financial stuff thus is subject to self-discipline, but could, on the other hand, avoid frustration as one can simply put any amount of fuel into the tanks.
Balancing/configuration:
This is the worst aspect as balancing needs to be done fairly carefully to ensure that users can pay for fuel and maintenance or repairs with a feasible amount of flying or a feasible load factor. It would probably result in a configuration file that can be edited by everyone.
In any case, any aspect of this gauge would be persistent for the given aircraft by making use of the XML Config or Logger gauge/module.
So basically, you'd have an extremely simple XML-based version of FSPax/FSEconomy.
Oh well, maybe I get around to program this one day.
RyanJZ
Members +
Dude that would be a fantastic addon! For the engine stuff though, maybe that can just be configurable per plane? Default limits could be for the PT6, then the user could just edit to fit the specific engine type? PM me if you ever need some extra help in beta for this
I was working on something like this awhile ago as well. Wasn't generic though, it was on the AH Swift. I didn't get around to covering as much as I wanted before I switched gears onto something else, but I was working on a system that primarily dealt with flaps and gear failures, caused through persistent wear and abuse.
What I was most interested in was asymmetric flap failures. It was quite interesting, and I managed to get it working quite well. My idea for modelling it was based on a ever incrementing random chance to fail. Basically, wear would accumulate with use of the flaps, proper use accumulating an extremely small of amount of wear per activation. Dropping the flaps above the recommended speed, however, resulted in the stress associated with that action forcing an accumulation of a proportionally greater amount of wear. Eventually, varying with the amount of stress and previous wear, you could force a failure every time by simply going fast enough (in the Swift it required putting the aircraft into a deep dive) with the flaps extended.
By modelling an asymmetric flap failure, it actually created a situation where you had to respond; typically on other modeled flap failures it just 'oh I have no flaps'. With an assymmetric failure, it's 'holy crap my plane is suddenly banking hard, wth is going on'. Added to that, I also coupled the flap failure to the circuit breaker that IRL runs the hydraulic pump for the flaps; so while fighting the asymmetric drag, you have to reset the breaker on the pump before you can try to raise the good flap. A bit of extra code, that I never got around to implementing, would of been to randomly have a situation occur where the occasionally you might find the breaker trip again immediately upon reset, meaning that you have no way of raising the good flap, and now have to plan for a landing while struggling with the aircraft.
The biggest issue I found was trying to model the accumulation of wear, and applying that to a random chance of failure. To be realistic, it has to be such a itty bitty, tiny, small chance of failure, yet still be able to be incremented largely through abuse. I spent a huge amount of time with that, and still wasn't completely satisfied.
Ideally, I wanted to add a maintenance mode to reduce / reset the wear, but I never got around to it beyond planning. An accumulative financial mode would of been neat as well, with showing time and money spent on maintenance and repairs.
Instead, I ended up spending the next 50 or so hours of sim flight time in the 4X DA20 instead.
I still have a bunch of idea floating around in my head, don't know if they'll ever see light of day though.
I also wanted to mention that in doing the above, one of the things I did in research was to study how the Real Engine addon does what it does; for someone willing to do the footwork, it wouldn't take much to extend it to cover turboprops. (Well, if you know gauge coding that is...)
Bjoern
worst developer ever
The values are mostly static because I still need to implement the actual math for most of the functions and connect the system wear stuff to FSX' systems. But this is how the UI would look like.
The various checks are all mandatory after some time and costly, but will repair subsystems to a certain degree (except for the C-check for 50000 Funds that will yield a brand spanking new aircraft). The section with the engine stuff scales according to the number of engines mounted on the aircraft. I've settled for "payload" because it's as generic as it gets and supports both butt and crate hauling.
The most crucial part - actually tracking the flight - is one of the first things that will need to be done.
You will probably have to fly a flight plan in FSX in order to generate income.
Still a lot to do and little time beyond this, so don't hold your breath.
One of those situations where you aren't going to make everyone happy, so it's most important to make yourself happy first.
I think that this type of addon could be broken down in two different directions. One, as you've mocked up above, obviously for commercial ops. Another direction however, might be for personal aircraft / GA. It would still accumulate costs to do repairs, inspections, fuel, oil changes... basically represent a total cost of ownership. It could even then track flight hours, and show the cost per hour. I'd get far more use out of the later, since I never really fly anything that could be considered commercial, nor do I often fly full flight plans.
