There are so many freeware and payware add-on’s, I think it’s asking a lot to expect Asobo to check them all individually. Their job is not to QA, (quality test for compatibility) third-party freeware addons. And as you say, if Asobo have made an error on their end that was not intended, they will put it right. The warning at the start of update 5 predicts that there could potentially be new conflicts, this suggests that they have made deliberate changes in the coding relating to something related to third-party add-ons. Take care. Charles
I think I explicitly said it wasn’t their job. But if they know, and they’re making a change, why not just tell people what it is so it’s not such a tail chase to work around it or find a solution?
This update also broke the payware aircraft. Without the third party ecosystem the sim will never grow. Asobo might not have to communicate with freeware developers, but they should be doing so with their commercial colleagues. Carenado, Iris, Black Box… these current payware folks are dead in the water today, by their own admission.
Not exactly–and I’m speaking from the experience of developing software that we both marketed to our own customers but allowed other vendors to license. Once a company releases a product for third parties (independent software developers) to develop on, the company takes on the responsibility for not breaking the ISVs’ products. Conversely, the ISVs have the responsibility to write their software in accordance with documented application programming interfaces, specifications and best practices. As long as ISVs “stay in their lane,” they should be able to expect that their product will always work, regardless of what changes get made to the thing they are depending on.
The problem we have right now is that the SDK is filled with TODO’s so developers are having to figure things out without sufficient guidance. One could argue that freeware developers are jumping the gun, and that they shouldn’t be trying to develop anything with the SDK in its current state. The argument might even be right, but the problem is, that horse has already left the barn. Liveries and custom scenery have been an important part of the simulator from day one, and I don’t think it is much of an assumption to think that Asobo recognizes this.
It isn’t unheard of for software vendors to find themselves in a situation where they have to introduce a necessary change that they know will break people. From a customer perspective–both the ISV’s themselves, as well as the ISV’s end-users–really the only acceptable approach is to communicate the fact that things are going to be broken early-on and work with the key ISVs to ensure that they are ready to simultaneously ship updated versions of their products when the new version of what they are depending on releases. That way customers just update and are not broken.
Now I certainly wouldn’t expect Asobo to be trying to contact Clink (author of the mega livery pack that most of us are using) at this point, but I would have expected Asobo to post something up on this forum about the fact that upcoming changes are going to break liveries along with an explanation of why the breaking change had to be made as well as what changes developers will need to make to make their code work again. I hope at the next Dev Chat, we can find out why Asobo felt that they had to introduce this breaking change as part of the patch cycle, whether they understood what kind of an impact it was going to have on customers, and whether they plan to do anything differently when introducing breaking changes like this in the future.
This is software development and customer service management 101. Stuff that I learned from my career at Microsoft (back when it was a different company). Many others on this forum have learned the same lessons at other successful companies. So to us, it is mind boggling when Asobo keeps making rookie mistakes–whether it is in shipping obvious, serious bugs, or not handling basic customer relations well. To their credit, they seem to be taking feedback and trying to use it to improve. But breaking liveries was a huge miss on their part and they need to hear about it. At Microsoft, we used to talk about “delighting our customers.” Introducing regressions that compromise customers’ enjoyment of the game is the opposite of that. It really isn’t excusable.
Geoff, you have some very good arguments here and a passion that has opened my mind to your way of thinking. Thank you for this. I can see you editing your text in real time and making changes to it
Cheers! All the best … Charles
I’ve got over one thousand liveries. I just tested this with the Cessna 152. My 152 folder has a modified aircraft.cfg file to include third-party skins as well as stand-alone skins in their own folder. The method above works fine for the modified aircraft.cfg file liveries, but it does not work for my stand-alone skins. They show up in the liveries list in-game, but when selected, the sim instantly crashes to desktop.
As much as I agree with you. They did point out in their patch notes that some mods in the community folder may break and they recommend to remove them until they are updated. Yes although it would be great for them to give some guidance on what they have changed, we have a great community and have worked out a way to remedy the problems and they will be fixed very shortly.
In the long term though, more problems like this will occur until they support livery creation officially and we will just have to deal with it for now like the majority of other game titles that have a large modding community.
What is required to fix the problems is not a big deal but getting every creator on the same page to update is. Our megapack though once patched will be a working set of liveries until the next issue arises, hopefully not a botched attempt by Asobo to fix it on their end.
While this may be a fix for a “Drag and drop” style livery, I haven’t gotten this to work for adding more than one livery per aircraft.cfg, which is apparently possible because I own the C182 and it’s liveries seem to be working. However, I can’t actually check the aircraft.cfg because it’s encrypted.
on their last Q&A session they were talking about licensing each livery correctly with each respective airline, i am now wondering if this was done intentionally in order to avoid copyright infringement
That would be very surprising since fixing the livery issue for v.1.10.7.0 seems to be a fairly easy thing to do according to some of the mod creators. But yes, at this point it’s still puzzling why Asobo chose to rework the livery system.
