posted 05-23- 07:24 AM               

Lil'bastard already made a historically correct skin for a Greek Hurricane MkI/II (flying under RAF insignia).

Due to the nations v3 release, Greece is in need of airplanes. In order to include the"greek hurricane" to the next plane pack, what exactly is that you need ?

posted 05-23- 08:24 AM               

Unless the Greeks had a really special variant of the Hurricane, I say please don't do this. If we include the RAF Hurricane, the French Hurricane, the Greek Hurricane, and also the Polish, RAAF and RCAF Hurricanes, we end up with 6 versions of the same aircraft. Each version eats about 1 extra meg on the PP download, and the only thing we get are different skins (downloadable separately anyway) and training missions for each country.

IMHO, it's not worth the extra 5 megs. I say we should also remove the French Hurricane (as they were standard RAF planes, period), and remove the French Lanc (the new loadout is cool, but the PP concentrates on WWII aircraft, and these were delivered in the 1950s).

This is not a criticism on the Nations project, I did my part and I'm very proud of the inclusion of France in SDOE. I think it's perfectly valid to add a country without specific planes. You can't have training missions because of the SDOE architecture, that's too bad, but you can still add historically accurate squadrons and create scramble missions and whole campaigns with them.

posted 05-23- 08:51 AM            

(this list is not exhaustive nor is it meant to be, its just to illustrate a point)

Russia - Pe2, La7, Yak3, I16...
Japan - Zeros, Val
Italy - Several "fakes" which could (relatively) easily be made into "legit" planes
France - D520
Australia - *AGAS had floated a couple Aussie planes as possibilities
Poland - PZL## already done
Greece - PZL (other variant) almost done

etc.

Anyways Pachy's right, its totally fine to have a nation without its own aircraft, but even still we tend to have at least one unique airplane per nation (on average) anyways.

While we're at it... I think the French P39 should probably be binned too, unless it is a separate variant.

Werner

posted 05-23- 10:26 AM               

In the main planepack you'd have the "unique" planes, or the "main" version of a plane that was used by several countries. For instance, the planepack would include the Bf-109E and Bf-109G and Bf-109K, but not the ITALIAN Bf-109G. It would include the Yak-3 and the P-39 but not the RUSSIAN P-39.

Then, if an "interested party" wanted to create a VVS P-39 and a VVS P-40 and a VVS Spitfire and a VVS Hurricane for the Russian Nation, he packs them up in the "VVS Pack" as a separate download.

Then mission builders put "VVS Pack Required" in their mission descriptions, and hopefully that minimizes the mismatches.

Host the "Nation Packs" at the same location as the main PlanePack as optional downloads.

You could even re-think the whole planepack concept and break it down by nation packs if you wanted to. It would certainly make for more manageable downloads...

posted 05-23- 10:27 AM               

quote:

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Can a plane be assigned to more than one nation?

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I don't think so. That's really a historically inaccurate limitation in SDOE. I can't name a country than fought during WWII without using any foreign planes.

posted 05-23- 11:44 AM            

To the best of my knowledge, a plane can be assigned to multiple nations by creating a separate loadout file for the distinct nation.

The limitation with this however is skins. You wouldn't be able to have british and greek hurricanes flying in the same mission with distinct skins. However, you may be able to have two different countries flying the same plane in the same mission (I'd have to test this).

If you want to try it yourself, the beaufighter Mk ?? (the one with Australian colours). Has a duplicate loadout for the British. Someone complained about having both, in pp6.0 but it was the same plane files just a separate loadout.

We could take the same approach with many of the duplicate planes (including the hurricane - and save a little space). (You would have to manage the skins through a utility like Chameleon though).

A suggestion for the patch team would be to enable an option in the loadout file that would specify the folder for the skin files for the aircraft in use. This could have a default value (such acname/textures) or alternates defined in the loadout such as acname/frenchtextures.

