Community Folder Subdirectory Names (for freeware mods, liveries and addons)

Am really appreciative of all the effort going into getting this sim up and running and/or improved by the FS community here ahead of the official bug fixes and patches. It has been the glue that has lifted this product to excel and endure for over 30 years now. In downloading some of the most recent mods and liveries, I have noticed some rather logical but random naming for the subfolders to placed in the …\Community directory.

Do these primary subdirectory names need to stay exactly the same as packaged by the developer? Or… can they be renamed as long as the subdirectories within the main addon folder stay the same (which seem to follow a standard MSFS structure). I would like to name them so they can be grouped by category (i.e. airports-xxx, liveries-xxx, vehicles-xxx, etc.). I notice most liveries have a root directory that start with liveries-xxx, but others like Sydney Harbor Bridge is just named “sydneyharborbridge”. Over time this seems likely could get difficult to manage. I don’t know how the sim finds the addons to load, so unsure if any files within the addon call using the original folder name established by the developer.

Hoping this question makes sense. I could just try it, but afraid to crash a working installation . Especially, since I seem to be one of the few who got the installation and sim to run without issues on the first try and first day released.

no prob to rename them

I’ve renamed nearly everyone I’ve installed, they all work.

Thanks guys…

Good idea. I have been wondering how we would keep all these future community add-on’s manageable.

Im using a system with a letter at the front of the folder name. A for airports (A - og20) P - for plane, S- for scenery etc.

Only question with changing the folder name is if payware updates will recognize the location of their product.
As it is so early in the development, we probably will not know till we get a Payware update, lol.

MFDC3… An even better reason for a standardized subdirectory naming structure. The nested subdirectory tree is so deep already it can cause too long file name errors in some instances.

I don’t have that problem, as I installed in a custom folder E:\FS2020\Community.