Well I dunno. Like I said. It’s using the fallback method because that’s what was happening if you leave a blank customisation field. That’s why I reworked on all my livery aircraft.cfg to leverage that method.
I don’t think I’ve seen any patch notes for SU5 or later saying that this method has been changed. So I’m under the assumption that the fallback method is still in place and I don’t see any reason to test it. Especially with the reports of people not being able to reset their callsign flight numbers or tail numbers after entering them with the customisation screen. That’s why I never use the customisation screen at all because I don’t want the customisation screen from overriding the stuff I set in the aircraft.cfg. (for example, customisation screen always shows callsign in all capital letters and you can’t enter space. Which makes callsign sometimes being called the wrong way like putting THAI will have the ATC call you Tango Hotel Alpha Charlie. If I use the aircraft.cfg I can set it to “Thai” and the ATC will call you “Thai”. That’s why I never use the customisation screen anymore.
So of they change this quietly without any patch notes explaining to us on how it actually works now. Then I wouldn’t know anything about it. That’s why I said the stuff about the fallback method because it’s still working the same way now for me.
Maybe a usefull tip here… .DDS textures can be changed, if they are separate .DDS files. If you have some disk space available, install Visual Studio Community 2019. The application will be linked to .DDS files, you can open the texture bitmap and change things. Keep in mind a DDS texture has mip-levels. You’ll have to change every mip-level of the livery texture, else the tail number will still be shown from a distance.
No, it’s not. Which you would know if only you had tried it. Instead, you speak as if you’re a subject matter expert when, by your own admission, you don’t know a thing about it. I’d recommend you not do that in the future.
Which is proper for a sim who’s tagline is “As Real As It Gets!”, because in real life, registration numbers are always all caps, and spaces are not allowed. And THAI should be addressed as Tango Hotel Alpha India.
Okay, so I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt thinking, maybe you’re right. Maybe the registration number customisation has now changed since SU5 and it’s now doing the exact thing that you said it would. So I actually try it this time Post-SU5 and do some testing with the hope that you’re right and I’m wrong.
In summary what I found, is that it’s still behaving exactly the same way as I said. Fallback method between Customisation Screen in the UI takes precedence, then fallback to Livery Aircraft.cfg, then fallback to Aircraft’s Aircraft.cfg.
Here’s the detailed steps in my testing method.
Aircraft Use: Default Asobo A320.
Default Asobo A320 has this line in the Aircraft.cfg
atc_id = "ASX320" ; tail number
I use 2 Liveries:
Garuda Indonesia (GIA) Livery with this line in the Aircraft.cfg
atc_id = "PK-GIA" ; tail number
Merpati Nusantara (MNA) Livery with this line in the Aircraft.cfg
atc_id = "" ; tail number
Testing 1: I use the GIA livery AND add PK-XXX into the Tail Registration number. sorry for the bleached screenshot, I took this with HDR.
At this point, note that the PK-GIA registration number from the livery’s Aircraft.cfg is being overridden by the one entered in the Customisation screen.
Testing 2:
Now I deleted all the fields in the Customisation screen. This means I make everything blank.
Notice how once I put a blank field in the customisation screen, the aircraft is automatically using the PK-GIA registration that came from the livery’s aircraft.cfg file.
Testing 3:
This time, I’m using the MNA livery which already has a blank registration number in the livery’s aircraft.cfg And I also keep the customisation screen blank as well.
Notice now that with a blank customisation screen, and also a blank tail number on the livery aircraft.cfg the sim still uses the ASX320 registration number that is actually coming from the Default Asobo A320 registration number.
Based on these comprehensive tests. My conclusion is still the same as I said in previous posts. The registration number priority is still behaving the same way as it always have since launch, and even today.
Anything you entered in Customisation screen will take precedence. When you delete and clear the customisation fields, the sim will fallback to look for the missing gaps from the livery’s aircraft.cfg. If the livery’s aircraft.cfg still have missing fields, it will fallback again to the aircraft’s aircraft.cfg file to fill in the gaps.
This is the reason why I never use the customisation screen at all, I’m leveraging this fallback system so that I can have all my tail number, callsign, or flight number customisation on the livery level instead of having to constantly changing the fields in the customisation screen everytime I change livery.
And to come back to the initial purpose of this topic. If you want to remove the tail number registration, you have to do it on the livery level by making it with a blank character (not a space) like so. And you can end up with an invisible tail number which will help for those with hardpainted tail number directly to the livery:
Coming back to your post of simply “deleting” the customisation field. It’s still only half of the solution, as you probably already have the same livery and aircraft that’s already built around these fallback method, to make sure that a blank customisation field would result in a blank tail number as shown above. But as shown in the testing of the default aircraft above and a commonly available free livery. This isn’t always the case. So it’s still come back to how detailed the work of these livery creators have done. And how much work that you have to do yourself to fix them.
Well, I do not know what to tell you. Right now, as I type these words, I have a flight paused in the background. As I was setting it up the flight, I couldn’t remember what, if anything, I had put into the tail number field, so I used my “delete the tail number field” to make sure.
Sure enough, the only tail number on my bird is the one the livery maker painted on the livery.
Yeah, then as I said above, the livery that you just happen to be using is already set to behave this way by the livery maker. But that doesn’t mean all of the liveries by all the different livery maker have designed their livery to work the same way.
Some livery makers don’t know about this blank character method, so they end up using a “dash” symbol instead, or worse a space that would freeze the sim. For these liveries, even making the customisation screen blank would make the tail registration to be shown as a dash. Because of the fallback method that I explained above.
