Hi All

Can anyone recommend a third party program for use with "FSX" which sets a framework for flying with a purpose. Something like, but not including.. "Air Hauler" or "Cargo Pilot". (Though I'm not tied to the idea of freight haulage exclusively.)

Many thanks for any ideas

Badger

Offline: http://www.fspassengers.com/

Standalone add-on.


Online: http://www.fsairlines.net/

It used to be free, with your own airline et al, but has (sadly) gone subscription based not too long ago.

When it's released

http://forums.vrsimulations.com/tacpack.htm

That's gonna be quite a purpose! By the way, are we close to getting it? (Not trying to hyjack the thread).

Thanks for the replies gents..

Wow..nearly 130 hits on the thread and only three suggestions? Is it just me or is there a huge gap in the market here for some enterprising developer to take advantage of!



This seems to be the leading contender then Heretic. Is it complicated to install? Because I'm not much on the tech front sadly.

Is it like "Airliner Pilot"? That's one I only wasn't considering because I discovered it wasn't FSX compatible. But I thought it looked like just the job otherwise.

When I first played "Air Hauler" I realized that it ran to a real time delivery schedule, which didn't suit me all that well as I'd have preferred it to run in "game time" and only when I ran the game. (As opposed to taking note of your PC clock and moving time on while you weren't playing.) What does FS Passengers do?


That's an interesting one Dave. I be interested to watch some of the game play videos once they start coming out on U-Tube. I must admit though that for myself, I don't quite know why I'd want to bring a combat aspect to my FSX table, when I already have so many top notch combat sims to choose from.

At the moment if I want to scratch that itch I turn to "EECH", but normally resident on the hard drive would be "Falcon 4", "1946" and "Black Shark". Oh.. and recently "BoB 2 Wings of Victory."

What attracts you to an FSX combat addon, rather than a native sim? Because I might well be missing something that would wet my appetite.

Badger

don't know if this will fit your purpose, but there are some interesting missions at http://www.dc3airways.com/ that you can download for free. And if you become a member the purpose will even be higher (I think... but I'm not a member myself).

Then there's the (almost) yearly X-Mas Challenge here at SimHQ.

Its payware and comes with an autoinstaller and a manual.



Don't know.



Whatever the website says it does.

Well one from another thread here that I was looking at is:

http://www.play.com/Games/PC/4-/5508880/Around-The-World-In-80-Flights/Product.html

Also there is:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flight-Tales-Add...4579&sr=1-1

And:

http://www.simw.com/rescue-pilot-mission-pack.html

I'm surprised Rise of Flight isn't there! its about to get a dynamic career any day now but its a great sim anyway - the planes are a joy to fly and fight with. I really think RoF is the only combat flight sim worth considering at the moment (other than possibly DCS's A10) But RoF stands well above the rest due to its multiplayer community, immersive missions and several careers plus the new one which will put it into line with Red Baron 3D, one of my favourite sims of all time. Its unfortunate that no other combat sims are available with decent campaigns - IL2, CoD and A10 all have canned missions which I dont like much and I have played Falcon 4 to death. We now really need a decent jet combat sim with a decent campaign - A10 would be the one I definitely wish would get one !! I would love to buy it but not if it has just canned missions.

http://www.justflight.com/product.asp?pid=138

Cargo pilot is fun.I use it with small planes and i choose missions no longer then 2 hrs.

I highly recommend www.fseconomy.com

It hasn`t the real big birds in it though, as it started with bush-flying in mind. Biggest birds are around 70 seats.

You can do anything between flying as a single pilot with a rented plane to running a network of FBOs. This is the Group I`m "working" for: http://www.german-flight-corporation.de/

It really brought be back into flying FS, made me buy FSX (and a ton of addons).

And it`s free. Might be looking a little complicated at the beginning, but the community is very helpful.

IL-2s campaigns are dynamic...

