Wondering if we can’t get a thread going with all of our best practices regarding custom tail numbers and registration numbers (and throw in the ‘ATC Call Sign’ too), because it’s all a bit convoluted.
I never paid much attention to these menus when the sim first launched; I put in BDM for my tail number and ATC Call Sign and I was just Bravo Delta Mike in every plane I flew.
Then the sim updated and ATC started pronouncing BDM as “Bee Dee Emm” sometimes, and in other planes it was still Bravo Delta Mike, whatever, kind of odd, no big deal.
What REALLY threw me off was purchasing the Milviz 310R - now I’m starting to see firsthand how certain things like “ownership state” are tied to custom registrations. Add to this the fact that 3rd party devs are releasing their aircraft with many (sometimes dozens!) of liveries, each with their own realstic-formatted registration that ATC pronounces natively. When I realized that my custom registration was interrupting my ownership save state of my Cessna, I zeroed out that field and haven’t used it since. But I kinda miss being Bravo Delta Mike. But I don’t want to remember to go in there and change it every time I fly the 310R.
There’s other strange things afoot too - some 3rd party devs include a “custom registration” livery which acts as a blank space for whatever reg you wanna throw in there. The Got Friends DoubleEnder features a dozen or so liveries, all of which require you to reset custom camera views and dirt accumulation options, etc each and every time.
I guess my overarching question is - is there an elegant way that someone can utilize these tail number/registration/ATC callsign menus in a fairly frustration-free way and kind of set it and forget it?
Am I off the mark in any of the behavioral assumptions I’ve made in this post? Is this just a factor of a growing third party market handling this functionality differently and requiring the end user to make adjustments with no real source of truth?
Any and all feedback or experiences is appreciated!
Oooh, yeah, forgot to mention, I’m not doing any config file hacky stuff - simming on Xbox Series X and only have the native menus/options to work with, in my case.
oooh, yeah, and I forgot to mention, that the “well know developer” who is guilty of this registration.js Core file overwriting, only markets their plane on the Ms-Store, for both PC & Xbox…
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The answer is, yes. But it does require a bit of effort up-front.
Basically, each aircraft livery/variant that you have installed always have a file called aircraft.cfg.
You can open this file using Notepad++ and in there you’ll see different fields items. All you need is to look for ATC_number and ATC_Callsign.
The ATC_number can be filled with your registration and tail numbers, and this will stick to that livery. Same with ATC_Callsign, you can enter this with any callsign you want the ATC to call you. The difference here is, if you fill it here in the aircraft.cfg you can bypass the censorship and limitation of using the flight customisation menu because it can accept uppercase and lowercase letters as well as spaces instead of the flight customisation menu that always capitalise everything and you can’t use space.
Once these are saved, they are automatically assigned to your livery. So when you fill all your installed aircraft and liveries this way, whenever you switch aircraft/liveries in the sim, the tail registration and callsign and flight number will automatically follow suit without you needing to constantly change them in the flight customisation menu.
Just make sure the fields in the flight customisation menu are all cleared. As soon as there’s something in there, the sim will take that as a precedence, not the one from the aircraft.cfg file. So make sure it’s cleared because the sim will think it’s missing and do a fallback to look for the tail reg and callsign from the edited aircraft.cfg
