Add-On Idea - Where to start?

User Support Hub SDK
1

Hi All,

I have an idea for an add-on and am looking for advice on where to start since it doesn’t appear to fit cleanly into any one particular category.

I’d like to add meteoroids into the game. I do a lot of night cargo flying, and have had fun picking out some of the constellations in the night sky, but it seems to me that adding the occasional meteor streak might add a touch of realism. Part of this would involve spawning an object at the appropriate time and the appropriate location, and that object would be…what? An aircraft? A living world “object”? Something else? In Blender, it’d be a simple sphere of course. The streak through the sky would be maybe a particle effect? And the thing spawning these occasional meteors would be like a C# program using SimConnect. Conceptually this feels relatively straightforward. But the SDK isn’t necessarily as straight forward as I’d like.

So, any of you out there who have put add-ons together before - I’d love to hear your thoughts on where to start. I’m sure once I get started I’ll have a lot more questions, but I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot. Appreciate any input you might have! Thanks!

Mark

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I think you can start with creating a meteor streak effect. For this you can use the Visual Effects Editor in devmode. To have the effect in freeflight I think you can use either an external simconnect program, or create a simobject that has programming that triggers the effect at the right time.

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Might also consider contacting Puffin. His fireworks mod seems to fit the context if what you’re trying to do. Have somewhat random locations away from the plane spawn a vfx. You’d just need to make it at higher altitude and with your own vfx.

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