I became really annoyed by the lack of any sorting function when viewing planes, and also the fact that naming conventions and photos are not standardized, so I figured out how to solve my problems and wanted to share. This is what I was able to get, for example.
People that have those planes know they would not normally show like that. For example, the 337 would be titled “Carenado” rather than Textron and would sort by “C” with Cirrus. Others would be titled like that and sorted badly as well, and I want all my Cessnas and Beechcrafts together.
The 2 aircraft descriptor rows displayed in these boxes are within the aircraft.cfg file:
“ui_manufacturer”
“ui_type”
The hanger will sort alphabetically by this ui_manufacturer field, then by ui_type, and if you’ve got an aircraft.cfg with multiple [FLTSIM.#] sections it only seems to care about the top one. You could even choose to assign numbers here to your Top 5 aircraft or something to just have them all together at the top. It’s a good idea to make a copy of your aircraft.cfg before working on this type of stuff.
So what if you’ve got a marketplace plane you want to change, and don’t have access to the planes aircraft.cfg? The good news is, the hanger will use the aircraft.cfg from whatever 3rd party livery the plane is using by default.
So here’s how to set a default livery. Within the livery’s folder, go into SimObjects > Airplanes, and rename whatever the folder is named here to start with a “-” so it will sort to the top of the list of other names. After doing this though you have to edit the layout.json file in the livery’s top-level folder to also update the folder name there. This can be easily done using the “Replace” feature of a CTRL+F search in a program like Notepad++
So essentially if you find the livery you prefer to use and make that alphabetically first, then you don’t ever really need to select a livery as step two unless you want to change?
And you only need to do it for ONE livery of each plane to have the initial sort order correct?
And it will only work if you do have at least 1 third party livery for the default planes I suppose - as you can’t touch the base game ones?
But then if you select a default encrypted livery, what happens to the sorting when you go back to the Aircraft page?
I guess a side-pain is you’ll have to redo that after any updates to said livery but that is a pretty rare occurrence. I might have to do this hahah
Correct. It will also show that livery on the plane selection view. The title might change though depending on how the livery maker filled out the ui info I mentioned, so you may have to fix.
Right, as long as you can name that folder to sort before everything else. I suspect some less credulous livery makers already know this trick, to try to jump ahead in line
I believe we can access the aircraft.cfg files for most (maybe all) default planes and liveries now. The 3rd party planes available in the official marketplace are encrypted though, so you’ll have to have at least one 3rd party livery to do this.
And yeah, auto-updates or adding new liveries might make you have to fix again.
I’m sure they do! I’ve quite a few planes where the first thumbnail is not of the standard kind of view / background (which I also dislike … OCD!)
…unless it’s an “accident” I’m sure they are tryna get their skin used (although I can’t see the benefit to them as only other players that have the same plane and skin will ever see it online and even that seems hit and miss)