You can also try a virtual airline. I joined one to have more of a purpose flying FSX and ended up being a hub manager.

http://www.simulatedunited.com/

You don't have to fly on VATSIM for these but you can if you want the whole ATC experience.

All depends on what you want. VA's are for the airlines

Thanks for the new replies folks. (PM's to some of you are en route) It's always nice to find such a welcoming friendly forum. Sadly I have found that this is not always the case with flight sim forums. (All forums have their trolls and A-holes of course, but oddly enough in my travels, I've found that we flight simmers seem to have more than our fair share.)

Online airlines you say? As much as the idea fascinates me, I'm not ready for an online alternative yet. Firstly I'll still learning to fly and secondly... well... I'm not sure I'd have the time needed to do justice to something like that and not let my fellow online flyers down.



Hi Heretic, are you sure about that?

A dynamic campaign generates missions on the fly, reacting to what you did on your last flight. (As per "EECH", or "Total Air War") My Old friend "IL2" on the other hand, has scripted mission descriptions at the start of each mission and strings a series of these together to make up a number of mini campaigns.

Badger

I would say,

fseconomy is almost perfect for you. You can really do what you want, in FSE you only have to book your assignments, rent a plane and fly your job. F.E. you can rent a C172 for a 80 NM flight with three PAX. You fly, land, apply your Parking Break and the server logs your flight and pays your virtual fee (minus the rent and fuel costs. Once you get more familiar with the system, you can rent bigger planes and do multi-hops. Later you might want to buy your own planes or FBOs or even open your own Group (or join one). If you own a plane, you have to care for maintenance, repairs and fuel. (flying into a forgotten place where no fuel is available is a really bad idea, you might have to fly in fuel drums to get your bird airborne again). If you own FBOs, you have to care for supply and fuel to keep them going. And if you you find a place with a room for one FBO, you fly in building material and build your own one, build PAX terminals and or repair shops. No need to fly online, you only need a internet connection for the client with which you book your flights and logs your flight, fuel use, rent time. FSE is really what YOU make out of it. Fly once a week, or several flights a day, your choice. The nice thing IMO is, the most valuable flights are around 100 to 150 NM, so lots of action, no cross continent flights on Autopilot.

Be warned though, it`s addictive. I just checked my stats, I`ve done 720 flights within the last two and a half years. The downside, as FSE is privately run, the server at times has outages.

cool...will have to check that out!

I always fly FSX with FS Economy, great group of people on there. You can fly anything from a J-3 cub right up to a 330 seater Bristol Britannia, it's mostly prop stuff with a leaning towards bush flying. You hire planes initially until you have saved up enough or taken out a loan to buy your own plane.

If exploration is your interest....


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pole-Add-FS-2004-FSX/dp/B002C1B3L0

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Discover-Great-Britain-PC-DVD/dp/B0030GEQIS/ref=pd_sim_vg_h__7

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Discover-Arabia-Add-2004-FSX/dp/B002MZZSIU/ref=pd_sim_vg_h__2

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Discover-Europe-Add-2004-FSX/dp/B002MZZSIK/ref=pd_sim_vg_h__1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Discover-The-U-S...4502&sr=1-1

Thanks again all

Badger

Certainly CoD is completely undynamic as far as I am concerned. Even FSX is more dynamic than IL2 and CoD (in that you can often select new objectives on the fly) and the weather changing etc can force you to make changes to your flightplan etc. IL2 and CoD dont have any of that to my knowledge or at least they didnt the last time I looked (but I admit I didnt pay much attention to IL2 as I just didnt like the whole premise much). Certainly CoD is a flat as a pancake in terms of any surprises or excitement once you have played through a given mission once. And even when you are playing the mission the first time its pretty dull most of the time (no AA over German airfields, no AI generated interceptions over France, etc). I wasnt impressed with either sim much. Give me the dynamicism of the Falcon 4 and BOB2:WOV campaigns any day.