So while everything I said is overcomplicating things. It is a way to standardise all liveries in my collection so that they all behave the exact same way, without the inconsistencies that multiple livery creators supplied their liveries with. Sometimes they put the wrong callsign than the official ICAO one, so I had to correct it. And when it comes to callsign as I said above, I have to set the correct callsign in the livery aircraft.cfg because if you set a callsign (not registration number), the sim can’t handle Space for multiple spaced callsign like “New Zealand” because it will show as NEWZEALAND in the sim. And because of the all caps from the customisation screen, they call you En E DoubleYou Zealand. So by making the callsign to be on the livery level with the mix of caps and lowercase letter with space “New Zealand”, the ATC can call you the correct way.
I tried this method today. And it doesn’t seem to work, at least on the FBW A32NX. All my panels are just disabled, or even when I put the entire exact panel.cfg file without any modification, it’s still causing panel issues.
It looks like I still need to use the invisible character on the atc_id field and not use any panel.cfg file on the livery level.
You cannot move the default Registration number decals. They are baked into the model.
It’s possible you could monkey with the GLTF files, but I don’t know how to do that.
The easiest way is to use the panel.cfg method outlined above to turn off the registration decals (in the past, sometimes a panel.xml is required when you do this, but there is a fix for this, too), and paint the registration into the texture.
But won’t this remove the registration for the entire aircraft? Meaning regardless of which livery you use, if they don’t have a painted tail number, you can’t use the decal layer at all, making them not having any tail number for some liveries that are designed to have dynamic registration number.
I’m not talking about moving the hard baked tail number on the texture. I’m talking about moving the position where MSFS builds the tail number that you input in the aircraft customization tab. The default black text one
Edit: I think I understand what you are saying now. I think you are telling me the default tail number is edited through the model files, and as such it is not so much a texture problem but rather a modelling problem that needs to be fixed in order to correct the positioning of the tail number.
Due to this, it is much easier to make the default tail number disappear, and color your own custom tail number onto the textures instead?
I don’t think that solution helps. I actually liked the idea of the customisable tail number. It lets everyone to enter any number that they want and it should appear.
What we need is actually a switch that can be placed in the livery aircraft.cfg or customisation screen. A checkbox that we can determine whether we want the tail number to be visible or not.
The aircraft.cfg actually already have this field called atc_id_enable=1/0 but selecting 0 in here doesn’t really do anything. So if this setting can be used to manage whether the tail number is visible or not. That would solve the problem.
There is a field in the aircraft.cfg file that used to work in FS up through FSX. For some reason, Asobo chose to not honor it. Major pain in the butt that they don’t honor it, and it’s caused lots of problems for livery creators. For some reason, they think we all have the tools for modeling aircraft and a deep understanding (while having ZERO documentation) on all the details of modeling aircraft and how to attach textures, etc… I mean, a MAJOR misunderstanding on their part and a lack of studying the community they were developing for.
Yes, it’s easier to make the default tail number disappear, and paint your own.
The next level is to develop an understanding of how to apply textures and decals to aircraft in 3D. But this is very complicated and requires a good knowledge of tools available and how to use them. And there’s no easy to use tool at a reasonable cost that does it all, so you have to fudge around things. Blender is getting better at it, but, there’s quite a learning curve, and it still needs some functionality.
Once you get the hang of decals, I imagine the next level is learning how to create a Registration number decal and apply it. The problem there is, you’re limited to available fonts, so, creating an accurate registration isn’t always easy, and you’d have to ship the font with your livery to allow people to make their own registrations. So, again, if getting the font correct is important to the livery, it’s easier to paint it on.
But, to me, the liveries I choose to paint, they’re real, so it makes no sense to me for people to change the registration, because the registration it’s delivered with is the registration for that livery. I create mostly liveries of planes I’ve flown, will fly, or would like to fly. So I want the registration to be that registration so I can get used to saying it. So changing the registration, to me, would be like, hopping in N244ND and then telling the tower my registration is something different. But I understand some people disagree.
Exactly.
Community: Why are some of the liveries mirrored?
Creators: Because the UV set by Asobo is mirrored.
Community: Can’t you fix it/work around it?
Creators: Requires modeling skills, not texture skills.
Asobo: Why are you all hollering about mirrored textures? Just do what we do, and use the model. Problem solved.
Smh. I’ve only been able to make non-mirrored liveries with blender, and it really is a pain if you even want to add one itty bitty detail (that you don’t want mirrored) to a mirrored part. Had to go through a 50 minute tutorial on youtube (a really start-from-scratch, layman’s tutorial) to learn it.
I mean, REALLY??? They expect us freeware developers to pay $1700/yr for a 3DSMax license so we can paint a few liveries??? Really?? Completely out of touch with the community.
If you’re going to expect us to develop for your product, how about you provide us some tools so we can do it? I’ve been developing freeware for FS since 1998. At least they got us a free GMax tool to use for FSX. It wasn’t awesome, but, it worked.
Their choices of file formats unsupported by most of the general development community, and no tools or documentation to help support the community to develop tools for creating, major, major failing on their marketing and production departments. They could have some amazing products available for their software if they had put a proper amount of effort into creating tools for the community.
Yeah. I mean, at least Blender is free. But the ONLY official import/export SDK info for models is for 3DSMax. For blender it’s a hunt of googling and checking your importer is the latest version and you have all plug-ins blah blah blah.
But I understand some people disagree.