Pilot Journey v1.20 - Economy game

  • Update v1.20 - 12/10/2019

    CUSTOM AIRCRAFT

    ---------------------------

    All supported aircraft are now stored locally in a textfile: "aiplanes.txt". Adding new planes to the game or deactivating planes or customizing their values is very easy (explanation inside the file). This is nice to have for future addons.

    WORLDWIDE COVERAGE (over 30000 airports...)

    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

    You can now switch between generating missions using only the standard FS2 airports (& custom scenery) or play with all the airports & helipads from the database. Thats more than 30000 all over the world.

    This is nice if you sometimes fly other simulators too and want to continue playing missions and logging your flights with PJ when doing so. You can switch back to the FS2 airports with the click of a button.

    Old savegame files from 1.10 up should be playable, don't reuse other old files though.

    please tell me if you run into bugs or weird behaviour. I haven't had time for really thorough tests

    Downloadlink: http://ybshare.com/download/7njnuz929w


    changelog v1.14:

    - Airports from Lukla payware addon can be added via the menu now. They were not all found via custom import

    - Support for the Dornier do27 freeware addon, it will appear instead of a bu133 or pitts from time to time.

    - The reasons for failed custom import are now displayed correctly and more clear.

    - Heliports are now imported even when there is no runway length info found.

    - the airport list in the dropdown menu is now sorted by country.

    bugs: progress display for custom import only showing on program launch, not on refresh. It works though, just be patient.

    Java download link: https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/ja…oads/index.html

    Custom airports:

    ------------------------

    You can enter just the ICAO codes of your custom airports in the file custom_airports.txt. Rules are one code per line, no blank lines.

    PJ will then parse the worldwide database files "airports.csv" "runways.csv" and "countries.csv" and try to gather all the data needed to create a working airport for the game, including the appropriate country flag.

    --------------------

    Update v1.04 - 09/23/2019

    - FS2 now launches with the mission plane already selected also for R22 and all the JustFlight Models.

    ( I wasn't able to personally test it with the duchess yet, but in theory the code should work thanks to a tip from Jetjockey10)

    Edit: It seems the game window still displays the old "v1.03", I just forgot to update that. It doesn't affect the functionality
    -------------------------------------------------------------

    Update v1.03 - 09/22/2019

    ------------------------------

    Update v1.02

    Fully compatible with old savegames. It's just some button additions to the In-flight window which link to sites I was browsing all the time. Buttons are more comfortable in VR.

    - added initial bearing display. In case you were really impatient and just took off without gps and doing any kind of navigation. It's probably not the magnetic course you are actually looking for. But at least the autopilot won't fly in the complete opposite direction of where you want to go while you can start figuring out a proper course.

    - added buttons with weblinks for navigation info and LiveATC for departure and destination airports. The nav button links to airportnavfinder.com and the ATC button to LiveATC.com. LiveATC does not cover all airports, but I liked it a lot for the atmosphere when it is available.

    - removed non-functional real world weather UI elements.

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Update v1.01:

    It is fully backwards compatible to savegames from v1.0. You can just put your old savegame or highscore files into the same folder as the new version.

    However, if you have been to Wangen-Lachen (LSPV) during your journey, the new version will now assume you have already been to Zweisimmen (LSTZ) instead. Also your current score will possibly be a little higher than in v1.0, because the multiplier for visited airports was increased.

    Changes:

    - the game now autosaves after you edit the journal.

    - removed Wangen-Lachen, CH (LSPV) because it is not part of the FS2 Switzerland DLC.

    - added Zweisimmen, CH (LSTZ) which is part of FS2 Switzerland but was missing in PJ v1.0.

    - mission utc time is now generated randomly.

    - the "random weather" button is now labelled "randomize" and also changes utc time.

    - added a button to use real world utc time.

    - The default locale for the program is now english by default. This means even if you live in germany for example it is now $2,000 instead of $2.000 for two- thousand dollars. This was necessary for writing the weather data correctly to main.mcf.

    - Pilot Journey now automatically writes the mission aircraft, time and weather data for the mission into the main.mcf file in your documents/Aerofly FS2 folder. If you see the In-flight panel and start FS2 afterwards, the plane & weather will already be set up correctly, no need to tweak all the sliders yourself anymore. You only need to pick the starting location. For this to work, you have to have a folder "Aerofly FS 2" in your documents folder, which has to contain the file "main.mcf". It should be there by default if you have FS2 installed.

    - increased the score multiplier for visited airports a little because I felt visiting new airports is not rewarded enough.

