Preflightly - Your MSFS add-on library (freeware)

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1

Hey,

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Been working on a free app for MSFS 2024 for a while and just put out the first beta. Some of you might remember me as headwind, I made a few addons back in the day but went quiet in 2023 when I became a dad. This is my comeback project.

The idea is simple : managing addons in MSFS is still painful, and once your library grows you never really know what you can actually fly with what you have. Preflightly tries to fix both.

What it does :

  • Central library outside Community/ : your addons live in a folder you choose, Preflightly links them into the sim with symlinks. Nothing is moved or copied, fully reversible.

  • Route Finder : pick a departure or let it suggest one, it shows real routes you can fly with the aircraft and airports you own. It takes the Official MSFS airports into account and prioritizes community payware over Asobo defaults when you have both (Fenix A320 over the stock A321neo, for example).

  • Quick Import : drop a zip or a folder, it figures out what it is (scenery, aircraft, livery, plugin) and files it in the right place.

  • Smart grouping : addons get auto-grouped by developer, aircraft family, region, etc. So your 40 PMDG liveries don’t drown the rest.

  • Conflict detection : warns you when two sceneries or two liveries fight over the same slot, before you launch the sim.

  • SimBrief integration : send a route straight to SimBrief in one click.

  • Autorun : launch your usual companion apps (SimBrief, Navigraph, GSX, vPilot, etc.) automatically when you start a flight.

  • Free, no account needed to use the app. Optional account only if you want to sync across machines later.

Still early, expect rough edges, but it’s usable day to day. Available at https://preflightly.app/

PS1: If you’re currently using MSFSAddonsLinker (or any other linker-based manager), please move all your addons back into Community/ before running the Preflightly setup. Preflightly needs a clean Community/ folder to import your existing library properly, otherwise you’ll end up with broken links or duplicates.

PS2 : some liveries, PMDG ones in particular, can end up in the “Others” tab instead of being attached to their aircraft. I’m aware of it and working on a fix, just waiting on a bit more feedback before pushing the change to make sure I cover the main cases.

Happy to answer questions or take feedback here :slight_smile:

2

Can you clarify? Move content into community, or have a clean community?

3

Hello BigCow74,

Move content in the Community like if you didn’t have an addon manager

4

Got it. I interpreted “clean community” to mean empty community.

5

This looks like a genuinely useful idea. The route finder part is the bit that caught my eye, because once you have a mix of payware airports, default airports and a pile of liveries, choosing something that actually uses what is installed becomes more annoying than it should be.

One question: how does it handle Marketplace content versus Community-folder content? I can imagine that being the tricky case, especially with aircraft/liveries where some things are visible to a manager and some are more locked down.

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Thank you Simcaptain91,

The route finder is honestly exactly the problem I was trying to solve : once you mix payware, default and Marketplace airports with a growing aircraft collection, picking a flight that actually uses what you own becomes more annoying than the flight itself.

There’s also a side benefit : since only the addons relevant to the flight are active, the sim stays lighter and you avoid a lot of the weird conflicts that happen when everything’s loaded at once.

On your question about Marketplace vs Community/ : Preflightly doesn’t touch Marketplace files, it just scans what the sim already has on disk to know what you own. That’s enough to match possible routes, detect conflicts, and try to attach liveries to the right aircraft, whether the content comes from Community/ or the Marketplace.

The tricky case is liveries. Some are properly declared and get picked up cleanly, others are packaged in a way that makes them harder to attach to the right aircraft and end up in the “Others” tab. PMDG ones especially. I’m going to try to push a small update tonight that lets you manually move an addon to the right category when the auto-detection misses, so at least nothing stays stuck in the wrong place while I work on better detection.