I make quality of life improuvement to addon planes like modifications to cameras.cfg and soon adding checklists.
Issue is that I have so far been unable to make a working package that can simply be dragged and dropped into the community folder as for now I need to ask my users to replace the addons’ original files.
Can you please axplain me how to package my modified files into a addon installed to be simply dragged and dropped into the community folder like it is commonly done for this kind of modifications?
All my attempts so far have either been seemingly unrecognized by the sim or caused crashes.
you need to add a manifest.json file (which you can compy from anyone, just replace a few infos in it like your addon name) and you also need a layout.json file, it should be structured that way
{
"content": [
{
"path": "path to the files you modified",
"size": 16480710,
"date": 132508311918694420
},
the size and date can be left as is, in order to ‘replace’ an original file without actually modifying it, in the path you need to put the path like if you were in the aircraft folder. It will be better with an example:
imagine you want to replace the camera.cfg of the a320neo, in the path, put SimObjects/AirPlanes/Asobo_A320_NEO/camera.cfg
{
"path": "path to the files you modified",
"size": 16480710,
"date": 132508311918694420
},
you need to copy and paste this for every file you added, but remove the last ‘,’ , example
{
"content": [
{
"path": "CUSTOMIZE/A320NEO_COCKPIT_MAINPANEL_ALBD.PNG",
"size": 16480710,
"date": 132508311918694420
}, <--- there is a , here
{
"path": "CUSTOMIZE/readme.md",
"size": 418,
"date": 132508311918734420
} <--- notice how there is no ,
}
if you have any question, please reply and i’ll try my best to answer
In the meantime from posting that I realized that I was already doing it right. but for some reason it doesn’t work for the aircraft I was trying to modify.
I’ve made modifications for 4 aircraft now, these being Carenado’s PA44 and M20R and IndiaFoxtEcho’s Long EZ and MB-339.
All of the addons are packaged and work fine but my camera modifications for the two Carenao planes which don’t.
The most confusing part is that they only differ from the manifest and layout fof my working checklist addon for the same plane in superficial ways, I’ve highlighted in bold the differences between the two.
It is also to note that even if they don’t work the sim recognize them in the content manager.
(It’s normal that the config file’s name is capitalized, it’s the same in the plane’s original manifest and the path is correct)
In the case you want to take a closer look at the files from the addon’s in question, you can find them here
The M20R and PA44 camera modifications are not packaged, instead ask for the original files to be backed up and replaced.
I initially thought it was DRM protection but I’m having doubts since my checklists addon works great and directly alterting the plane’s files works without issues too.