Addon Organizer support for native Autogen

[edpatino]

Hi Oliver:

As you know, with P3Dv4.4 you'll be able to have native support for merging autogen definitions from different developers. As I undertand it implies the creation of a xml file telling P3D the location of the different definitions. I'm pretty sure you know already about this.

Do you have any plans in mind to include or develop support for this with the Addon Organizer or a similar tool?.

Cheers, Ed

 

[Lorby_SI]

Hello Ed,

P4AO can already create any type of content assignment that is described in the spec, including the category "Autogen". You can create the add-on.xml file for this (and any other type of content) on the "Other addons" tab.

What the spec doesn't say is what P3D is expecting to find there… This option has existed from the start, so I suppose that the only change that 4.4 brings is that you can have a definition file in that place too, not only .agn files.

Best regards 

[edpatino]

On 1/13/2019 at 4:46 PM, Lorby_SI said:

Hello Ed,

P4AO can already create any type of content assignment that is described in the spec, including the category "Autogen". You can create the add-on.xml file for this (and any other type of content) on the "Other addons" tab.

What the spec doesn't say is what P3D is expecting to find there… This option has existed from the start, so I suppose that the only change that 4.4 brings is that you can have a definition file in that place too, not only .agn files.

Best regards 

Hi Oliver:

Yes, in that case I think you can drop your specific autogen descriptions folder from any developer inside the main P3D folder, and "tell" P3D where to locate them by creating an addon-xml file (using your tool of course) pointing to that specific folder. Thus, if the native P3D support works as intended, it should merge these autogen definitions with the P3D default and voila!.

An example of this (as taken from FSDevelopers.com) follows:

<SimBase.Document Type="AddOnXml" version="4,0" id="add-on">

     <AddOn.Name>Autogen Descriptions from Ed</AddOn.Name>

     <AddOn.Description>Files Common to all Ed Products</AddOn.Description>

     <AddOn.Component>

         <Category>Autogen</Category>

         <Path>Ed Autogen\Autogen</Path>

     </AddOn.Component>

</SimBase.Document>

Where Ed Autogen is a folder inside the main P3D directory, containing an Autogen folder and inside the respective autogen descriptions.

So, what do you think?. I haven't tried this yet, since I'm still with P3Dv4.3, but planning to do my upgrade of Client and Content to v4.4 this week.

Cheers, Ed

[Lorby_SI]

23 minutes ago, edpatino said:

what do you think?

I wouldn't put them into the P3D folder. But otherwise, yes, that's what it should look like. But the Component category "Autogen" has always been there, and I really don't know what it did since P3D V3.x - and I never saw any scenery that made use of it.

Best regards

[edpatino]

2 hours ago, Lorby_SI said:

I wouldn't put them into the P3D folder

Yes, I agree. Probably in the add-on or third-party scenery directory created outside the main P3D directory. As I remember, the P3D autogen native support was only included in the changelog when LM released v4.4.

Cheers, Ed