As the successor to my ImageToMSFSKTX2 script, I’ve been building an all new application that is intended to deal with all the back-end drudgery of livery creation - called MSFS Livery Toolkit! A typical workflow will be:
Launch MSFS Livery Toolkit
Pick the base aircraft (the app will scan your choice of aircraft folders, such as Community folder or MSFS Addon Linker folders)
Create a new project, set title, etc
Create one (or many) liveries in the project - also define texture fallbacks for texture.cfg, set ATC ID and other things that would appear in aircraft.cfg / livery.cfg.
Using the base aircraft as a reference, choose which textures will be included in your livery. The are various ways to sort and filter the sometimes long list of textures used in the base aircraft, to help find the right ones. After that, the app can create placeholders at the correct resolution and filename, which you can then overwrite with your artwork.
From the livery texture panel you can open source artwork (e.g. PSD, Gimp or Affinity) if present. The app will read the texture flags from the base aircraft and use those as defaults, but you of course can override them.
The app will also generate placeholder thumbnails with the correct size and filename, ready for you to overwrite with the real images.
When your livery is ready, you can press compile and my app will call the MSFS SDK to compile the textures into a finished livery, ready to use in the sim!
This is going to be a completely free application for the community, I’m not going to monetize it (besides an entirely optional donation button) or lock anything behind a premium tier. I’m doing it because I’m a livery painter who also enjoys building tools like this!
I think it’ll be ready to publish within a few weeks. If anyone can commit to testing an early build and providing much-needed feedback then please let me know! Some additional hands-on testing will be helpful since I tripled my testing work by ensuring the tool supports all three livery types:
MSFS 2020
MSFS 2024 Simple
MSFS 2024 Modular
I will get ahead of one point now, while the application requirements were 100% created by me, the code was written using VSCode with the Claude Code add-in. I know there’s some stigma around AI, “vibe-coding” and resulting “AI slop”; I’m pretty adamant that is not the approach I’ve taken. I paid for a Claude Pro subscription to help me convert my requirements into specifications and ultimately instructions that Claude Code could then implement. The application was carefully planned, with milestones and countless hours of human testing and refinement. Simply put, this thing wouldn’t exist without Claude, I’d be limited to cumbersome 90s style Batch files like ImageToMSFSKTX2!
That sounds awesome, I’ve always wanted to create my own but never found the time to learn through all the procedures required. Looks like your tool may speed up the process and make it simply easier, thank you.
I get it - and I’m rooting for you. This is a fantastic idea, and Claude is exactly the kind of tool that helps bring projects like this to life. Don’t let anyone discourage you!
I began a similar project but it’s shelved due to other obligations. It’s great to know someone is working on streamlining the livery creation process! Looking forward to using it!
I’ve made good progress. I’d love it if anyone here would be happy to volunteer for some testing - I guess we can call it a “closed beta”.
The workflows I would be looking for test coverage on are:
Building an MSFS 2020 livery
Building an MSFS 2024 “simple” / “monolithic” livery (i.e. uses the older non-modular simobject structure)
Building an MSFS 2024 modular livery
And it would be great if we could get some testers who use the Steam version, since I can only test on the MS Store version. I’m still very happy to get testing feedback from MS Store users, but getting at least one Steam user would help knock off something I simply cannot test for myself.
If anyone would like to test the latest build please DM here, or on Discord (flaknine), or email theflaknine@gmail.com - I’ll send you a download link.
Note that we should not use this forum post or forum DMs for any support / bug reporting, in order to comply with forum rules. Probably best to use email or Discord messages for that.
First of all, thank you for all the time and effort you’ve put into creating this tool and for making it available to the community for free. I always have a lot of respect for people who spend their own time building tools and helping others.
I was wondering if it might be easier to publish a beta or nightly build on GitHub instead of running a closed beta. That way, anyone interested could test it, and GitHub already has a great system for reporting bugs, opening issues and suggesting improvements.
Just a thought - I completely understand if you have reasons for keeping the testing closed for now.
Thanks for the kind words. The project is already managed in a Github repo, however it’s private.
While I’m 100% keeping this as a free tool for the community, I do still want to retain ownership of the code since a lot of work has gone into this (even with Claude actually writing the code), hence not making a public repo. Maybe I’m paranoid or overly protective, and maybe my position will change on this, but for now I’m going to keep it as a private repo. I think I’d be OK inviting a hand picked group of testers to that repo for testing - I’ll give that some thought.
I’ve flip-flopped a few times while developing this, as to whether to make it all public or not. There are definitely pro’s to making it public, such as transparency, bug tracking and an easy way to push new releases, however I’ve seen real cases where work is stolen and published by others (regardless of any license terms in the repo), hence my current stance.
Good news, a beta version of MSFS Livery Toolkit is available here.
I created that new public repo for distribution, issue tracking and documentation, while keeping the source in a private repo.
