Economy/maintenance add-ons for XP11

[Bjoern 1,157]

Just to check with the crowd here, what's the range of economy/maintenance add-ons available for XP11?

So far, I've found:
- FSEconomy (community)
- Air Hauler 1 (offline; via XPUIPC?)
- Fly The World (community)
- ProjectFly (?; community)
- XPFLier (community)
- Countless virtual airlines (community)

I'm looking for something that lets me do stuff on my own any plane I want (regardless of size) and no fixed route system. Offline preferred.

 

Edited July 16, 2018 by Bjoern

[Paraffin 2,197]

My only experience is with FSEconomy, which I've used for years as basically a "motivator" to get me flying more often, and into interesting areas I wouldn't know about otherwise. It also encourages good flying practices like route planning and having to complete every flight. 

It's offline except for the need to have a plugin running that logs in at the start and end of each flight. No live interaction with other pilots during flight, just optional participation in the forums. Routes aren't fixed, except in the sense that you take assignments that point to other airports. How you arrange and link up those assignments is up to you. 

One downside is that can't fly just anything. No military aircraft except civilian converted like C47 or Chinook, No modern airliners in scheduled ops, although you can take occasional single "all in" assignments in airliners. It's mainly aimed at civilian charter ops in GA aircraft up to biz jets, with a few heavy haulers for supplying FBO's. 

The other minor downside from an X-Plane perspective is that FSEconomy uses the FS9 database for consistency across all the supported platforms (FS9, FSX, unofficially P3D, and X-Plane). That can lead to occasional glitches where the game shows an assignment destination to an airport that no longer exists, or now has a different code in the up-to-date X-Plane database. But it's not that hard to work around.

The game introduced a change a while back that enforces a monthly, generalized maintenance fee on "owned" aircraft. So if you do decide to buy a plane, there is now a requirement to fly it often enough (or your other "owned" planes) to cover the monthly fees. There are also regular scheduled fees like 100 hour engine maintenance, eventual overhaul, and sometimes you'll get a random "hanger rash" maintenance fee. Not hard to cover if you fly often enough in the game. I "own" two aircraft in the game -- a PC-12 and Bell 412 helicopter -- and I can manage the monthly maintenance fees with just 2 or 3 assignments flown every month in the PC-12. On the other hand, you can just rent any aircraft available in the game and fly it to make virtual $ without worrying about that. 

The game is free and the forum is friendly. Check it out!

[Guest-475 81]

Same with me. I tried almost all of the options you mentioned, but none would really fit.

 

I hope FSCaptain for X-Plane is still under development as Travis suggested in December 2017: http://fscaptain.proboards.com/post/21931/

[Bjoern 1,157]

I should have mentioned that my experience with various economy and maintenance tools for FSX (among them FSE) and its limitations prompted me to code this for FSX: https://sites.google.com/site/fsxstuffbybk/gauges/maintenance-income-tool

A port to LUA isn't impossible, but the sweet student life with two or three weeks of uninterrupted time for coding something like this from the ground up is over.

Hence my inquiry for already existing tools.