Liveries and plane variants are all over the place, but all liveries do show up. Both from Livery Manager and downloaded from Flightsim.to. Sometimes it’s just tricky to find them.
Yes, your experience is real. Asobo changed the way aircraft are grouped and sorted in the library.
The library is organized based on records in the aircraft.cfg. Aircraft used to be grouped by ui_manufacturer and ui_type, and liveries being ui_variation under a ui_type.
Now aircraft are grouped by the combination of icao_model and ui_createdby. So, if the livery creator took credit for their work in ui_createdby, as many do, the planes will be grouped under that author. And, if they didn’t include the icao_model information, the planes will be grouped together under a (random) single plane.
So, finding where planes are is going to be fun.
I tried to bring this up with the SDK team, but, they laughed at me and didn’t believe me.
Ultimately, there’s information we don’t currently know about creating liveries (the registration function has changed), and there’s file organization information that needs to be better communicated, and, eventually, livery creators will be able to get back to work.
The Library organization thing. Ouch. We’ve essentially lost the ability to organize our library the way we want unless they unencrypt all of the aircraft.cfg and new livery.cfg files, 3rd party and first party.
You can use liveries, it’s just that 2020 liveries for the Microsoft planes that have been converted to 2024 format (those planes that have walkaround features, so not all planes have been converted yet) won’t work. But there’s lots of planes where 2020 liveries do still work. And there are people now creating liveries for 2024 planes.
The issue, for me, is that they changed the way the library sorts planes, so it’s extremely hit or miss that the organization of where to find the plane you want to fly is going to be where you expect it to be… To the point that planes are named wrong, planes end up inside other unrelated planes, liveries “create” whole new planes instead being attached to their variant, and other issues.
It’s gotten so bad i don’t even want to open 2024 anymore because I’ve totally lost control of how my library is organized and what planes are named. I get it, I’m sure many people think that’s weird, but, I’ve been curating how all the planes I purchase have been organized in FS for half my life (been modding FS for over 30 years now), and I took great pride in that. Being able to change planes to the name I want (their real name, not some developer named concoction), removing liveries I don’t need or want, and organizing my planes the way I want them in the library. But this change is that bad for me, it makes me really sad. And comments from the dev staff have said they’re not changing it. Making the organization developer centered instead of plane centered is the way that it’s going to be, and we’re going to be flying Carenado M20’s and Carenado V35b’s and UI_MANUFACTURER Caribous forever more now.
It irks me about my amp modelers, too, that I can’t choose a Fender Reverb. I have to choose some name that’s close but no cigar. Thankfully I can still control that, but, it’s a lot of work.
I get it, there’s copyright issues that must be dealt with. But, at least in the past I could fix it. Not anymore. And it hurts emotionally for me, so bad the sim has lost a lot of its fun for me. That used to be a big part of using the sim for me. Admiring my collection of planes. No more. Now it’s just a big mess to me.