Pilot Journey v1.20 - Economy game

  • PJ already switches planes.

    The problem with positioning is that main.mcf does not use lat/long values but 3 parameters which are presumably x/y/z coordinates.

    This would be a hint towards the earths surface possibly being modelled as a flat projection and not as an actual sphere or ellipsoid.

    Pilot Journey

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

  • Plane switching - I hadn't noticed that one yet. Great !

    "The problem with positioning is that main.mcf does not use lat/long values but 3 parameters which are presumably x/y/z coordinates."

    Jet-Pack (IPACS) - any hints for us on positioning?

  • PJ already switches planes.

    The problem with positioning is that main.mcf does not use lat/long values but 3 parameters which are presumably x/y/z coordinates.

    This would be a hint towards the earths surface possibly being modelled as a flat projection and not as an actual sphere or ellipsoid.

    x, y, z is the karthesian position in space relative to earth's center, rotated with earth reference frame. X is towards 90° East meridian, Y towards 0° and Z up I think. And it's an ellipsoid model of the earth...

  • x, y, z is the karthesian position in space relative to earth's center, rotated with earth reference frame. X is towards 90° East meridian, Y towards 0° and Z up I think. And it's an ellipsoid model of the earth...

    Wow, thats that's pretty cool. Thanks a lot for the insight. For some reason I expected spherical coordinates for that shape but the values just didn't make sense for that.

    Pilot Journey

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

    Edited 2 times, last by perestain (October 25, 2018 at 8:41 PM).

  • I think this should be made a sticky or whatever in the forum.

    I bought ORBX Netherlands in the sale and decided instead of jumping to all the best bits and whizzing through the times of day, I will simply have Pilot Journey start me somewhere in Netherlands, and have it let the scenery unfold for me as I go through a career.

    Love how it sets many things now in game, and random time of day. Had to change one a bit as it had me flying a banner over Touge quite late in the day and nobody would of seen it lol.

  • Hey perestain I have another idea for an improvement. I've used Pilot Journey for every flight i've made since you launched it. I love the variety of time and weather it generates so i've been thinking of other aspects of my flights which i don't tend to vary but i could.

    How about if PJ did some ATC style things like specify what runway you should land on and whether you had to join the traffic pattern or should fly straight in?

  • Hey perestain I have another idea for an improvement. I've used Pilot Journey for every flight i've made since you launched it. I love the variety of time and weather it generates so i've been thinking of other aspects of my flights which i don't tend to vary but i could.

    How about if PJ did some ATC style things like specify what runway you should land on and whether you had to join the traffic pattern or should fly straight in?

    That sounds like a cool idea.

    I have tried pilot2ATC for Xplane once and all this flightplanning and ATC stuff is very fascinating, but I'm afraid it's also well beyond the scope of my aviation knowledge or programming abilities. For example it would probably be wrong to set the active runway randomly, since it is has to depend on the conditions and whether it has a published IFR approach etc etc. Also I would probably have to manually research all that info which I barely understand for all the runways on all airports which would take a lot of time.

    To add more realism, right now its probably best to do the flight planning manually, i.e. use the navigation link to http://www.airportnavfinder.com to get published depature and approach procedures, decide the runway based on wind and conditions yourself and then head to https://skyvector.com/ and create an actual flightplan along the published VFR or IFR routes (whatever applies) and edit that flightplan into FS2 as closely as possible. http://www.navfltsm.addr.com/ is an excellent ressource for learning how the navigation works. But I am really just a beginner at following all that stuff myself and far from being able to create automated results that are convincing here.

    I could of course add some random occurences, things happening during flight, like a sudden change of destination. flying an extra round around the airport, some dramatic stuff, engine failure which you had to manually simulate or things like that. Its on the idea list, but I can't promise very much right now, I'm currently too busy with my actual work to heavily delve into a big PJ update.

    Pilot Journey

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

  • Yes I take your point. ILS (and local terrain) is probably what makes it complex otherwise you could just pick whichever runway is closest to upwind or randomly pick from parallel runways. That is kind of what I'm doing now. That data could be got without external references - just by looking at the FS2 runway definition files. In terms of what random scenarios could be offered by PJ I'm not entirely sure what's realistic but plenty of real world pilots on this forum would be able to suggest things. Maybe something to consider when you have more time.

  • I'll add it in the next update, no eta though since I'm still pretty busy. I think I have to rework the way planes are organized and chosen by rng. Right now it's not really expansion-friendly. I didn't really think a lot about upcoming aircraft back then.