It would be great to get testing and feedback from some community livery artists. As mentioned above, let’s not use this forum for support, in order to comply with forum rules. You can open an issue on the Github repo if you have bugs, problems, feature requests. However I’d love to see any general discussion about this tool here on the forum.
Edit: one point I forgot to mention - currently there is no support for aircraft in the Virtual File System. That means no stock or marketplace aircraft. However this is next on my roadmap, and planning is progressing well.
Support for stock / marketplace aircraft is coming along nicely. The app can interrogate the VFS (if mounted) and lets you build a project with a VFS base aircraft. I still need to verify the rest of the workflow with a VFS aircraft but so far so good. Providing I don’t hit my weekly token limit on Claude Pro subscription I should have a new build ready soon!
OK so here is new beta build v0.1.100 with a substantial changelog! I haven’t updated the online documentation yet.
WHAT’S NEW SINCE v0.1.97
New:
Stock and Marketplace aircraft are now usable as a livery’s base aircraft, read live from MSFS’s Virtual File System - start Dev Mode’s VFS Projector (Tools > Virtual File System > Start) before using Discover, and a green “VFS” tag marks these aircraft alongside your own Community-folder ones.
Most work (editing details, browsing/painting textures, generating placeholders) keeps working from a cached snapshot even after you stop the VFS Projector again - only adding a brand-new livery or extracting fresh artwork from the base needs it running at that moment. This is untested against a Steam install of MSFS (MS Store installs are confirmed working) - if you’re on Steam, let me know how it goes either way.
A “Recheck connection” button on the VFS banners lets you confirm the app has noticed you’ve restarted the VFS Projector, without navigating away and back.
A “Paintkit artwork” panel on each texture shows the base’s matching source file (.psd/.afphoto/.xcf) when auto-detected, and lets you browse for a different file when the base’s paintkit files aren’t named to match (common in practice) - your choice is remembered per livery.
Modular (2024) liveries: you can now edit their airline/parking-type/parking-code/ATC-id fields after creation on the Details tab, matching what monolithic liveries could already do.
The Settings page contains a user edit-able texture exclusion list, designed to avoid cluttering the texture selector with items you are unlikely to want to paint, such as “rivet”, “tire”, etc.
Extracting a texture that exists as more than one compiled copy across different folders now shows which folder each copy came from, to help you pick the right one.
The “MSFS is running” warning is now two-tier: informational when your open livery isn’t deployed anywhere the sim would actually load it (safe to keep editing), a stronger warning when it is.
Some base textures that ship uncompressed at 16-bit-per-channel (rather than the usual compressed format) can now be extracted correctly, with full 16-bit precision preserved by default (toggle in Settings).
The nav pane’s collapse/expand button has been removed - it stays open at its (already narrow) width.
Known issues:
If you stop and then restart the VFS Projector, extracting artwork from the base can occasionally hang indefinitely right after the restart. If this happens, closing MSFS entirely (which also stops the VFS Projector) clears it. Waiting a few seconds after restarting the VFS Projector before extracting anything may help avoid it. A proper fix is in progress.
More features added to the MSFS Livery Toolkit. Here’s what’s new in v0.1.103
Check fallback coverage: a new “Check fallback” button (on the Textures tab and in the Edit-fallback screen) checks every texture the base aircraft needs and tells you whether each one is covered by your own painted image (“In livery”), inherited from the base through your chosen fallback (“In aircraft”), or “Missing” - the last of which would show up as a pink checkerboard in the sim. Missing textures are flagged in pink, and for inherited ones it shows which fallback resolves them. The Compile page also shows a (non-blocking) warning if any livery has missing textures, so you can catch it before building.
Delete a livery: you can now remove a livery from a project. It’s on the Project page (down in the Liveries list, marked with a red trash icon) rather than the everyday Liveries tab, since it’s destructive - it permanently deletes that livery’s deployed folder AND its source-artwork files, and asks you to confirm first.
Clear a thumbnail: each thumbnail now has a “Clear” button, so if you pick the wrong image you can wipe it back to empty and regenerate a placeholder or replace it.
Your Recent and Pinned project lists on the Home page now show the green “VFS” tag when a project’s base aircraft comes from the Virtual File System, matching the tag in the aircraft picker.
New liveries no longer guess a texture selection: the first livery you create for an aircraft you’ve never used before now starts with nothing pre-selected (the old automatic “all albedo” guess pulled in images you usually didn’t want), so you pick deliberately. Once you’ve made a selection for that aircraft, later liveries still default to it as before.
The busy spinner now tells you when it’s reading from the Virtual File System, which can take a while as the data streams in - so a longer wait on a VFS aircraft looks intentional rather than stuck.
Assorted UI tidying on the Liveries page: status messages (“Saved…”, etc.) now appear in one consistent spot instead of blending into nearby labels, and some panels/spacing were made steadier.