One thing I always thought was neat about both the Dodosim 206 and the 4X DA20 is that there are various things that have price tags associated with them. If I recall, it's repairs that get shown a cost in the dodo, and as far as I can tell, it's only fuel that shows a cost on the DA20. Still, it would be neat to take this a step further and track those costs inside an addon.
Also, there may be a very, very small percentage of users that are like us that would find such a thing interesting.
RyanJZ
Members +
Like I said in my OP, something like the F1 B200 maintenance and failure module would be ideal. You would have to be able to configure to different engines though, like the PT6, or the Garrett TPE-331, or even the GE CT7
Craig Taylor
SOH-CM-2025
I'd like to suggest checking out "Air Hauler" over at JustFlight.
http://www.justflight.com/product/air-hauler-download
It has an economy engine that's pretty workable, although it's based strictly on cargo hauling. It breaks down and tracks operational costs such as FBO establishment and overhead, fuel, ownership (purchasing or leasing), landing fees, and rudimentary wear-and-tear maintenance. Income is made through what seems to be randomly generated cargos and destinations. All this happens in Air Hauler, but based on your interaction it will transfer data like fuel and cargo weight to FSX when you fly the mission. You can even purchase insurance to cover any liability, such as damage to the A/C or cargo. There's some career progression built in as well. I picked up a copy last Fall during one of the sales and just got around to installing it. On "hard" it starts you out in a default 172 flying stuff into grass/dirt strips and other small airports, and you've got to earn your way to something better.
The app uses FSUIPC to obtain data from the sim to determine if you successfully flew the assignment or not. If you flew/landed it hard, expect to pick up some damage and have to fix it, but it seems to be pretty basic stuff. Nothing as intricate or detailed as Bjoern's. That would be really something!
http://www.justflight.com/product/air-hauler-download
It has an economy engine that's pretty workable, although it's based strictly on cargo hauling. It breaks down and tracks operational costs such as FBO establishment and overhead, fuel, ownership (purchasing or leasing), landing fees, and rudimentary wear-and-tear maintenance. Income is made through what seems to be randomly generated cargos and destinations. All this happens in Air Hauler, but based on your interaction it will transfer data like fuel and cargo weight to FSX when you fly the mission. You can even purchase insurance to cover any liability, such as damage to the A/C or cargo. There's some career progression built in as well. I picked up a copy last Fall during one of the sales and just got around to installing it. On "hard" it starts you out in a default 172 flying stuff into grass/dirt strips and other small airports, and you've got to earn your way to something better.
The app uses FSUIPC to obtain data from the sim to determine if you successfully flew the assignment or not. If you flew/landed it hard, expect to pick up some damage and have to fix it, but it seems to be pretty basic stuff. Nothing as intricate or detailed as Bjoern's. That would be really something!
Craig Taylor
SOH-CM-2025
I hear you, Ryan. I was only suggesting a look based on Bjoern's comment about "generating income," and JimmyRFR's response to that. Air Hauler's actually kind of dated, but it provides some structure if you're tired of just flying around, without having to start or join a VA. There's a new version in development, but my impression is that it's been that way for a few years with no release in sight. I think it's just one developer who happened to hit on something appealing for a niche of the community.
I have a vague recollection that something I had in FS9 tried to implement some kind of ownership cost/maintenance module. Might have been the FSD Cheyenne LS400. I don't think it was all-encompassing, but I seem to recall that it tracked flight and engine time and you had to address certain things in the associated load master app or the A/C performance would start to degrade in the sim.
I'm sorry I don't have anything more to offer for the topic other than just kind words and moral support. I think it's amazing how people much more talented at this sort of thing than I am keep pushing the boundaries of an 8(9?)+ year-old program.
RyanJZ
Members +
Oh the innovation out of developers like A2A and Flight1 is outstanding! Damn near rivals the progress of real world aviation developments... almost......I hear you, Ryan. I was only suggesting a look based on Bjoern's comment about "generating income," and JimmyRFR's response to that. Air Hauler's actually kind of dated, but it provides some structure if you're tired of just flying around, without having to start or join a VA. There's a new version in development, but my impression is that it's been that way for a few years with no release in sight. I think it's just one developer who happened to hit on something appealing for a niche of the community.
