[agracier]

I think I've posted about this before.How do I get the aircraft selection in the drop-down menu to show them in alphabetical order?
I tried this in air.ini and planes.properties to no avail.
Why are they jumbled up?What's the process?
Thanks.

In the original game, the aircraft list was put together in two groups - Allied and Axis aircraft. The thing is though, that often an airplane produced in an Allied country was sold to and used in what later became Axis countries and so it all depended on your point of view in which part of the listing they belonged.

And also, some planes were placed in an alphabetical order, while leaving out part of their name in the pull-down menu - e.g. the [Fiat] Cr-42 or the [P-36] Hawk 75a to name a few.

For beginners or those unfamiliar with aircraft names this can all be very confusing, and it is somewhat arbitrary.

If you wish your pull-down menu to show aircraft in alphabetical order, all you need do is re-order your air.ini file to a strict alphabetical order, repositioning line by line in the order you wish the aircraft to appear.

Be careful about renaming aircraft though. This is not done in the air.ini, but in the second part of the line of the plane.ru.properties file. But if you change this, then you will have to rename the corresponding skins folders as well, otherwise the game will not find the skins for that plane and only be able to use the default skin. And moreover, skin folders will not accept carriage returns in the name, so while these appear in the plane.ru file, carriage returns must be transformed into underscores _ in the skin folders.

I've changed some names of the aircraft in my game to reflect a more obvious usage, my Cr-42 appears as a Fiat Cr-42 etc ... but take care when doing so.

Always always always make backup copies of files BEFORE you change them around.

Otherwise, welcome to a simple but gratifying first step into modding your game.