Hi everyone

I was trying to be adventurous and edited the json file for the Henrik Nielsen's Global AI Ship addon, suggested by another Avsimer in another topic.

Now all the json files are showing the notepad format.

I think the sim is still working OK.

Is there an easy way to revert them to their original form....Google says there is an app window store.

All advise and help will be much appreciated. 

Many thanks

Qas 

A JSON file is a JavaScript Object Notation file. This is actually a plain text file. Any file format can be right clicked on and you can choose 'properties' from a drop down menu and select 'change' on the 'opens with' section. So if you chose 'Notepad' for this (or your computer assumed this was the default application you usually needed to open JSON files with and defaulted to this icon, then your icons for JSON files would be the Notepad icon, and this is what you are seeing. but what you are seeing is just a visual thumbnail which your computer is displaying, the JSON files themselves have not actually changed.

The thing you sometimes have to be careful with if doing this sort of thing, is that any changes the application makes on files which you actually opened, edited and then saved with, can (potentially) be a problem if the developer who created the application which ultimately uses the JSON file, made these files have a specific formatting which the main application which uses them (in this case MSFS) happens to need some specific formatting so it could be edited from within the sim (for example with the MSFS built-in scenery editor). Notepad is unlikely to do this to a JSON file if you didn't mess about too much, but if you want to make the JSON files open with Visual Studio, you can do this, although it doesn't really matter too much if you don't, as all you are seeing with those thumbnails, is you computer identifying a default application it would open that file with.

Thing to do with files such as this if you do want to edit them, is copy the file first, then add 'back up' to the original file's name, then edit the the copy to your heart's content (making sure it has the same name you started out with). If things go awry, simply bin off your edited file and take the 'back up' bit off the original file name and all will be back as it was.

Many thanks for the reply. I am happy to hear the sim will not be affected. As regards to future editing, I think I have learnt my lesson.lol.

51 minutes ago, rwy12 said:

Many thanks for the reply. I am happy to hear the sim will not be affected. As regards to future editing, I think I have learnt my lesson.lol.

As well as everything Chock says, you might want to consider getting hold of the freeware Notepad++ app. It's a more sophisticated text editor (although you can still happily ignore most of the fancy stuff) that tends to leave anything it touches in its original format. Some files can end up being saved with a different character set/format if saved with ordinary notepad, but that generally won't happen with Notepad++.

+1 on Notepad++. It's a superb editor. It's been my default text editor for years. It also has a great "compare" feature which is really useful.

Many thanks everyone.

Someone has mentioned there is a json editor available in the ms store.