Update on my upcoming Livery Manager
After other projects were done I finally can push forward to the release of my Livery Manager. So it's still WIP, but I just want to show some progress I made since the announcement.
Note that all of what follows is not finished, so features, layouts and designs will still be adjusted. And again it's not supposed to be the most complex tool, but a very easy to handle tool with a "What you see it what you get approach" so you can easily move liveries in and out of your AMS2 without modyfing XML files and copying files manually all the time.
Also the tool will save all of it's own data into json files, so other tools could import or export all your data.
Class Selection
I created a proper class selection that gives you a good overview of each class. You can set favorites that are listed on top of the list, and for each class you instantly see the amount of cars, the available livery slots of those cars and how many liveries for that class you have imported. Note that I haven't imported all classes into the tool yet, but I already wrote scripts that completely automate that for me, so the first public release will support all classes and cars in AMS2
Livery Selection
The Livery Selection became a bit adjusted to not waste as much space. Stock liveries are now darkered out, so you can easier see what custom liveries you use. But most importantly it got very easy to use by adding drag and drop. You just pull liveries from the buttom into the livery slots on top, that's all you have to do. Mix and match all custom liveries into the slots you want (you can still work through that via clicking)
GT3G2 also got a special implementation for yellow headlights, so you can easily add or remove them for any GT3G2 livery (excluding the R8 which doesn't have yellow light files) and the tool will export the correct data for that for the livery.
AI Drivers
No matter how I twisted it, the tool didn't make much sense when ignoring how to deal with AI for liveries. So besides liveries the tool also imports your AI files and saves all drivers standalone. On the left side you can see all your available drivers (imported from AMS2 or files or created) that indicate who already is assigned to a selected livery, you can also filter the drivers to see all, your class and which AI isn't assigned to any livery yet, and of course you have a fast search where you can type in names to find AIs faster.
On the right side you see your current selection of liveries for the class, so you can easily drag the Assign knob into a livery and it will assign that driver with all of it values to a livery. (You will be able to edit the driver data including all the custom skill values for the release, the UI fields are not build for that yet)
AI Grid
The grid determines which liveries and drivers will be exported to your AMS2. It is as easy at it can be. Just drag and drop your selected liveries from the slots on the left in and out of the grid on the right. You have quick buttons to easily clear the grid, select all custom liveries or throw in all available liveries.
Custom Livery File Tags
Who looked into my GT3s skins might have found some trags tags in the livery overwrites. The tool will export the new tags LM_LIVERYNAME, LM_AUTHORIMAGE, LM_AUTHOR and LM_VERSION and read them when importing liveries. This is data for the tool that helps you manage the liveries easier by seeing authorIcons and be able to update liveries properly if they come with a new version number. If imported liveries don't have these fields set you can set them manually (before an important of a whole package and for each installed livery). But if a livery has these tags set, they can't be replaced in the tool to secure proper credit of the creator.
What's next?
There's still a lot of work to do. I want to add the custom BOP that is saved per livery, so you can easily manage that in the tool too. There will be export options, so you can easily select if you want to export BOP oder AI driver skills and if you want to install directly into AMS2 or to your save folder first (so you can check what it did and manually copy that). A bit of busywork to get all classes in. And tons of tons of testing to make sure everything works as intended.
I hope September will finally be the month you can all get your hands on the first public release. The most complex parts are already fully functioning and working great, so it's down to getting more detailled things and polish on it in the upcoming weeks.