Hi @runshotgun,
I must admit that with all the issues we’ve had to deal with since launch this one has gone a bit out of the radar. However I have to say: it might have been more efficient to ping us here during the past six months rather than publishing yesterday’s “kind of agressive” official statement with a link to this thread. Anyway…
- Regarding SimFX: I don’t really see how the flag you are suggesting for overriding VFXs would work - what if multiple add-ons try to override the same VFX? I’ll check with one of my colleagues regarding the loading order - maybe we can ensure that the base VFXs are loaded first and that any override takes priority (which still leaves us with the issue of multiple packages overriding the same VFX). If that’s simple we might be able to slip that in for SU3 but there’s no guarantee here. Also, I am not sure if SimFX added new effects by overriding FX.xml but if that was the case, the described solution would obviously not work (for those aircraft that use CompiledBehaviors - which I’d like to remind is an optional feature).
- Regarding Flow: there’s already an undocumented (more on that below) way to override files in the html_UI folder - this is a declarative mechanism which will allow us to warn players in MyLibrary that add-ons are modifying core files which may create issues. The reason this is not properly documented yet is that it essentially allows to reproduce the issues we had on 2020 - albeit with a way to warn the user which hasn’t been implemented yet (our UI team is focused on other priorities). We may also have to indicate that we cannot guarantee backwards compatibility for those add-ons that are modifying core files, but this needs to be discussed in more detail with Microsoft.
Again - apologies for the delay in getting back to you - but I still wonder why you did not ping us here at least once prior to publishing your PR…
Best regards,
Eric / Asobo