FSDT always had a history of arrogantly tampering with assets which are not theirs. For example, back in the FSX days, they were removing any other SimObject, which wasn't their own.
I really don't know what you are trying to say with your completely useless "arrogantly" adjective, which only showed your lack of understanding of the sound reason why Simobjects around the airplane are removed.
The objects that are removed by GSX are only Simobjects of the "GROUND VEHICLE" category (only!) which are in the close proximity of the user airplane because, of course, when GSX is called, is to be expected that other ground vehicles (usually default ground vehicles) should be removed.
Now, it happened that in some cases, some developers created parts of their airports as Simobjects, assigning them to the Ground Vehicles category even if they are not really ground vehicles but, for example, pieces of building or other details. Now, I won't question the reasoning behind flagging something that is not a ground vehicle as such ( the SimpleObject and Viewer types are usually best suited for that ), there might have been reasons behind this but that's not really the point, the point is that GSX cannot possibly know if something that is flagged as a Ground Vehicle is not really a Ground Vehicle, so the only option we have is to keep a "white list" based on the object title, so developers that required their objects not to be removed, always contacted us supply with a naming pattern that we added to the white list, without any particular issues.
And now, they are tampering with the aircraft model files.
You are making it sound as if we just modified user airplanes automatically without a warning, which is not the case. It requires the user to go into the GSX Config page and explicitly enable every airplane individually.
Which is, for example, breaking the aircraft liveries, like with PMDG planes
You are making it sound as enabling passengers on PMDG airplanes will surely break a livery. It's not. Every time somebody reported a problem with a specific livery, I always asked for a download link to check it.
In some cases, due to how the livery was made, we had to update the installer to take into account some specific ways that livery, and of course all these changes has been added to the installer as soon they have been reported.
But in other cases, I couldn't replicate any problem and the livery that was supposed to not work, worked perfectly here. Some of the possible reasons for this are either the usage of the Addon Linker for some liveries, which seems to prevent access to files that needs to be copied from the original folder, but it might also be antivirus interferences, which are preventing the installer to *complete* the patching.
If you will not revert back your seated passengers before exporting a livery, the livery will not be working for anyone without the GSX.
Not really. GSX only adds two attachments to model. If an attachment is missing (because the user doesn't have GSX), it will simply not show up. However, I think it's a good practice to disable Seated Passengers before exporting a livery to be shared, but this is something you are supposed to know if you want to share a livery and it's not GSX-specific, there are other add-ons that modify the airplane models, so you would have to disabled those too, if you want to share a livery.
And all this without any warning whatsoever, left for the users to figure out.
No single airplane file is touched UNLESS the user goes in the Config page and do it himself first.
IF we did this "without warning" as you are trying to suggest, it would have saved us a lot of support of user wondering why they don't see seated passengers even if they have a supported airplane installed, because most of the time, they just don't know they must be manually enabled first. But, precisely because it's not right altering files in the sim without warning, they are NOT enabled automatically.
Extremely annoying, and I am surprised that not a single developer had chosen stronger way how to combat this.
Because all developers of the supported airplanes are just happy to have their airplane supported, and they are assuming their users DO understand that, when they enable Seated Passengers, the airplane model file is being altered, something that is of course clearly explained in the manual, and it's the reason why we can't support Marketplace airplanes, precisely because the file we need to modify is not accessible.
But that's besides the point.
The point is, Seated Passengers are clearly an highly wanted feature, and the only way to achieve this, in MSFS, is to modify the airplane model. Same as many 3rd party products like add-on instruments, tablets, etc. They all require the airplane model files (either the exterior or the interior) to be patched so no, GSX is not by any means the first or the only add-on that needs to modify the airplane model files.
Of course, this requirement would immediately go away if MSFS had an "Attach API" similar to Prepar3D. There, we could have added seated passengers to any airplane programmatically, without touching the airplane files.
If we had an Attach API in MSFS, we could:
- Add Seated Passengers to any airplane, on the fly, with no need to modify it's model.
- Support Marketplace airplanes as well.
- Open up the ability for users to edit all seat positions and share the airplane profile, so every airplane could be supported by users sharing files without having to do it ourselves, and having to support each airplane individually, having to update the installer to recognize new airplanes.
But unfortunately, the ability to Attach objects to other objects, which IS available in Prepar3D, it's just not possible in MSFS and, of course, we suggested it on the MS/Asobo Dev forum years ago, but it didn't get much traction so, we don't have any other choice than patching the airplane model, or just not having the feature.
Which again, is OPTIONAL.