I have a vague recollection that something I had in FS9 tried to implement some kind of ownership cost/maintenance module. Might have been the FSD Cheyenne LS400. I don't think it was all-encompassing, but I seem to recall that it tracked flight and engine time and you had to address certain things in the associated load master app or the A/C performance would start to degrade in the sim.
I'm sorry I don't have anything more to offer for the topic other than just kind words and moral support. I think it's amazing how people much more talented at this sort of thing than I am keep pushing the boundaries of an 8(9?)+ year-old program.
Bjoern
worst developer ever
I said that you need to fly payload along a flight plan to generate income. I didn't say anything about wear&tear only ocurring on such flights.
Do a money cheat or do an occasional revenue flight with a ridiculously high income and you're good (for a while).
And yes, I'm tailoring it to larger airplanes, but since income rates can be adjusted by anyone, I guess you could adjust the gauge for everything between a Cub and an A380.
As I'm mostly sticking to generic, default stuff, my module might even play nice with RealEngine and DamageMod.
I wish I could go more detailed on the systems damage, but as aircraft come in all shapes and sizes...
One other idea I'm toying with is company funds, i.e. your money being stored in a file that can be accessed by all planes using the gauge. That way, you could haul things in a DC-3 by day and blow the revenue on GA aircraft on the weekends.
Bjoern
worst developer ever
Flight tracking is implemented and working with two modes.
Mode number one is for revenue generation and you will have to file a flightplan and load the plane with the allowed amount of payload. You have to arrive at your planned destination to claim the funds for transporting stuff. How you get there is up to you.
Mode number two is the joyride mode. No flight plan needed but on the other hand no revenue either.
In both modes, tracking begins once the engine(s) is/are running with the parking brake active on the ground and ends when shutting down the engine(s). You will have to pay for whatever fuel you've used for the trip plus crew costs (adjustable in headcount and average hourly wage) and other costs (adjustable; stand-in for insurance, catering, airport fees, etc...).
So the only thing you need is a plane with a parking brake.
Still need to figure out a reputation system. For influence factors, I'm thinking along the lines of:
- Landing at the destination (base bonus; only in revenue mode)
- Touchdown vertical speed (bonus or penalty)
- Condition of the aircraft (penalty if condition is awful, slight bonus if good)
- In-flight system failures (always a penalty if an emergency landing or crash occurred)
- Excessive sink rate (penalty; only in revenue mode)
- Landing without landing lights (penalty; only in revenue mode)
- Edit:
Got a random number generator to work. This has potential...
Mode number one is for revenue generation and you will have to file a flightplan and load the plane with the allowed amount of payload. You have to arrive at your planned destination to claim the funds for transporting stuff. How you get there is up to you.
Mode number two is the joyride mode. No flight plan needed but on the other hand no revenue either.
In both modes, tracking begins once the engine(s) is/are running with the parking brake active on the ground and ends when shutting down the engine(s). You will have to pay for whatever fuel you've used for the trip plus crew costs (adjustable in headcount and average hourly wage) and other costs (adjustable; stand-in for insurance, catering, airport fees, etc...).
So the only thing you need is a plane with a parking brake.
Still need to figure out a reputation system. For influence factors, I'm thinking along the lines of:
- Landing at the destination (base bonus; only in revenue mode)
- Touchdown vertical speed (bonus or penalty)
- Condition of the aircraft (penalty if condition is awful, slight bonus if good)
- In-flight system failures (always a penalty if an emergency landing or crash occurred)
- Excessive sink rate (penalty; only in revenue mode)
- Landing without landing lights (penalty; only in revenue mode)
- Edit:
Got a random number generator to work. This has potential...
Bjoern
worst developer ever
Yeah, I hope so too. Hopefully it will be as robust as useful.
I still need to figure out the exact implementation, but the random number generator could have its uses:
- Random system failures (the chance for which inreases as system condition decreases)
- Very slightly randomized time to failure for each system (regenerated after every maintenance cycle, so that no engine will perform the same)
- Very slightly randomized randomized allowable payloads (good days, bad days...)
I still need to figure out the exact implementation, but the random number generator could have its uses:
- Random system failures (the chance for which inreases as system condition decreases)
- Very slightly randomized time to failure for each system (regenerated after every maintenance cycle, so that no engine will perform the same)
- Very slightly randomized randomized allowable payloads (good days, bad days...)