From Forgotten Battles on, IL-2 had dynamic missions. "Dynamic", as in "take a snapshot of the picture of the situation and choose an appropriate mission type".
This is no different from the mission generation system in Falcon 4, EECH, TAW or else with the only difference that IL-2's system works basically turn based instead of real time. You and the AI fly their missions and the results influence the battlefield picture in the next one.

For example, at the start of my current campaign I was up against a lot of flights of LaGG-3s. My squadron mauled them time after time, so at one point the skies over the front were clear of LaGG-3s until the Russians got enough reinforcements to send up a flight of 'em again.
Over the course of 60 to 70 missions, the german ground forces managed three quarters of the way to the current map's objective, endured a counteroffensive, then counter-counterattacked and are now kind of bleeding dry because the opposing side has superior reinforcement abilities (as it was in the real battle).
Would I play the map again, in the same role and with the same aircraft, but decide to strafe everything in sight or do as bad as I could, the situation would be different. Not in the big picture (we're talking WW2 here and nothing fictional), but notably different locally.

This totally qualifies IL-2s campaigns as dynamic.

(I have to say though that I only fly with Lowengrin's Dynamic Campaign Generator in IL-2, but this program is nothing than a beefed up version of the original one, with more units, better calculations, etc...the principle remains the same though.)

With the advantage that the mission intervals (daily, although 2-3 per day would be a tad more accurate) are more realistic than in their real-time counterparts where you can fight non-stop 24/7 (e.g. F4 or EECH).


Strike Fighters works in the same way as IL-2, although I get the feeling that player successes there are a bit more influential for winning or losing than in IL-2.

I didnt know you could win or lose a campaign in IL2 I also thought it was just a load of independant missions. Well I bought IL2:FB ages ago and sold it shortly after so maybe its changed since I tried it. Certainly that is nothing like how CoD works though ('works' being said tongue in cheek).

I haven't tried CoD. Not because of the bugs, but rather because of the non-dynamic campaigns and an uninteresting scenario (BoB...*yawn*). The former also applies to all the DCS titles.

It's just beyond me how a 200x flightsim just can't have a dynamic campaign. Falcon 4's had a more than excellent campaign, systems modelling and (at that time) superb graphics. And that was even back in the day when there still was a considerable market for (and thus competition between) flight simulators...

Yes you wouldnt think that the intersts of gamers would have change much from what it was in the 90s even when you had Privateer, Wing Commander, X Wing, Strike Commander, TFX, Gunship 2000, M1 Tank Platoon, F19 Stealth Fighter, Silent Service etc and loads more I cant remember. Now we just have FPS, RPG and RTS games and thats it.

I think developers fell into the trap of feeling they had to produce superbly accurate flight games and also with the better computers and graphics available they just priced themeselves out of the market. I dont see why there wouldnt be a great interest in another EF2000 or Elite today if one ever came out. People like great plane and space games with user choice, skill and rewards provided, and ones which you can win at easily and enjoy the ride - they dont have to be complex. I think thats why FS games have been so popular for so long - they dont stress you out and they provide a great reward whilst you are playing them and you can choose what you do and when, and if you want to go explore somewhere outside the mission area you can.

Most other games these days are just extremely complex, extremely stressful, just boring or linear. I just dont understand the developers today - but then I think economic greed has taken over from pride and the desire to produce rewarding games in many of them, these days computer games are big business and have a lot of money rising on them so they stick to well worn formulae. Its all rather sad really.

Well, to be fair, times did indeed change. You used to have just a single platform (PC) to develop for until console gaming got popular and networked gaming is getting more and more important as well. To actually make money and still be up to date, you have to develop a product that appeals to as many people as possible. And if the people dictate systems fidelity over campaign modeling, devs can't do much if they don't want to extend development times and risk losing interest of possible clients.

Kind of sad, but what you're going to do?
(Well, except going guerilla and doing an open source flight sim after your own taste.)

Came upon this thread late but I think what you are looking for is here. http://www.fseconomy.com/