Custom missions file: Livery and parking position property

Armitage · February 26, 2026 at 7:44 PM

I had a very insightful conversation with AeRodri about the limits of the custom missions and the Missionsgerät. So here's my proposal for two new properties for the custom missions file:

aircraft_livery: This string will set the aircraft livery on loading the custom mission. This could allow for setting the correct airline livery, as well as providing missions scenarios with the matching livery (e.g. military jets and helicopters with the correct livery).
has_auto_parkposition: This boolean will ignore the aircraft starting position; instead on loading the custom mission the aircraft will be set to the closest parking position to the original aircraft position and will set the orientation accordingly.

These two properties would greatly enhance the possibilities of mission creators, as well as improving the options to import flight plans (e.g. from SimBrief), as SimBrief can also export the selected airline, but does not know about parking locations.

Oh, and the livery option would also be beneficial for the integrated challenges and scheduled flights.

Jet-Pack (IPACS) · February 26, 2026 at 9:24 PM Official Post

Good suggestions but unfortunately we can't yet easily set the livery programmatically from within the missions module and at the time where the mission is selected the airport and its parking positions aren't loaded yet, which is why the location needs to be set in the missions for now.

Armitage · February 27, 2026 at 6:21 AM

Than I would like to suggest to split the actual flight settings from the main.mcf into a separate file, e.g. flight.mcf. In this scenario all data from the main.mcf required for the flight definition would be removed from the main.mcf, and instead stored in the flight.mcf, while keeping the name of the properties.

This flight.mcf would contain the following properties:

aircraft: aircraft with livery
flight_setting: state and position of aircraft
fuel_load_setting (which on my PC is neither read on startup from the menu nor written on exit without moving the aircraft first)
time_utc: time and date
visibility
wind
clouds
navigation

See https://github.com/fboes/aerofly-…ainMcfExport.ts

This would open up a new way of working with external flight plans:

Adding the option to alter time, date and aircraft livery for the next flight (in addition to the already existing option to set the weather).
Skipping the hack which required external flights to be loaded via the challenges functionality...
...and instead promoting the usage of the integrated Aerofly flight planner for the final adjustments of the flight plan, e.g. parking position or setting departure and arrival procedures, which cannot be correctly set for external custom missions.
Also the virtual guides spawned by the challenges would be gone, improving immersion for missions which do not require the guides. (According to the Missionsgerät's statistics most of the exported flights add the hack to remove the guides.)

Actually the mission description and mission title of the custom missions is not needed for the users of SimBrief and all the other external flight planning tools, or the options to store multiple flight plans in a single file. It just needs to set up a draft for the next flight.

(If I were to become greedy, I would also like to propose to switch to XML instead of the IPACS config storage format for easier implementation into external software. See https://github.com/fboes/aerofly-…ssions_user.xml for an experiment how this would look like for the custom missions, in comparison with https://github.com/fboes/aerofly-…ssions_user.tmc.)

Armitage · March 7, 2026 at 11:28 AM

Regarding the potential flight.mcf and the property for heading:

Code

<[matrix3_float64][orientation][-0.449510470601295 -0.541223404385256 -0.710645877610949 0.868733701939534 -0.450067862031944 -0.206738179058507 -0.207947329711721 -0.710293000184874 0.672489228132418]>

Obviously my formula for converting headings in degree to a (simplified) orientation and vice versa is somewhat off. Does someone know the correct formula? (I suspect that conversion between orientation and heading is dependent on the current position.)

Jet-Pack (IPACS) · March 7, 2026 at 3:24 PM Official Post

The orientation is a 3x3 matrix for the aircraft attitude relative to the global coordinate system. The three vectors that make up this 3x3 matrix are X - forward, Y - left and Z - up of the local aircraft coordinate system, so for the heading you need the x-axis.

Code

vec3 direction = orientation * vec3( 1, 0, 0 )

You then need to compute the 3D vectors of the local East (x) and North (z) direction relative to the ellipsoid surface. The direction vector is then transformed from global to the local East/North orientated system using the inverse/transpose matrix.

Code

double GetAzimuthAt( const vec3d& position, const vec3d& direction )
{
  vec3d east = vec3d( -position.y, position.x, 0 );
  east.Normalize();
    
  vec3d up = position;
  up.z *= 1.0 / ( 1.0 - EccentricitySquared ); // WGS84
  up.Normalize();

  vec3d north = CrossProduct( up, east );
  north.Normalize();
  
  mat3d m = mat3d( east, north, up );
  m.Transpose();
  
  const vec3d local_direction = m * direction;

  // using atan2...
  return VectorToAngle( local_direction.x, local_direction.y );
}

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The azimuth value is the true heading in this case.

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