Question regarding AI organization in FS2004

[Jimmy RFR 406]

I've been working away in my spare time to create traffic files for the majority of the smaller Canadian airlines. So far I'm at 63 separate airlines, looks like I have about a dozen more to go or so.

 

A couple of questions though that have come up and for which I can't find an answer either in the TTools docs or on the forums.

 

1) I have a few airlines where I'm missing repaints for flights specified in the flightplans. I am substituting a different paint (usually older fleet livery) in those cases, but I have plans to create the missing liveries myself. Is it okay to have different AC#'s which specify the same repaint in the Aircrafts.txt? That way I can keep the structure of my files intact, and simply change which repaint a particular AC# refers to. However, I haven't seen any of the downloaded flightplans do it this way, so I thought I'd ask.

 

2) To make my workflow easy, to keep everything extremely tidy, and to be able to add / change / delete airlines at will, I've been creating an airplane folder for each aircraft & airline that I use. I have a work folder that simply contains AI planes with no textures or entries in the aircraft.cfg, and I simply copy it in, change the title, add the repaint textures, alter the aircraft.cfg and it's good to go. Of course, the result of doing it this way though is that I have now about 185 aircraft folders, instead of about 25. Are there any downsides to this method of organization that I should be aware of?

[N60JBravo 27]

1) You should have no problems with what you are doing.

 

2) The only downside I see is a) wasted disc space with duplicate aircraft folders, though not much as the textures are usually the biggest files and they would not be duplicated. 2) slightly longer load times as FS indexes the extra folders.

 

I doubt the extra load time will be much though, 185 folders isn't many by some standards. I currently have about 470 AI folders and still have to add some from time to time.

 

regards,

Joe

[Jimmy RFR 406]

Thanks for the response!  I didn't want to get farther into this project and discover I'd have to redo it!