    As a quick and dirty workaround until then you could just allow yourself to fly a R22 whenever you rent a pitts (same amount of seats) and then edit the journal entry manually. Fuel cost and range will be a little off, but they're not that accurate to begin with.

    Pilot Journey

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

  • Would be cool if the program could read all the airports in the addon scenery folder as well.

    and the My Documents area for fsCloudPort airports and other home made ones.

  • Hi,

    sorry for being sort of disconnected for quite some time now. I managed to do a quick update to include the robinson r22 and the new payware planes from justflight. I also added a button to launch the steam version of FS2.

    The download link is on the first page of this thread.

    I didn't have much time for testing so let me know if there are critical bugs or errors.


    I'm currently contemplating an overhaul for the airport list. Ideally I'd like to store it in an external xml or csv file so everyone can just add custom airport data for themselves. There's a few issues to overcome for that, especially with savegame compatibility and scores, so it might take me a while. It'll probably be worth it in the long run though.

    By the way, if anyone has the duchess, it would be nice to know how it is correctly abbreviated in the main.mcf. I haven't bought it yet, so the automatic selection when launching fs2 will likely not work, fs2 will default back to the c172 in that case.

    Pilot Journey

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

  • perestain September 22, 2019 at 2:20 PM

    Changed the title of the thread from “Pilot Journey v1.02” to “Pilot Journey v1.03”.
  • Hi,

    sorry for being sort of disconnected for quite some time now. I managed to do a quick update to include the robinson r22 and the new payware planes from justflight. I also added a button to launch the steam version of FS2.

    The download link is on the first page of this thread.

    By the way, if anyone has the duchess, it would be nice to know how it is correctly abbreviated in the main.mcf. I haven't bought it yet, so the automatic selection when launching fs2 will likely not work, fs2 will default back to the c172 in that case.

    <[string8][name][duchess76]>

  • Thanks for your help,

    I made a fix and fs2 should now always start with the mission plane already selected. (including the r22 heli which didn't work in v1.03).

    Download link is on the first page. Savegames from v1.03 are still compatible.

    Next task will be adding support for more airports.

    Creating all sorts of airport data manually like I did so far is probably way too tedious for anyone. My current idea is that you enter ICAO codes into a textfile, and then Pilot Journey reads those and gathers all further info from the databases at ourairports.com and builds its airport list from that. Lets see if I can figure that out...

    Pilot Journey

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

  • perestain September 25, 2019 at 10:43 PM

    Changed the title of the thread from “Pilot Journey v1.03” to “Pilot Journey v1.10 - Economy game”.
  • It turns out that special characters in custom airport names are not displayed correctly.

    for example the airport at Martinique "Aimé Césaire" looks like "Aimé Césaire".

    I have uploaded a quick hotfix for this on the first page. you only need to replace one file and everything should be displayed correctly.

    Pilot Journey

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

  • How do you get the airport data? Copying it from main.mcf, or is there any other source?

    Hi Armitage,

    I'm not entirely sure I understand the question fully but I'll try answering anyways:

    The economy game comes with data for all the official and payware FS2 airports. You can disable specific payware addons (Switzerland, NL, etc...) in the menu "Settings => Enable airports" if you do not have bought them for FS2.

    To play with custom airports (the ones you might have gotten from FSCloudport etc..) it is a little different.

    You have to add them manually under "Settings -> Enable airports -> edit custom airport list". All you have to do is enter the airport code for the airport you want to add. For example "EDDF" for Frankfurt Main Airport. Don't leave blank lines.

    The game automatically reads those codes on launch (or when you press "refresh custom airports") and then searches for all the necessary other data in a big database. It should display a message how many airports were added correctly.

    The database contains data for thousands of airports and runways worldwide, it is located in the Pilot Journey folder:

    "airports.csv" "runways.csv" and "countries.csv".

    They are not my work, but free to download from http://ourairports.com/data/ and were released into the public domain.

    If you want to add a specific airport and it doesn't work at all you might want to have look if you find it in the database, and in theory you could manually enter all the details in there. So far all the airports I ever tried were already listed though.

    Before I found that ressource I usually went to sites like https://www.airportnavfinder.com/airport/L25 to get information about airports.

    The main.mcf doesn't hold much useful data about airports. The location of the plane is stored in x,y,z coordinates. I've not succeeded to convert that into latitude and longitude so far (didn't try that hard tbf), that's why Pilot Journey is not (yet) able to automatically set the starting location for the next mission.

    Pilot Journey

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

    Edited 7 times, last by perestain (September 27, 2019 at 12:15 AM).