Hey (as Spin has a brain fart) if they did this we could add squadron specific textures (recognizing the limitation on textures in the game already). This may be able to go places. Bryan what do you think?

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Spin

posted 05-23- 12:08 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by jedi:
Another way to handle this would be to create "Nation Packs" as separate downloads for the various nations.

In the main planepack you'd have the "unique" planes, or the "main" version of a plane that was used by several countries. For instance, the planepack would include the Bf-109E and Bf-109G and Bf-109K, but not the ITALIAN Bf-109G. It would include the Yak-3 and the P-39 but not the RUSSIAN P-39.

Then, if an "interested party" wanted to create a VVS P-39 and a VVS P-40 and a VVS Spitfire and a VVS Hurricane for the Russian Nation, he packs them up in the "VVS Pack" as a separate download.

Then mission builders put "VVS Pack Required" in their mission descriptions, and hopefully that minimizes the mismatches.

Host the "Nation Packs" at the same location as the main PlanePack as optional downloads.

You could even re-think the whole planepack concept and break it down by nation packs if you wanted to. It would certainly make for more manageable downloads...

---

It took a second reading of that for me to realize that the "Nations Packs" you're referring to are aircraft, not Nations... For clarity's sake, may I suggest a name change? (I know, I know, I don't mean any offense or imply that you shouldn't have called it that, I'd just like to make sure we're clear from the start).

Anyways... I was going to get all mad because I'm still fuming over this Nv2.1 business, but I think you've got a good idea there jedi.

Werner

posted 05-23- 01:52 PM               

The loadout defines the hanger pic / stats, but ultimately different nations could use the same aircraft.sm The psudo-nation aircraft would even reflect their respective launguages, units and squadrons if need be.

posted 05-24- 04:23 AM               

I've been MIA for a 'little bit' ....been very busy at work....I've sort of left a few guys in the lurch in regards to Nations V3 - sorry Werner, Eyes and Dinga.

In regards to aircraft for Australia. My original idea was for the Boomerang, Wirraway and Kangaroo (remember - 'it ain't a bloody Mustang!'). The Boomer was started by Hippie I think, but sadly he has other real life priorities.....

Luckily though, Jedi came to the rescue with his Spitfire Vc and HF Mk VIII. I'm unsure about their current PP state, but the're both on my HD and I enjoy flying them under Australian colours.

Also, Bishop added his Beaufighter Mk21 to the Aussie fleet and again his consideration in this regard is appreciated.

If only I could learn AC3D......

Cheers,

AGAS 5

posted 05-24- 05:28 AM               

This may have been presumptuous of me-- I can make a British loadout again if need be-- but it seems this mark was for the Aussies. Also-- as it was, the British loadout.ppf was dominant over the Aussie, so if I do put it back in, I will switch that around and make the British one the option.

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Brought to you by the campaign for a better Dauntless!

posted 05-24- 05:46 AM               

Besides the PZL 24G made by Zur is a wonderfull airplane ! Zur wait soon (today) an email with my comments on the PZL )

posted 05-24- 08:40 AM            

Jeeves - I agree 100% with what you've done with the Beaufighter. Do you know when that version come into service? During the war or after?

Werner

posted 05-24- 08:05 PM               

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Brought to you by the campaign for a better Dauntless!

posted 05-25- 03:37 PM               

Suppose, when you made a mission, along with selecting the loadout for each plane, you could select the paint scheme as well?

Each plane would have a loadout.ppf and a camoflage.ppf file. The camo.ppf would specify the location of the .tifs for the specified aircraft, and the mission editor would allow you to pick the skin. The loadout.ppf file already appears to override the .sm file as far as weaponry goes, so perhaps the camo.ppf file could override the "default" skin file reference in the .sm too.

You could get the planes to appear in the proper Nation just by putting multiple loadout.ppf files in, as noted above. If no camo.ppf file was present, the plane would appear with the skin specified in its .sm file.

Then you could get rid of ALL the "redundant" planes that are just "copies" with new file refs and trim the download size of the planepack.