posted 06-17- 10:43 AM               

Let's say all of the planes in the planeset were modified in a similar fashion. That is, every plane adds six switchins that point to six tifs. These tifs have well defined names, and all the planes use the same ones.

Any particular plane would have these switchins at different locations, but in general I believe there would be a set that's pretty standard for practically any plane:

kill_marking_left
kill_marking_right
squad_marking_left
squad_marking_right
nose_art_left
nost_art_right

(question: do some planes have individual markings on the upper/lower/left/right wings that would need to be added?)

These switchins look for their markings in a new folder, either inside textures or "beside" it (so you'd have two folders in the plane's folder, textures and decals).

Now the user can add their own artwork to their planes simply by dropping the tifs in that they want to use. Wait, it gets better.

Since these markings are small, we could demand that they follow certain guidlines. For instance, we could say that they must be 256x256 (although if possible, it would seem 128x128 would be more than enough) and 8-bit with no alpha. We could likely use an indexed-colour palette, but I don't know if the system supports that.

Anyway this means these decals are small. So we could send them during net-game setup. Now we get individual planes in net games.

Would it work?

posted 06-21- 09:06 AM               

• alpha textures are needed (since the markings need to be transparent, i.e. the camo must be seen under the squad code letter for example).
  
• that would not give us individual markings easily (the code changes needed are as complicated as having one big tif per plane/player)
  
• adding 4 or 6 alpha LODs would hurt the framerate a bit
  

Now the really great thing would be if those markings were generated dynamically by the application. That's what IL-2 will do, BTW. Two examples could be:

The 602 sq. RAF is used: markings are usual RAF camo plus "LO" squad letters plus one infdividual letter per plane.

posted 06-21- 12:39 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Pachy:

alpha textures are needed (since the markings need to be transparent, i.e. the camo must be seen under the squad code letter for example).

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Sure. Is this bad? Or is this OK? Is there an indexed-colour system that allows for alpha that's supported? These patches would typically only be a few colours at most.

quote:

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that would not give us individual markings easily (the code changes needed are as complicated as having one big tif per plane/player)

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Sure, this part I was kinda assuming. You can read my (long) thoughts on the topic at:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/maury/openplane/op_wishlist.html

quote:

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adding 4 or 6 alpha LODs would hurt the framerate a bit

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Hmmm. Any idea how big such a hit would be? Guestimates are fine. Is alpha that expensive?

quote:

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Now the really great thing would be if those markings were generated dynamically by the application. That's what IL-2 will do, BTW.

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I thought about this but I couldn't come up with a system that was very simple. Whenever I looked at it it seemed the game would have to "know" what the lettering style for a particular plane was, which would seem to require a lot more code. With the LOD/patch you don't need that, although as you point out this means more alpha-LODs.

Hmmm, how about a non-linear solution?

posted 06-21- 01:38 PM               

IL-2 does handle insigs like this and making schemes would be way easy since you don't have to worry about the insigs but each plane will need custom places for the insig togo since every plane surface is different.

If there is an alpha channel that doesn't effect the colors then I don'tsee why it would work. kill markins aren't reall that important unless you get SDOE to remmebr the planes you kill which would take a lot more programming then I think we want to spend on this idea.

I've though about this idea but it's on a long list of "new features" and many other things need to be fixed before something like this can be added. I think we should really be working on trying to get the rendering engine updated and on DX8 before we worry about little things.

What would you rather see, insigs on planes or FS running at 90 FPS with 20 planes in the air in 32bit color?

posted 06-21- 02:19 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Razer:
I've though about this idea but it's on a long list of "new features" and many other things need to be fixed before something like this can be added. I think we should really be working on trying to get the rendering engine updated and on DX8 before we worry about little things.

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I'm running DX8, what's the issue there?

Well sorta running, 1.5 is fine, the patch gets me blobs of multi-coloured tiles for the ground.

posted 07-28- 10:38 AM               

Would SDOE save these Markings after the game, as this would mean that providing we kept the same markings, they would only have to to transfer the once.

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