Markings.bmp

[Bullethead]

I can understand why this is necessary on US planes that have only 1 upper wing texture.  You have to put a decal star on just 1 of the wings.

However, I wish HTC would stop putting the decal stars on the fuselage in AH2, and go back to drawing them into the texture like in AH1.  There are 2 reasons for this:
[list=1]

• Using the decal on the fuselage limits the number of skins we can do.  Different units had the star in a different place on the fuselage, with different arrangements of unit codes around it.  However, the decal is always in the same place and skinners have no control over it.  This means that some skins just can't be done very well or at all.
• The decal can't be weathered effectively.  This is because the same decal is used on both the wing and the fuselage.  If you put chips in it to outline gunbays on the wing, these same chips appear on the fuselage.  Conversely, if you have exhaust stains over the fuselage star, you also get them on the wing.  The result is that the whole skin can't be weathered as much as some would like.  The star always has to look pristine and chips and stains can't cover it.  Thus, to balance that, the weathering on the whole plane has to be rather understated.

Please give this some consideration.  Drawing good stars isn't a problem and not having decal stars on the fuselage would be a boon to skinners.

[moot]

give the markings.bmp an _alpha.bmp.

[Bullethead]

Originally posted by moot
give the markings.bmp an _alpha.bmp.

You miss the point.

There's already a Markings_a.bmp.  The problem is, HTC uses the same star in Marking.bmp on both the wing and the fuselage, they just scale it smaller on the fuselage.  So the problem is, if you black out the star in Markings_a.bmp, you lose ALL the stars on both fuselage and wings.  So once you black it out, you have to draw your own stars.  But because you only have 1 upper and 1 lower wing surface, which get mirrored to the other side of the plane, anything you draw will appear on both sides of the wing, both top and bottom.  IOW, instead of just 2 wing stars, you get 4 total.

This is OK if you're doing a Brit skin for a US plane, or if it's early enough in the war that the US still had stars on both wings.  But of course this is totally inaccurate for mid-late war US planes with just 1 star above and 1 below.

Back in AH1, the US planes did NOT use the Markings.bmp star for the fuselage.  This allowed skinners to put the star anywhere so they could make skins with it in all possible positions.  But in AH2, the fuselage star is a decal and you can't move it  This IMHO is a retrograde step.  Please get rid of the decal on the fuselage.

[moot]

ok. Might be worth asking them directly if more separate bmp's (maximum of?) would be possible, if that doesn't stretch texture volume too much etc.