FSX-MS MIT - Maintenance and Income Tool (Freeware; FSPaX, AirHauler, FSE alike)

[Bjoern 1,153]

Maintenance and Income Tool
 
Need a purpose for your flights?
Tired of people stealing your airplane in FSEconomy?
Tired of that annoying flight attendant in FSPassengersX?
Tired of wussy passengers who panic during the slightest bit of turbulence?
Tired of having to purchase airplane paints and repurchase the whole darn thing when you want to switch repaints?
Tired of hunting down payload configuration files?
Tired of being permanently, financially screwed after a particularly bad flight?
Tired of that first officer that chews you out for not switching off the landing lights at exactly 10000.0000 ft?
Tired of running separate tools for passengers and cargo?
Broke?
 
Then MIT is the perfect solution for you!

• This tool is actually only two gauges(!) to add some purpose to your aircraft. They install as any other subpanel and gauge can be used with any aircraft* having one to four engines**, so you can use it with everything from an ultralight to an A380.
• Payload is just that: Payload. It doesn't discriminate between cattle, humanoid cattle, weapons or boxes. If it possesses weight, it can be hauled.
• No whiny passengers. Hit some turbulence? Enjoy the ride! Your payload won't care.
• No annoying flight attendant to scare you out of your sleep while on a transcon.
• You're in charge of payload distribution with FSX' or the aircraft's payload manager. No hunting down bloody payload configuration files.
• The only thing that counts for making revenue is arriving at the destination set in the flight plan. So fly where you want and take as much time as you need (as long as you can pay for the fuel).
• Not in the mood to buy your plane? Turn the purchase requirement off.
• Buy a panel variation or an entire aircraft type. It's up to you.
• Watch the condition of the engine(s), flaps, landing gear and airframe degrade over time. The worse you fly, the quicker this will happen.
• Failures are probability based and dependant on the plane's condition.
• If a system fails, the particular type of failure will be randomly chosen.
• Your reputation influences the amount of payload you're allowed to carry. Treat your plane well, fly well and watch your reputation (and thus income) grow.
• Earn funds to pay for mandatory aircraft checks. Miss a check and your reputation is going to suffer.
• Not in the mood to haul stuff? Use "free fly" mode to simulate positioning flights, training flights or simply to screw around and watch your aircraft's condition degrade.
• Money is tight and there's an expensive check coming up? Cheat. MIT won't judge you.
• MIT is written in XML and configurable, so you can tailor it to your liking.
• Persistence across sessions and aircraft and more kindly provided by XMLTools.

So much for the exciting stuff.
The more unexciting stuff:

• You will have to be able to run XMLTools 2.0. If you can't run it, you can't use MIT. XMLTools works in FSX, FSX:SE and (apparently) P3D. Instructions regarding the download and installation of MIT are included in the documentation.
• While MIT is tailored to be as flexible as possible regarding the aircraft it is used with, its failure modeling might not play well with add-ons simulating failures themselves (i.e. AccuSim, Damage Mod, RealEngine). In that case, however, failure modeling can be turned off.
• The destination in revenue mode has to be defined as an airport/airfield/seaplane base and available in FSX' flight planner. Moving ships are therefor NOT supported as a valid destination. Returning from a moving ship to an airport/airfield/seaplane base, however, works just fine.
• The installation requires intitial configuration for the airplane you've installed MIT in. This is described in the documentation.
• The default values for revenue generation mode might not work well for the aircraft you might want to use MIT in. The documentation contains a guide on how to determine values that might work better.
• I can't test each and every scenerio, so there might be bugs. But it's freeware, which is good, right?
• If you have a particularly good set of values for the configuration options for a certain aircraft, feel free to share them in this thread.

 

The link to the documentation (and download):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-HUCYi9oLjpQQGUMv29CzjDirvzOlXjep6YluTYIPMk/edit?usp=sharing
 
Read the documentation, give MIT a whirl and post a few words of appreciation here if you like it.
 
 
 
*Helicopters are untested and the failure simulation is tailored to fixed wing aircraft.
**Four is the simulation limit in FSX. Don't be ridiculous, An-225/B-52/B-36 drivers.

[Bjoern 1,153]

Heads up!
Make sure that the last leg of your flight plan (the one to your destination) is activated before or after you've landed!
Otherwise, the GPS and thus MIT will never set your status to "arrived" and you won't be able to record the flight.

