P3D V4 AddonOrganizer 1.40 b02: Discovery Paths

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

Hello @ll,

a short note about the latest version of P4AO:

since Lockheed has fixed the addon autodiscovery mechanism, I have decided to add the mechanics to utilize a little known feature of the sim: the Discovery Paths. It is possible to instruct the simulator to not only search "\Documents\Prepar3D V4 Add-ons\" for add-on.xml files on every startup, but also any other path that you want to keep addons in. Those paths can be anywhere on your computer, and they work just like the one in "Documents". 

One use case would be for users to further organize their addons by grouping them in different discovery paths - which can then be activated or disabled in P4AO with a single mouse click.

Another one would be for developers who wish to keep all their products tidied away in one single "ecosystem" folder - you can add a discovery path with the CLI too. 

Apart from that, the 1.40 scenery search functionality has been updated to work more intuitively, and the usual couple of bugs or oddities have been fixed.

Best regards

[penta_a 429]

thanks a lot for your hard work and sharing.

YOU ARE DA MAN.

[Michael Moe 495]

Thanks for a great product all though i do sometimes find my self not to knowledge of the exact procedures.

I installed your new version.1.40.B01 on  top of the old one 1.39xx and it said it removed 4 scenerys to right locations. Dont have a clew what that means other than it was to the new afdon. XML method. 

Thanks again Michael Moe 

Edited April 12, 2019 by Michael Moe

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

15 minutes ago, Michael Moe said:

Dont have a clew what that means other than it was to the new afdon.

P3D 4.4 was misplacing the addon package references into the wrong add-on.cfg file (there is more than one). Since this has been fixed in 4.5, I have activated a cleanup procedure (which of course will also work in 4.4). P3D 4.5 itself unfortunately doesn't clean up anything.

Btw. b02 is the latest version.

IMHO the P3D addon system wasn't designed for end users. Instead it is more like an industry standard base level procedure for a system or application administrator. For example, most of the web- and application servers work the same way, using autodiscovery folders and XML files to reference their content or libraries. 

Best regards

Edited April 12, 2019 by Lorby_SI