Thanks. Found another post which agrees with you and provided some more detail. “You can see the load order by looking at the Virtual File System in dev mode. Community loads after Official, and in alphabetical order, with the last package’s files winning (i.e. the file that’s loaded last is the one the sim will use).”
This would explain why my repaint with both colour and font type causes a lockup with the G1000 mod, as it partially replaced some of the G1000 mod I guess. I had the mod loading order wrong.
I have to do some testing to see what happens when I load in the right order. Does the G1000 somehow overwrite commands used to set the font type on the repaint?
No longer having a problem with the G1000 mod and the custom font. I think it was either down to Community folder order, or perhaps a missing panel.xml in the layouts.json file. Been working on this so long I can’t even see straight. Have updated guide to remove reference to the G1000 conflict.
You shouldn’t need the panel.xml I don’t think. I never have before. But maybe they are looking for it now with the new update? If it’s not called out in the mod, it should use whatever other panel.xml it finds, starting with the default, which, technically, it should load first, and not overwrite if it doesn’t find another.
But, just like with the manifest.json, it looks like one of the things they’re doing with each update is adding all the error checking that should have been there to start with. So there could be that. Of course, with only partial error checking, we’d be seeing lots of bugs,… oh, wait,… haha
Managed to work out how to create different coloured fonts for aircraft registrations with Blender thanks to Youtube. Then had the problem of the the MSFS default regsitration always appearing over the tetxure rego. While using a panel.cfg can get around this problem, you then run the risk of the contents getting out of sync with any updates Asobo might do. Also using a panel.cfg made my DA40 repoaint either compatible with the default DA40 NG or the mod DA40 NGX, but not both, since both use different panel commands. But with a bit of lateral thinking I managed to solve the default rego bleed through without using a panel.cfg or panel folder, while making ATC communicaiton use the aircraft rego more realistically for a GA aircraft. You can find my DA40 repaints on Flightsim.to if you want to see how this was done. Just search for “DA40 NG Repaints” (minus the quotes).
So, I tested my repaints with the latest rev, and you are correct that the panel.xml file is now required to use the panel.cfg trick. I don’t use blender yet, so anything using that won’t work for a lot of people unless they learn blender. Painting on a reg isn’t enough if you want to use ATC… The reg decal has to be defeated. Then again, hopefully they’ll just fix the stupid code and make it work like FS has forever and allow the reg decal to be turned off in the aircraft.cfg. I’ll check out your repaints.
This is my 1st repaint for MSFS, my last was for FS9. Learning Blender was a bit of a learning curve, I might do a tutorial just for rego placement.
This is not correct any more.
And it can handle local abbreviations or full registrations. The aircraft repainter can decide on the abbreviation used. Or anyone who downloads the repaint can easily choose either full or abbreviated regos by changing 1 line in the aicraft.cfg file.
VH-BLP abbreviated as BLH as is the practice in Australia.
The only limitation of this process is that whatever you choose (ie full or abbreviated), ATC communications will only ever use the one you nominated. Asobo announced they were going to deliver some location based ATC usage at some time in the future. Until then this method will work.
What I meant was, if you’re going to paint the registration, you need to hide the decal registration for ATC to work, which is what the panel.cfg trick does. I have not yet downloaded your repaints to see how you’re doing that without the panel.cfg. Is atc_id_enable=0 in the aircraft.cfg working now to hide the decal on the outside of the plane? It worked in all previous versions of FS (at least '95-FSX).
Being able to use the atc_id=xxx in the Aircraft.cfg was the point the whole time of using a combination of panel.cfg and painted ID, except that painted ID fixed the id on the outside of the plane (and gets overwritten by what the user uses as their ID as far as ATC is concerned. For instance, if the plane showd C-GCEC on the outside, but I changed it to N38494 on the World Flight menus, ATC would use N38494, and that’s what you’d see on the dashboard… obviously, but I wanted to be clear.). So, if the decal reg was close to the actual look of the real plane, I kept it (but still used the panel.cfg trick to change its color since atc_id_color didn’t work in the past… Does it now?) You could put whatever you wanted in atc_id=xxx all along. For instance, for my Rosie the Rocketer Savage Cub, the default Reg is K-55, worked just fine…
As far as atc_id_font… i don’t know what available fonts are or what the convention is for calling them. I saw some stuff in the CSS for the Registration, but I couldn’t get it to work. Mostly I just wanted to see what italic would do (except it would be backwards slant on the right side, but, that would have been ok with me).
I’m trying to do this for a 3rd party livery which doesn’t have a html_ui folder, is the process different? Or do I have to change it on the base aircraft? Thanks
Thanks yeah I was about to try copying them from the default CJ4 file structure, but I can’t find the default CJ4 now lol, neither of the Cessna jets seem to be present where all the other planes are.
Update: For some reason when I selected the livery with incomplete folder structure game crashed and both my CJ4 and Longitude folders were deleted.
Ah I missed a step, that’s why it was so confusing lol. With the size and date, is it size or size on disk, and date modified or created? Thanks
Update: After all that I started from scratch and it still didn’t work. I was trying to get it to work the Working Title CJ4 rather than a default aircraft though. I copied their panel folder for that part.
I don’t think these values are important. This little utility will automatically updates the layout.json file for you. You just have to drag and drop the layout.json file onto the .exe of the program to update it with any changes you have made to the folder names or included files. Beats updating the layout.json file manually and is a must have tool for a repainter.
By the way, turns out the font callout is the name in the font file of the font, not the filename of the font that you want to use. This little tidbit came from a comment from an Asobo developer in the SDK Development forum.
Important question: For whatever font I may choose, does the end-user must also have that font on his/her system or is the font embedded? I’m assuming it’s the former, in which case one should package the used font with the livery, correct? Unless it happens to be a font bundled in with Windows by default (e.g., Calibri)
Wow! Thanks so much for your guide here, I got it working! I skipped the step about layout.json because there’s a layout generator out there that’ll do it for you.
Now I just need to find a nice font to use. The color is maddening, though, I can’t get it to match my livery color for the life of me. Thought it was enough to match the hexadecimal color in Photoshop where I created the livery, but nope. Must be the lighting in-game somehow affecting the livery and registration differently.
Unfortunately the colour of the tail number often doesn’t match the colour you have used in the panel.cfg. If I want a specific tail number font colour/font, I put it directly in the textures but this then restricts the tail number choices to 1.
Yeah, I’m learning that the best way to match color but retain custom registration is through sheer trial and error.
Although I could make it a little less painful by utilizing Wingdings or Dingbats and use a series of solid blocks each with its own color search to narrow it down.
Thanks again! Your solution for custom fonts is a hit in various discord channels!
