posted 10-10- 11:00 PM               

I Was just thinking about the new countrys and how cool its going to be to fly for Canada after all this work is done BUT. We do have problems and everytime we add a country they get worse.

So here it is, And i'm sure i'm not the only one worried about this.

We have tons of planes that can easily be converted over to Canada with a simple change of names, and skins, and maybe small armerment stuff.

THe problem is if we change the new seafire to a Canadian seafire, once the original is updated it has to be reconverted to Canadian. That doesn't sound to bad but Consider how much work it is once we have to convert 10 planes, Now consider how bad the problem is when we have to convert 10 planes for 5 countrys.

Its starting to sound like the opening canopy delima, It sounds like an easy task to make all the canopys open but theres a TON of aircraft out there now so it looks a little scarry when you look at the big picture.

So we need to come up with a solution right now that can be applied in SDOE2 or the next real patch.

We need a way of keeping the main aircraft the same so only that ONE aircraft needs to be updated, maintained and tweaked. While leaving the name, country, skin and maybe guns individual by country.

I don't think its possible right now but its something to think about.

What would you do?

posted 10-11- 03:30 AM               

As long as the skins were named and mapped the same, which they would be, all you have to do is swap them into the texture directory. There is a utility that does this for EAW, swapping skins in and out, so why not do the same. That way, the SM would not need to be copied and changed, and anyone releasing a model could release it with sub-directories of Texture already in place.

sample directory structure:

aircraft
-Spitfire
-textures
-canadian
-australian
-uk

and so on. The utility would need to read the sub-directories and give you the option to select a directory and swap the contents with the textures file. A ppf file would also need to be swapped into the spit directory. Missions would work whatever versions you had, since the basic SM is unchanged.

posted 10-11- 06:18 AM               

I see what you mean WTG but I'm talking something thats seemless, Behind the scenes, somthing you don't have to babysit.

posted 10-11- 07:15 AM               

Make a utility that reads the pilot profile and gets a nationality from that. Then, perform an automatic swap as above whenever that value is changed?

Ideally, the game would need to have a flag in the .ppf file that tells it where to find the textures. With their locations hard coded into the .SM, can't think of any other way of doing it.

Still, I would like a utility to do my skin swapping for me! It would make life a lot simpler. Run it in background, and you could swap skins with a point and click interface.

posted 10-11- 11:51 AM            

This is definitely a growing problem. With nations now online standard, we need to consider standard planes for the multiple countries - how many spit variants can Tailslide manage fm updates for ?

The same applies for the b17, lanc and others (the dambuster lanc is different from the regular lanc). Keeping a consistent standard is pretty well impossible.

posted 10-11- 04:56 PM               

So how would you guys solve this if you had access to the code?

That ppf idea sounds good.

posted 10-13- 02:11 AM               

... can the texture references be changed so that the root is the directory the .sm file is in? Then to create the same plane for a new country you create a .sm in a new directory that is only a file reference to the original plane. The texture folder and loadout in the new directory would reflect the new country and any FM/DM changes would only have to be made on the original...