Financial Monitoring System - Is there one?

[JDCollie]

One challenge I have faced with X3 (TC and AP) is monitoring my finances. I have nearly no input from the game regarding how much I am spending and where, and how much I am making and what is making it.

my question: Is there a mod out there that allows me to see a more detailed financial readout? As in, with expenditures and income, and the their respective sources (something similar to the wallet in EVE for example)?

If I'm just missing a key game feature that any other idiot would have found, please tell me, I don't mind looking stupid, and I really want some financial feedback

[Nicoman35]

The only thing I would know off is Trade overview, but I don't think it will cover all. Especially when using mods it gets complicated, as everyone is cooking his own soup.
Give it a try...

[fiby]

The only thing I would know off is Trade overview, but I don't think it will cover all. Especially when using mods it gets complicated, as everyone is cooking his own soup.
Give it a try...

I'm currently using that to track my UT's and other trade activities however like JDCollie it doesn't give a very accurate reading when you also have addons such as codea which will take salaries into account etc. Would be useful if someone with good knowledge with coding to make a script that shows everything going out and everything going in, and present it similar to the trade overview.

[JDCollie]

I'm currently using that to track my UT's and other trade activities however like JDCollie it doesn't give a very accurate reading when you also have addons such as codea which will take salaries into account etc. Would be useful if someone with good knowledge with coding to make a script that shows everything going out and everything going in, and present it similar to the trade overview.

This ^

I'm currently running Marine Repairs v2, Bonus Pack (of course!), DCS2, etc. It would exceedingly cool if there were a mod that could itemize my expenditures.

Something like:
165,930 - JDC Military DCS Shard - Omicron Lyrae
165,930 - JDC Military DCS Shard - Omicron Lyrae
2,693,123 - Your Equipment Dock - Home of Light
33,513 - CAG Ranger N TC - The Wall
466,440 - CLS ISR Trap - Family Whi

I don't need to know specifically what each transaction is, but where it occurred and who was responsible would be amazingly useful. Heck, even just the who would be more than good enough.

Honestly, I'd try it myself, but I know literally nothing about scripting in X3. (And I'm using 'literal' correctly here. I don't even know what language mods for X3 are written in)


EDIT:

Out of curiosity, is it possible to approach this from the wallet side of things? As in, itemize changes to the player's account? (I don't know how the problem has been approached before, but there seems to be a problem if the system can't log transactions from mods) That way even if a 'unsupported' mod takes money out, the script is still aware of the balance change and logs it accordingly? Obviously I'm talking out of my ass here, but still, it would be interesting to so. Maybe I should look into this scripting stuff. . .

[anachron13]

I'm far from an expert scripter so i may totally be wrong, but i'm pretty sure that keeping track of expanditures of any script is quite impossible. Scripts like DCS2 just remove or add money to the player account to simulate expanditure, there is no real transactions made that can be tracked like Trader Overview do for traders or stations.

[JDCollie]

I'm far from an expert scripter so i may totally be wrong, but i'm pretty sure that keeping track of expanditures of any script is quite impossible. Scripts like DCS2 just remove or add money to the player account to simulate expanditure, there is no real transactions made that can be tracked like Trader Overview do for traders or stations.

The player's account is just a variable that any mod can interact with or something I assume?

[X2-Illuminatus]

Correct. Via script commands you can get the amount of money currently being present on the player account and add/remove money from it.

[JDCollie]

Correct. Via script commands you can get the amount of money currently being present on the player account and add/remove money from it.

So, if I wanted to make some sort of accounting script, I would need to either:


A) Create a script that monitors the player's account balance on a short interval and logs any changes.
+ Would be able to track pretty much any change
+ Could tell you when said change occurred
+ Very simple to create ( I think even I might be able to hack it together )

- This approach would be unable to identify the source of a transaction
- Couldn't separate several transactions that occurred very close to each other. (more quickly than the script's monitoring interval)
- Could theoretically miss transaction entirely if the balance between the start and end of the script's interval is the same (Unlikely, but possible)

B) Mod the mods themselves to call a 'logging' script.
+ Could potentially be extremely specific.
+ Script only called when a transaction occurs, rather than looping.

- Prohibitively labor intensive. ( Wouldn't even know where to start )




Just some thoughts... I honestly might try the first way simply to see if it is even useful. Being able to see the relative size and frequency of transactions might be helpful, but without knowing where those are coming from, it's hard to tell.

[anachron13]

for A, Automatic Rank Variation Checker should do what you want. But even with that it's hard to tell what cost money when you have marines repairing and DCS2 producing drones at the same time.

[JDCollie]

for A, Automatic Rank Variation Checker should do what you want. But even with that it's hard to tell what cost money when you have marines repairing and DCS2 producing drones at the same time.

Ooh! Nice

I'll have to look more closely at this one. I need to see if it can handle modded wares and ships before I could use it however.