I have been looking through the various aircraft folders to investigate the file structures with respect to painting. I can make some sense of it all, but why are aircraft.cfg files missing in some aircraft and not in others - and when I do find one there is more confusion than sense.
I have not studied all aircraft (yet) but I am getting bad vibes just by looking at a few.
I do see a generic aircraft.cfg in places like:
***\asobo-aircraft-generic-piston-singleengine\SimObjects\Airplanes\Asobo_Generic_Piston_SingleEngine
On the other hand, some aircraft have their own aircraft.cfg
More confusion reigns when you look for the"sim = " line. in the Bonanza aircraft.cfg - it reads: sim = Cessna172SP (er… exactly the same as in the generic…)
Now in FSX and prior, the aircraft.cfg data made a lot of sense. Things like registration, camera angles, aircraft types, loading, locations and names of texture folders and fallbacks… ALL these followed the same rules in the more logical FSX.
In a way I find it partly good in msfs 2020 that we have a separate cfg per aircraft type, model, variant and livery - especially when a personal livery is added. We can turn off tail number and atc id so the private livery is not spoilt. We can change the colour and font of the tail number. etc. etc. But if I wanted to create a paint for the ASOBO C172 in real world livery G-BONO (I did this for the FSX default C172 and the real world version has flown overhead my house from the local field a few times) or a fictional livery with a non-ASOBO atc.id, well - how do I turn the ASOBO atc id off? I could do it in the generic aircraft.cfg…, but then all single engine props would be anonymous. That is where the [FLTSIM.0] [FLTSIM.1] [FLTSIM.2] etc. blocks come into their own.
But the ASOBO file system logic is untidy to say the least, sorry. By having so many different places for files and folders and the fact that you have a SimObjects/Airplanes set of folders for each separate aircraft type, you are causing a lot of hard drive read head movement during use that I wouldn’t be surprised many users have drive crashes and slow-downs.
So if one day I want to do something like this (shown only as an example)
[ © note - I designed this livery, and the real world aircraft’s owner had his Marchetti painted to my design. I know both the original owner and the current one and they will back me up if I asked]
I would have to turn off atc id, font, font size and colour in more than one .cfg file Just so this aircraft could have a “Rosso Ferrari”-like colour font (the real Ferrari red colour is better protected than the Coca Cola logo!) that I hand drew and is copyrighted. That would leave all other aircraft of this type in the sim unmarked.
So… Is there an easy logic for aircraft repainters, or are we going to have big problems? Yes - I have seen som tube painters at work. But no one has yet commented that things like tail numbers are not all in the same position on an airframe, the id is not always the same typeface or colour and some painters have legitimate claims to wanting to paint their real world aircraft the real world way and not just be dictated to by ASOBO.