124: Break the 10-Day Shade Cycle Limit

SHADE for FSX is built on the 10-day cycle of FSX.   Therefore, up to 10 different SHADE presets can be saved via the program’s GUI utility (Shade_gui.exe).

Actually, it is possible to crack the 10-day limit and extend the cycle to cover all days in a month.    And theoretically, it is even possible to use a different preset every day throughout the year and beyond, despite of the impracticality of the idea.

The concept of this tweak is pretty simple — when SHADE for FSX is executed, it will load the presets from the settings.ini created by Shade-gui.exe.   Therefore, if one can:

  • Prepare three different settings.ini each containing 10 different presets (totalling 30 presets)
  • Load them one after the other in every 10 days

Then, each day in a month can associate with a unique preset stored on these three settings.ini.

The tricky part is how to fully automate the swapping process of these three ini files according to a predefined condition without human intervention.

Here’s what I did:

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