    Details:

    The multiplier for visited airports used to be calculated in the following way: 1 + (visited airports / total airports) * 2

    I.e. when you have visited all airports your score gets multiplied by a total of 3.

    now it is 1 + (visited airports / total airports) * 4, i.e. a maximum multiplier of 5 is possible.

    Just for comparison, the maxuimum multiplier is 3 for flown plane types, 5 for owned plane types and 9 for first owned plane types.

    You don't need to own all the planes at once btw, you can buy and sell them afterwards, the game remembers which types you have owned.

    But buying a plane on the other hand drains your money and thereby your money bonus score which is calculated before the multiplier is taken into account. So if you spend all your cash on a new plane, your score will likely be lower until you have made enough money again.

    ------------------------------------- Original Thread ---------------------------------------------------------

    Hi,

    after a break of several years from flight simming (I was into x-plane 10) I tried FS2 in VR and really liked it.

    However, I found it a bit hard to find inspiration as to what plane to chose flying from where to where etc.

    In Xplane I had played some FSEconomy which greatly improved the longterm fun of flying.

    Sadly, nothing similar is available for FS2, so I decided to try and build something really simple myself , just to give me some inspiration and context, and something to work towards when sim flying.

    I brushed up on my very very basic jave knowledge I picked up around 20 years ago and then things got a bit out of hand. After several weeks of coding (well at least thats what I call it, real devs would probably get nightmares looking at my code lol) the game is now at a point where I want to use it myself, for fun. It is more a game than a sim, really, mainly because I like gaming a lot and my knowledge of actual aviation is rather limited. No proper fuel consumption/ weight calculations are made etc. Everything is kept rather simple.

    But nevertheless I thought I might share the current version with you, for sure there must be other people who miss a little economy context in FS2.

    It is a single .jar file, and doesn't need to be installed, but it needs a java runtime environment installed on the computer to be executed.

    Highscores and savegames are stored in xml files that are created in the game folder. It autosaves after every mission and loads the last autosave upon start. you can also save manually.

    Well, there is a how to play help tab in the game with more explanations, so before I start rambling here over details for hours (which can happen really fast lol) I now proudly present:


    Pilot Journey v1.0 - an unofficial, fan-made, offline single player economy game for FS2 (or other simulators if they have the same airports and planes).

    Link to JRE download (which you need to run .jar executables):

    - outdated

    Some Screenshots: https://imgur.com/gallery/omVhcAn


    Some features:

    - Rent planes and fly different types of missions and earn money. Or fly in your own plane if you have bought one.

    - Pass license test flights to improve your rating to get access to larger planes and better missions.

    - Buy used or new planes and service them. Sell planes for a profit (if you're lucky).

    - Make your planes available for rent so they can earn some money.

    - Fly illegal missions for a large profit, get caught by the police and go to jail if you can't convince them of your innocence.

    - Try to beat the highscore in the first 53 weeks or in the first 265 weeks.

    - Play in normal mode and wait for a timer to run down to hand in a mission or play in Standalone mode to hand in missions instantly.

    - Activate cheats to fly any plane or mission without the proper pilot rating.


    Oh, before I forget:

    Pilot Journey is (c) 2018 by me.

    It is freeware and might be distributed freely in an unaltered form. It may not be sold under any circumstances, though.

    I don't want people to be charged for my current work, mainly because I don't think it is of a commercial quality in its current form.

    But of course it would be nice to hear from people who have had some fun playing around with it or have suggestion or find bugs.

    I can not make any promises whether I will be able fix any of them soon though, because I have a regular job too, and tbh. I am a little bit

    fed up with coding atm and finally want to spend my free time in FS2 :)

    Pilot Journey

    VR Oculus-Rift, Intel i7-7700, Nvidia GeForce 1070, 16GB RAM

    Edited 44 times, last by perestain (October 12, 2019 at 10:43 PM).

  • Hello perestain,

    Welcome to the forum. This is a whopping first post for sure. Sounds exciting. What is your favorite or most used aircraft in AFS2? Tell us about one of your most exciting flights using PJ.

    Regards,

    Ray

  • This looks very interesting. I'm aware of tools like FSEconomy but have never used them. I don't suppose you or someone else would be happy to make a video showing a few examples?

  • Hi Ray!

    Well I didn't really start actually using PJ with the simulator until just now because I was so busy coding and fixing stuff.

    But I just finished a nice little VFR flight in a C172 just from Hayward Executive (KHWD) to San Carlos, (KSQL) .

    It was a plane transfer mission for $ 232

    I did a little detour to the north to take a look at San Francisco at 3000ft and managed to find the golden gate without looking it up beforehand on google maps :). I need some practice with the landing though, but its getting a little better ...

