Help please! Aircraft management tool recommendations?

[J G 927]

I have many aircraft installed in FSX, so many now that I want to manage them efficiently.

 

The average install usually includes a bunch of paint schemes I don't want, and some interesting and irritating variations on data that need ironing out.  For example, under manufacture, I have some aircraft that appear with their original manufacture (e.g. Avro) and some with the sim manufacture (e.g. JustFlight).  Even then I have some aircraft under JustFlight and some under JustFlight Ltd.

 

What i would like is a tool that allows me to easily change these things, and to hide unwanted paint jobs without having to rewrite the config file myself.  Is there such a thing?  If so any recommendations?

[UKJim 502]

I do not know of a tool - but I do just use trusty notepad++ to edit the configs and remove any unwanted paints. It does not take that long tbh especially if you do it at the point of installing the addon. I then backup these configs for future reference in case I need to re-install. This way I do not need to edit them all over again. 

 

It is long winded but it works and you know exactly what you have changed. 

 

The other issue you might find is many different addon manufacturers write their configs slightly different and such tool may not pick up all variations/addons - who knows I may be wrong.

 

Good luck mate

Jim 

[J G 927]

Thanks Jim.

 

If only I had started editing from day 1! If nothing comes for this thread then I might have to sacrifice a weekend!

 

J

[Andrew Godden 941]

John,

 

Like Jim, I manage mine manually because I like to know what is being done to my files.

 

However, there is a freeware program called Addit! Pro.  I don't know what it's like but it sounds like it's worth a look.

 

Cheers

Andrew

[UKJim 502]

yeah - if you have say 60 addon configs needing editing - it would only take a couple of hours to edit them. Not too bad really. 

[patrico 8]

hi guys are  you saying each add on comes with its own cfg.................makes sense a on a recent cfg search for my fsx cfg   I found 47 of them

[Andrew Godden 941]

Patrick,

 

Each aircraft add-on comes with at least one aircraft.cfg and panel.cfg file (the two I mostly edit).  In some cases, if the aircraft add-on has multiple variants, it may have a discrete aircraft.cfg and / or panel.cfg file for each variant.

 

When you have a wide range of aircraft add-ons loaded into FSX, this can add up to quite some cfg file maintenance if you want to amend / adjust things to your liking.

 

Cheers

Andrew

[allardjd 1,853]

One thing to be careful of when editing aircraft.cfg and panel.cfg files for different aircraft is that they all have the same file name - FS requires that. If you have more than one open it's easy to get confused about which one is which. Jim mentions Notepad++ which is a great piece of freeware and permits multiple text files open at the same time under tabs, much like the Internet Explorer user interface. Having a couple of aircraft.cfgs open at the same time in that is a little easier than two instances of Notepad, except you can't have both in view at once, but rather have to click between them on the tab bar.

Anyway, be cautious about opening more than one at a time and if you do, be very sure of which is which. Sometimes it's desirable to do that, e.g. when copying and pasting from one to another, but it's a situation that begs for great care.

John

[patrico 8]

thanks Guys, I do not think  I will try it until I get more experience

[UKJim 502]

Yeah it takes a few practices - but it does help with the tidy up I use Programmers Notepad not Notepad++ that I quoted but its almost exactly the same

[brett 2,302]

There are so many things to learn I understand why you would like an easy program to it for you. I learned most of these rules below the hard way, always a good idea to back anything up when making changes. the freeware program called Aircrafter is also a management tool you can use but does not give you any warnings if you mess with something you shouldn't. I am interested in hearing if the program Andrew mentioned works for you. Let us know.

 

I know you should never change the folder name because other aircraft use this folder name to alias sound and panel folders.  Nor should you ever change the title of the aircraft in the [fltsim] section unless you are creating another texture.

 

The ui= info is what shows up as a description, under the aircraft, in the FSX hanger pop up.

 

The info that shows in the detail section in the left box comes from the [general] section, I think, but you have to know what your doing to get it right. That's why it looks funny the way it is written.

 

You can delete any texture folder, if you do not want it in your hanger, as long as you change the aircraft.cfg section that corresponds to that texture and renumber the [fltsim] sections. NEVER delete a texture folder that does not have an extension. This is a default folder used by all the other texture folders.  

 

You can delete secondary model folders or panel folders as long as they are not needed by any of the remaining aircraft textures you have in the .cfg file. The secondary models and panels folders are noted in the flight sim section under model= and panel=. If nothing is filled in on those lines it is because there is only one model and one panel folder and FSX will use them by default.

 

It can get crazy with some payware aircraft that have multiple folders for different models, like float, ski, tudra and such because they will alias files and folders from other each other. There is usually one main folder in these cases and it will usually be the wheeled version.

 

That all I can think of off the top of my head for now.   

 

 Check out this info from MS to learn all you need to know about the aircraft.cfg file. The first part of it deals with the flight sim section.

[patrico 8]

Thanks guys but as I have said I am to scared to mess with this file, I firmly believe you have to learn to walk before you can run