Interesting. To my mind, it is precisely
because they are short of artists that every effort should be made
now to optimise skins for re-skinning. The potential output of the community far-exceeds that of HTC. We proved this with SAC in Air-warrior. Kesmai made skins that were very straightforward to reskin, and the community put out over a thousand skins in 12 months, arguably extending the life of that game for 2 years or so.
So, I suggest that the thinking "not remaking textures that we've already spent a considerable amount time on just to satisfy a few people." - Superfly, is somewhat flawed, as it takes no account of the skinners ability to satisfy the many.
I was not so much suggesting that new skins were needed, more that in certain cases the "reuse" of areas of texture to cover multiple areas of the final rendered aircraft be ceased. This might involve the very occasional extra bitmap, frequently one which they already have on file already. This would go a long way to removing inflexibilities to reskinning aircraft, to everyones benefit.
Accordingly, I would suggest the ability for HTC to accept rigourous feedback on skins, and to amend the few areas that are problematic, would reap really vast benefits for HTC in the long run.
Thanks btw to those that wrote in or emailed indicating they thought the original thread unwarrentably locked.
Originally posted by Dennis
Superfly spaketh:
It won't change any time soon. I'm sorry. It ain't gonna happen. We only have two artists, and we are already redoing 4 years worth of artwork. We have standardized our way of doing things for now. Our primary concern is finishing AH2, not remaking textures that we've already spent a considerable amount time on just to satisfy a few people.