    I realized that California has a big advantage when it comes to the starting airport in PJ in a new career because around half the airports in the whole game are in CA and the program just picks one at random.

    Pilot Journey

    VR Oculus-Rift, Intel i7-7700, Nvidia GeForce 1070, 16GB RAM

  • Yea, it has more or less everything except chicago, for which I haven't bought the dlc yet. I skipped a few military airports here and there, and I believe one or two smaller ones from Netherlands and Switzerland might be missing, too. Totally would have loved to do some Area51 alien stuff or military missions, but there is only so much time and I rather wanted to somehow finish the project than get lost on the way. It got a little out of hand as it is already.

    Otherwise they are complete with ICAO and coordinates, runway length and elevation. The program calculates all distances based on latitude and longitude with the haversine formula.

    I got a lot of data from airportnavfinder.com, and if you click on the "You are at ..." in PJ you will be linked directly to the airport nav info on that site.

    Airports are

    137 California

    29 Arizona

    11 Nevada

    22 Utah

    29 Colorado

    19 New York

    9 South Florida

    2 Germany Helgoland

    29 Netherlands

    33 Switzerland

    and Innsbruck.

    For the most part of development I was using only switzerland, because I wanted to fly there, an then later bought NL and NY to check the mission generation for longer distances. In the end I wanted to put them all in.

    Btw is the Chicago Meigs DLC just that one airport? Because I could easily add it in at some point, it would even be compatible with old savegames. I kind of hope for more Europe DLCs or maybe the Carribean. I know somebody made a Martinique addon, but I haven't checked it out so far...

    Update: Next flight to Carson City, but I got rather lost in the Baron because it doesn't have GPS and visibility was not the best. I had set some VOR radio frequencies but either there is not a good one for the Carson approach or I'm too bad at navigating. I stumbled across South Lake Tahoe airport and did my smoothest landing there so far.

    Spit40:

    For video making I don't really see myself delving into that. I'm rather happy the program runs now and I can finally fly a little. But I imagine it's not so hard to figure it out for yourself. You can activate standalone mode and cheats in the menu, give yourself some money and just click on some buttons and see what happens. There's also some basic help for most of the gameplay mechanics if you press F1. It would be cool of course if someone else made a video.

    Pilot Journey

    VR Oculus-Rift, Intel i7-7700, Nvidia GeForce 1070, 16GB RAM

    Edited 2 times, last by perestain (October 12, 2018 at 8:05 PM).

  • Die Idee ist vom Prinzip her super - aber es hat leider keinerlei Verbindung mit Aerofly. Es ist egal, ob ich die Missionen fliege oder nicht. :( Keine Kontrollfunktion. :( Und nach dem ersten Auftrag waren alle weiteren Aufträge ausgegraut und es gin eh nicht weiter. :( Vom Prinzip her nur eine unabhängige Tabellenkalulatiion.

  • Schnuffelduffel

    Wenn man keine passenden Aufträge findet, kann man per Bus zu einem anderen Flughafen fahren, unten rechts. Oder auf den "Wait"-Button klicken. Für die Bequemlichkeit geht aber ingame Zeit verloren. Kosteneffizienter ist es mit dem Bus.

    Für mich reicht der Timer, nicht aus Reflex sofort auf Landung zu drücken anstatt die Mission zu fliegen. Wenn man da mehr Inspiration und Motivation zum Fliegen vom Spiel erwartet, ist man mit dieser Lösung möglicherweise enttäuscht. Sorry wenn ich da falsche Erwartungen geweckt hab.

    Die Verbindung zu FS2 besteht darin, dass es die gleichen Flughäfen und Flugzeuge sind. D.h. man hat die Möglichkeit, alle Missionen auch tatsächlich so in FS2 fliegen. Die Möglichkeit war für mich das Entscheidende. Die Kontrolle ob man es dann am Ende tut oder nicht ist für mich eigentlich unnötig. Man spielt ja zum Spaß, also zumindest ich. Mit ein bisschen Phantasie hat man dann eine fortlaufende Entwicklung, nebenbei werden die Flüge gezählt und die Meilen geloggt.

