I decided to install quite a few liveries to bring some variety to the static aircraft, but some of them just wouldn’t display in the sim. I copied them into a single folder in the Community, made the required entries in the aircraft.cfg, added a manifest.json and generated a layout.json with MSFSLayoutGenerator.
The first half of them is displayed in the game just fine, but the other half isn’t. I’ve tried every possible option, but nothing seems to work.
I would usually take this into a different approach:
Instead of having one folder (Asobo_C172sp_AS1000_classic_liveries) inside the Airplanes folder and having all that model and panel, and texture folders inside it. I would take it out, and instead having it as a separate folders inside the Airplanes folder.
So Under Airplanes you could have:
N4378Q folder, inside it contains the Model.N4378Q and TEXTURE.N4378Q and one Aircraft.cfg
Then there’s another folder inside the Airplanes called N80991 and inside it has the MODEL.N80991 and TEXTURE.N80991 and one aircraft.cfg.
That way the sim can treat them as separate aircraft entries and able to load them a lot more reliable as ground aircrafts.
Also, I’m not sure why you would need Panel folders if you’re using this for the Ground Aircrafts. I never use any panel folders in all my liveries, both flyable aircraft and Ground/AI traffic liveries.
Structuring them in that way, is also easier to manage. Instead of having the need to go through hundreds of lines in your Aircraft.cfg file to find the one you want to manage, you can just open the folder of the aircraft you want, and open the aircraft.cfg and you should have no more than 1 FLTSIM entries.
You would still be using just one folder in the mod, as it’s all still contained within the lvrs-c172-tmp folder. Only that they’re separated under the Airplanes folder.
I have 110 Asobo A320 and 110 FlyByWire A32NX in my single livery folder, each of these liveries are contained within a separate folder inside the Airplanes, with the A320 used for both Flyable and Ground/AI Traffic liveries, while the FBW A32NX is only used for flyable. But there’s no texture duplicates, since the texture files are contained within the Asobo A320 texture folders, and the FBW A32NX is simply “Grabbing” the textures from the Asobo A320 folders.
@Neo4316 Thank you very much for your input! I’ve started to think myself about using separate folders in the Community, but installing them into separate folders inside the Airplanes is a good idea that didn’t occur to me. I’ll try that.
About the panels, I’m not sure why livery authors even include them. I don’t know why a panel folder may be needed for a livery to work. I don’t completely understand how it all works in FS2020 so I just copied everything.
I guess it depends on the aircraft. I know for my A320 and A32NX liveries, none of them have panels folder inside them.
I do know the reason why it might be useful to have the panel folder in there. It’s basically to make a custom tail number. The Panel.cfg file inside the panel folder manages the position, font, and colour of the tail number. If livery creators decide to hard-paint the tail number into the livery itself, they would have to disable the default tail number decal in the panel.cfg file. This would prevent the sim from rendering doube tail number. One from the default decal layer, and another coming from the underlying painted textures.
However, these came with a lot of drawbacks. It’s probably doesn’t impact the C172 that much, but if like me who flies the A32NX, an aircraft addons which is literally can be updated more than a few times every day. If these updates changes the way the base panel.cfg works in the aircraft level. The Livery level will override it, and effectively breaking the aircraft from working. It’s always best to keep the panel out of the livery, because we want the aircraft to “call” upon the panel inside the aircraft itself, and not the livery.
But like I said, I only have experience in handling A320 and A32NX liveries. I’m not sure about C172 liveries, so what I said above might not apply the same way in there.
This is how I structured my livery collection in my community folder. Note that I group my A320 together, and A330 as a separate entry but also together.
Inside the Asobo A320, it has a Model for the flyable aircraft, and Model.AI for the AI and Ground model. But a single texture file that both A320 and A32NX will point to. That way I don’t need to duplicate the same texture for two aircrafts.
I thought so too… But they’re useless. If it’s set to 1, it appears… If it’s set to 0, it still appears. The only way I can get the tail number to be invisible is if I open the Panel.cfg file and actually set it to display=none.
Or another way without messing around the panel cfg. is to use a blank invisible character (not a space) into the ATC_ID field. This will make the tail number disappear, but the drawback is, I would also have an invisible registration number on the wings, and it can’t integrate with Volanta because it’s now reading it as a blank reg number.
