posted 02-22- 05:49 PM               

The main folder for all of the games resources is called 'media' (or ‘assets’ in the language of Inertia Games) it will be located somewhere like 'd:\sdoe\media' or where ever you installed SDOE. For a fresh install, about the only things in there are the PAR files, which are an uncompressed archive of the actual resources.

If you use the BigMunger program with the parfile tools (from openplane.org) and extract all of the PAR files to the 'media' folder you will end up with folders within the media folder called 'aircraft', 'missions', ‘training’, ‘terrain’ etc etc. It's probably easy to see what these are for.

If you go into the 'aircraft' folder you will see folders for each of the aircraft in SDOE identified by their short names. Each aircraft has a short name that is used by the game to find all of its files, and a long name that is used for the SDOE GUI. There are also some folders for common items such as 'cockpits' etc.

In each individual aircraft folder e.g. 'spit' for the Spit MkV, there are one or more .SM files that describe the characteristics of the aircraft and other parts of it for example the cockpit.

There are also some folders. One is 'textures' which is the default location for the textures common to that particular aircraft. There is also a 'sounds' which is where the sounds particular to that aircraft are stored. Keep in mind that many aircraft share textures for example the Spit uses the typhoons fast prop texture.

Each of the aircraft has a main skin. It is normally named based on the aircraft's short name, but this is not always the case. For example the typhoon's short name is typh and the skin is called typh.tif, but the Spitfire MkV is called spit but the skin is spitii.tif, a bit confusing but that's the way it is.

So... to replace a skin, you need to get one of the templates from one of the many sites modify it and just copy/save it into the textures folder for the aircraft you are changing. You don't actually have to extract all of the PAR files. In fact if all you wanted to do was replace the Spits skin you would just create a directory called 'spit' under 'media' and 'textures' under the new 'spit' folder and then copy 'spitii.tif' there. Individual files always override what’s in the PAR files, so if you get the directories right, then it will always use your skin. This can also backfire. For example if you make a new aircraft or aircraft skin, and then download the planepack (which is in PAR files) then you could never see the plane pack version. in this case just delete your own copy.

The main trick is to know what the short name, and texture name for the aircraft is.

posted 02-23- 05:57 PM               

------------------