FILE FORMATS
Creating add-ons for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 requires a great number of files, even for small additions to the simulation. Most of the files will be created for you by the editors available in DevMode, or will have been created beforehand using external tools (like 3DS Max). However, some files are used time and again within an add-on package and can be edited (or even created) by hand as part of an add-on, so it's useful to know what these files are and how they should be structured. In this section, you can find basic information on some of these file formats.
The file formats covered here are:
Editing CFG And XML Files
When creating or editing any XML or CFG file, you must ensure that they are saved using a UTF-8 encoding (without BOM) if your package is destined to be used on the XBox. Any other encoding may cause issues when published. Also keep in mind that XML files with an <?xml> header should also specify "utf-8" for the encoding attribute, for example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>This does not encode the file itself, but does provide a hint to the text parser that the file is using this encoding. To encode the file correctly, you can use the options within the text editor that you use. For example, in Notepad++:
.CAB Files
Previously, in FSX, you could use CAB files to store files - primarily used for XML gauges. However, with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 this is not possible and has been deprecated. CAB files are not supported on Xbox and, as such, they cannot be used for any aircraft packages for that platform. If you have a legacy aircraft that you have updated for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and it still uses CAB files, then you will need to resolve this before these aircraft will be available for the Xbox. The simple solution is to simply extract the files from the CAB file into a folder with the same name as the CAB file (minus the extension).
.AIR Files
In previous versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 an aircraft was defined by a single aircraft configuration file aircraft.cfg and an optional *.air file containing some flight model parameters. Aircraft configuration files no longer work as they used to and all the parameters that were only modifiable by the *.air file can now be set in the specialized configuration files directly, like the engines.cfg and the flight_model.cfg. With this change in a previous version of the simulation, all *.air files became obsolete and new aircraft are configured using the configuration files only. Therefore you cannot import or use the legacy *.air format any longer. See the section on Aircraft Sim Objects for more information on the current file structure.