In case you refuse to fly with a GPS, you'll have to make sure that you've hit all the waypoints on your flight plan (check the nav log).
Or create your flight plan as "Direct To".

This is a MSFS limitatation that I can't work around.

 

 

 

Also, MIT is totally tolerant about any FMCs or ATC addons you use for flying as long as you have a flightplan to your destination loaded in FSX.

[Bjoern 1,153]

New revision online.

- Payload calculation is frozen after takeoff. You're welcome, TacPack users, firefighters and parachute carriers.
- The vertical speed of the last landing is now displayed in the message window.
- The message window will show a reminder to leave the landing lights on when you are below the minimum height for lights + 500 ft.
- To facilitate flight plan monitoring, the message window now shows the next waypoint.


Hint for "round trip" flights: Define any airport as the departure airport and create a "direct to" flightplan to your departure/arrival airport or put as many waypoints as you need in between. MIT will only consider you "arrived" at your destination after you've actually flown.

[Dirk98 354]

Looks good.

 

Dirk.

[Ce_Zeta 13]

Thanks Bro! :wink:

[JSkorna 137]

When revisions are released what files need to be changed out?

 

Will it mean having to edit the plane name and company name each time?

[Bjoern 1,153]

Thanks, guys.

 

When revisions are released what files need to be changed out?
 
Will it mean having to edit the plane name and company name each time?

 
Usually, the two xml files need to be overwritten.
 
Yep. There's no way around that.

[Bjoern 1,153]

Jim's comment got me thinking, so...

 

New revision.

Highlights:
- Changed file handling, now with a base module in FSX\Gauges and an aircraft-specific gauge in the "panel" folder
- Automatic installation script for the panel.cfg
- The MIT window will now automatically pop up and sound the "no smoking" chime when a failure occurs. Popup without any sound will occur when a flight is finished. Can be switched off.
- Custom hotkey (default: CTRL+Shift+m) for the MIT window, configurable on a per-aircraft basis.

Read the "Installation" and "Configuration" parts of the documentation, especially if you're lready running MIT!


Upgrade:
- Uninstall the previous version. Keep the save files!
- Install the current version
- Change the save file names in MI_Tool_Aircraft.xml to the ones of your present save files
OR
- Generate new save files with new names by purchasing the aircraft in FSX, then transfer the file names of the new save files to your old ones and reload the aircraft

[Bjoern 1,153]

New revision. Save files are compatible. Mind the save file name in MI_Tool_Aircraft.xml when upgrading.


05/01/2016

Improved aircraft value calculation; changed used aircraft value generation; baseline for increased engine wear is now 92.5% throttle (used to be 85%); purged some legacy code from the system file; fixed semi-broken tire damage code; new bought aircraft will now adhere to the time-to-failure value for the engines that is specified in the configuration area

10/12/2015

Fixed display of large amounts of funds in the status window; fixed a bug with reading aircraft-specific component wear rates

[RobdeVries 28]

Thanks Bjoern!

[Bjoern 1,153]

I'm going to try to get a "destination suggestion" feature into the next revision. The list of available tasks at a given airport is one of the reasons why FSE is so motivating. Let's see if I can replicate this in XML.

[Bjoern 1,153]

Yup, I've managed to implement said Desination Finder.

 

Changes:

- Added destination finder

- Revised documentation a bit

- Fixed a bug in touchdown speed tracking

- Planes are much more expensive and price scales better with MTOW now, but you get more starting funds in turn

- Used aircraft generation method improved a bit further

- Failure generation is now simpler and more reliable

- Engine fires may now burn 60 seconds before damaging the airframe

- There's now a clickspot for advancing stuck flightplans to their last waypoint (no more GPS required to do this)

 

 

The download link is the usual one (see manual in post #1).

 

 

MI_Tool_Aircraft.xml has changed, so remember to carry over any custom settings before upgrading!

[Bjoern 1,153]

Very small update. I hope that failure generation and random number handling is ever slightly more robust now.

Also changed the installation instructions for XMLTools.

 

Download, etc...see post #1.

 

 

Affected files: MI_Tool_System.xml.

 

Updating XMLTools to 2.01 isn't mandatory, but can't hurt. It's just a matter of overwriting the old with the new .dll anyway.

[bjratchf 80]

This looks like a very interesting tool!

[Bjoern 1,153]

Small update. The reputation penalty incurred during a revenue flight will now clear correctly after accepting or rejecting the flight results.

 

Download: See the linked documentation in the first post.