Selecting an aircraft in MSFS is getting a big unmanageable; there would be more than 300 aircraft showing if I enabled all my stock planes, flight model mods that create a new plane, addons, and FSX port-overs. MSFS organizes them by airplane manufacturer for easier browsing, but it doesn't really work, and it's mostly the fault of addon developers.
The manufacturer field that governs the order that aircraft show up in the Aircraft Selection menu in world view or the Change Aircraft menu in your hangar is given by the ui_manufacturer parameter in the aircraft.cfg file. This is supposed to be the maker of the aircraft so that your Cessnas are together, your Boeings are together, and so forth. But many devs persist in putting their own brand in this field.
The purpose of this parameter in the SDK is clear, and some devs even copy the hint provided in the SDK into their cfg files without taking the hint, thus you might see a line like:
Hey, addon publishers: You are not airplane manufacturers. Get over yourselves. You have the ui_createdby field in the aircraft.cfg to identify yourself in the file. Users do not want to have to remember the publisher of each addon and have to scroll to FlyingIron to find our Lockheed P-38, SimSkunkWorks to find our Lockheed F-104, Aeroplane Heaven to find our Lockheed 10A, etc. Also, some devs actually understand what the ui_manufacturer field is for and correctly put "Lockheed" there, so even if we could recall what publisher produced each addon, some will appear under the aircraft manufacturer and others under the publisher, leading to chaotic organization of our ever-growing aircraft menus.ui_manufacturer = "Just Flight" ; e.g. Boeing, Cessna
To make matters worse, some flight model modders and repainters substitute their own names for ui_manufacturer, and these may either supersede or add new aircraft to the list in a new location, increasing the chaos. I think I ended up having my Cessna 208Bs in 3 or 4 different locations what with the analog mod, no-pod mod, etc., and none of them was under C for Cessna.
Until devs learn what a manufacturer is, I have been working on cleaning up my aircraft menu organization, and here are some tips I have learned.
For any planes in your Community folder, it's mostly just a matter of editing the aircraft.cfg files and changing ui_manufacturer for each skin of the aircraft to the real manufacturer. However, if you have a lot of repaints downloaded, you've probably noticed that some of those jump in front of the plane's stock skins and become the thumbnail that you see in the aircraft selector; the sim also adopts the manufacturer and type names from these skins. In these cases, you have to identify the repaint that has jumped in front, and change ui_manufacturer in its aircraft.cfg. It is not necessary to correct the aircraft.cfg in every repaint that you install. The sim takes its cue from the first one that it loads, and the main aircraft and all repaints will be under that manufacturer. I have not figured out how the sim decides what priority to load the aircraft and repaints in. I thought it might be alphabetical by the folder name in Community, or according to the ui_type or ui_variation fields in aircraft.cfg, or some cascading combination of these, but so far, I'm still using trial and error. These changes to ui_manufacturer don't appear to have any bad consequences for the sim being able to locate and use your addons.
Of course, updates to your planes, mods, and skins are likely to restore the wrong manufacturer name and screw all this up, so you can look forward to repeatedly editing aircraft.cfgs as a fun spare time activity.
Planes in the Official/OneStore folder are harder. The stock Asobo/MS aircraft have editable aircraft.cfgs now, but editing them for this purpose is mostly unnecessary, because they know enough to put the proper manufacturer in the ui_manufacturer field. The only changes I have made to the stock planes is to change Textron back to Cessna and Beechcraft, since I don't think of Textron as the manufacturer of these types and often forget to look for them there. Third-party aircraft purchased through the marketplace and installed in the Official/OneStore folder, however, still have encrypted aircraft.cfgs and it does not appear that any skins for these aircraft added to the Community folder will override them. Personally, I buy addons from retailers other than the marketplace wherever possible, so there are only a few planes that are still creating a problem for me, but I'm still looking for a solution and will follow up here if I find one.
August
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