Vector Thrust Aircraft Config Tool prototype Thread - Vector Thrust

After playing around with aircraft configuration .ini files, specifically relating to hardpoints, I figured it would be fairly straightforward to create a tool that would manage some of the tedium for you. With the text files I found rearranging weapons and hardpoints and adding new ones from scratch was a pain and easy to make a mistake. The idea of the tool is to load an aircraft .ini file and allow you to change, add, or remove weapons and hardpoints, as well as modify other data. Then in the end it would generate a new .ini file.

This was an attempt to see how easy it would be to come up with such a tool and to try and determine how useful it might be, and I'm hoping to get some feedback. Currently it doesn't generate a new .ini file but it will load most of the regular ones in (F-14, F-15, A-10, etc.). From there you can move things around or add new weapons. There are still bugs and it doesn't handle certain unique aircraft parts very well.

For now to load an .ini file just and paste the contents into the box at the top and then click the Execute button. Just reload the page and put in new .ini contents each time you want to load something new.

Hopefully most things are intuitive. Let me know if a tool like this would be useful or if in the end just modifying the .ini file manually is just as easy. I'm kind of flip flopping All feedback is welcome.

You can give it a try here:
Warpedproductions.echonetwork.net

Is it me or it processes commented lines as well?

A nice start anyway, I can see a good use of this. Maybe I can try making a simple VT .ini editor program someday.

It should skip comment lines (//), but there is always a chance that there is a bug.

.ini edits become easier to handle as you learn the layout and field context (Trust me, configuring ten hardpoints for the F-16XL wasn't fun), but I can see potential ease-of-use in this.

My dream program for editing would be an application similar to this, but with a previewer that can load a .mesh and its child .meshes, e.g.: hardpoints and weapons.

Loadout changes would become much faster, being able to observe changes from a single window instead of making changes in one and verifying the changes in another.

Edited by: SpootKnight

One thing I had thought about was something not quite as good as what you mentioned (which I agree would be best), but would show relative to each other where the hardpoints and weapons were. You could at least see that everything was generally lined up and there were no huge mistakes, but there would still need to be minor tweaking to get everything exactly right.

but with a previewer that can load a .mesh and its child .meshes, e.g.: hardpoints and weapons.

That would be difficult since you have to create a program with OGRE engine to load & view those .meshes & .skeletons

Edited by: Nergal01

It would be difficult, but it would alleviate a whole lot of pain for everybody when it comes to creating load outs.

At the moment the only help I can give is provide a clean and updated aircraft template file.
I´ll add comments to each field, I think it will be useful for anyone that is interested in making some edits.

The only "easy" way if you have OGRE .mesh to .xml importer is by converting VT's .mesh model to .xml and import using 3D modeler that supports importing OGRE .xml plugin

timeSymmetry wrote: At the moment the only help I can give is provide a clean and updated aircraft template file.
I´ll add comments to each field, I think it will be useful for anyone that is interested in making some edits.

I don't think we've got a confirmed "This is what a modded plane file should look like," so it would be nice to get our paws on an example of that.

Sorry Boogie_Van, when you say that do you mean in terms of what this tool would produce or what the final version of .ini files will contain?

TS, I take it when you create the files you just use a text editor? Comments are always useful. In some cases I wasn't sure which extra fields would be good to add as I presume some things should be left untouched.

A long time ago, TimeS added the functionality to mod a plane and not affect the base game's ini files, I just don't think we ever got anything that showed us what it should look like or how to enable it. Unless you're referring to something other than my last comment.

No that was it. Thanks for clarifying.

Boogie_Van wrote: A long time ago, TimeS added the functionality to mod a plane and not affect the base game's ini files, I just don't think we ever got anything that showed us what it should look like or how to enable it. Unless you're referring to something other than my last comment.

Wasn't it for loadout only?
Moddb.com

IIRC, it pretty quickly went from that to being the whole file.

@Boogie_Van, Nah that is just for the loadout.

To completely change the specs add “_alt” after the name

Like this:
Su-37_alt.ini
This file is only ignored in challenge mode.