    Ob sich jemand beschummelt lässt sich auch mit vertretbarem Aufwand nicht kontrollieren finde ich. Die Savegames und Highscores sind Klartext im xml-Format, ein Memory-Editor ist nur einen Download von wenigen Sekunden entfernt. Ich sehe für mich keine Rechtfertigung, Zeit in die Entwicklung von Hürden zu stecken, die am Ende keine wären und das Spiel kein Stück bereichern. Das plugin von FSEconomy fand ich z.B. damals sehr lästig und es führte eigentlich nur dazu, dass ich manche Missionen zweimal fliegen musste, weil irgendwas abgestürzt war. Gut, es war multiplayer online, da gibt es ja immer Scharen von Leuten die sich unbedingt gerne selbst betrügen möchten und dann wird es auch für alle anderen eine Zeitverschwendung. Aber PJ ist singleplayer offline, bevor ich da stundenlang sinnlos rumprobiere ob und wie man den Speicher von FS2 auslesen muss würd ich eher noch mich hinsetzen und den Polizisten malen, der einen verhaftet wenn man geschmuggelt hat. Hab ich aber auch aus Zeitgründen leider auch Streichen müssen.

    Pilot Journey

    VR Oculus-Rift, Intel i7-7700, Nvidia GeForce 1070, 16GB RAM

    Edited once, last by perestain (October 14, 2018 at 4:08 AM).

  • Well I love this. I haven't played in a while, was waiting for ORBX sale or the helicopter, but this is drawing me back in.

    It started me at Pheonix Mesa Gateway, and I transferred a Pitts to Falcon Field in a beautiful sunset.

    I copied the limited weather settings that there are, including Cumulus clouds which I usually have off in VR, but flying low and not paying much attention to them they actually added to the realism.

    I will be honest, took me a few tried to land the Pitts, but wow just reminded me of what an awesome experience this sim is in VR.

    Thank you for this!

  • When I opened PJ it placed me at Wanachen LSPV. That doesn't seem to be in FS2 or any DLC?

    I could have made it with fsCloudPort, but instead closed the app and relaunched to find I was at KSEZ which fortunately is in the sim.

    Any way I've done my first flight now and I'm a fan. Two thoughts:

    1) Wouldn't it be great if it was web based - all scores online, user community input of new ideas even

    2) Also great if FS2 had an "import" button that would pull all conditions info from the app (or a URL)

  • LSPV is Wangen-Lachen, located at lake zurich, hence swiss dlc.

    I'm not sure what happened to my keyboard. I agree with you that LSPV is Wangen Lachen but i don't see it in my Swiss DLC.

  • I'm not sure what happened to my keyboard. I agree with you that LSPV is Wangen Lachen but i don't see it in my Swiss DLC.

    You are right. It is part of PilotJourney but not of Aerofly FS2.

    Regards,

    Thomas

    i7-14700KF @ 5.6 GHz, Geforce RTX 4090, 32MB RAM, 1TB SSD M.2, 1TB SSD M.2, 2TB SSD M.2, 32" Monitor 4K, Pimax Crystal

  • Hi perestain - I'm really enjoying your app. I'm much happier having a "purpose" to make a flight. I'm flying to airports I wouldn't have and switching the weather/conditions when I wouldn't have bothered.

    I'm now wondering about better integration - how hard would it be to get PJ to write the conditions directly into main.mcf so they're ready before you launch FS2?

    The lines in main.MCF are quite obvious:

    <[tm_time_utc][time_utc][]

    <[int32][time_year][2016]>

    <[int32][time_month][5]>

    <[int32][time_day][20]>

    <[float64][time_hours][17.7311527331768]>

    >

    <[float64][visibility][0.415914326906204]>

    <[tmsettings_wind][wind][]

    <[float64][strength][0.504552125930786]>

    <[float64][direction_in_degree][261.821612119675]>

    <[float64][turbulence][0.174997881054878]>

    <[float64][thermal_activity][0.743172764778137]>

    >

    <[tmsettings_clouds][clouds][]

    <[float64][cumulus_density][0.268179297447205]>

    <[float64][cumulus_height][0.272736132144928]>

    <[float64][cumulus_mediocris_density][0.15]>

    <[float64][cumulus_mediocris_height][0.6]>

    <[float64][cirrus_height][0.663636028766632]>

    <[float64][cirrus_density][0.406822592020035]>

    >

    Location & aircraft type are trickier to write the correct values to but they're easier to set in the game so less worth the trouble.

    Also is there a way to make journal edits save to the normal autosave location so that when PJ is launched they open by default? I've just written some notes in the journal about my last flight but unless I remember to load them next time I might do a flight and get out of sync with them.

  • This idea has potential. And couple it with multiplayer and make it web-based, it could be pretty engrossing.

    Great job man!

  • This app sounds fun and very cool but with all the security problems with Java this program has me nervous. Has anyone who knows code taken a look at it? Is there a better method than using Java? Thanks.

    Over the years, to many end-users, Java became synonymous to security risks because of its “Java browser Plugin” technology. This is not the case here. You are not running the app in a browser. This is a desktop application, installed manually and locally on your PC. So, you really don't have to worry about security issues with PJ.