Will HTC follow the trend?

[hazed-]

I think full player skins is a bad idea but i would like to see some way of personalising aircraft as in coloured letter markings or tail bands of a certain size or cowling colour...basically what they had during the war.These would be unobtrusive and we could agree on how different it can go.This should be something you have to earn i think tho
one good way would be to finish in the top 50 in a tour in any catagory(planes/vehicles) means you are 'entitled' to personalise your plane/vehicle
or how about just a choice of paintschemes like desert/snow/sea/land types?

hell i dont know  

hazed

[Sandman_SBM]

I'm with ya there. Paint schemes would be nice. I think it would be very unrealistic to have pink planes flying around the main arena.

Years ago, there was a Mac sim called SkyFighters that allowed individual paint jobs. Nash used to fly this cloud/sky colored aircraft that was very difficult to see. He's very talented at ACM (as some are aware). Being near invisible just made it that much more difficult.

If I have the opportunity to paint an aircraft anyway I wanted, I'd do the same and paint it to match the sky for A2A missions. Can't see that as being fair (or realistic) at all but I'd do it.

[Tac]

I say it would be good to separate plane skin sections into costumizable parts. Like I said in another post, Tail, Nose, Engine, Wingtip, Wing Center, Wing Root, Middle Fuselage, etc etc.

These parts would be allowed to be set with a skin and background color. So, if I wanted a shark grin on the nose of my plane, and I want my plane to be completely black, I would set the "background color" of all the sections black and add the shark grin skin on my nose. Tadaa!

However, all textures (aka graphics or skins) must be from a library that the AH program has. No player-made and inserted skins or textures or graphics. Why? Well, if this was allowed then you would have to download every sucker's paint scheme when you fly..or disable the feature, which defeats the whole purpose. By using game set skins/graphics/skins you wont have to do that.

The whole purpose of painting your plane is the same as why WW2 squadrons had distinctive colorings... the Tuskegee Airmen had their tail painted all red, one of the fighters we have now has a blue nose, a german squadron had green hearts,etc. The point was to let others know who you were.

So you would know when you see a pink P-38 flying around.. "thats wobble!!" or "that guy's from that squadron, hes got the markings", etc, etc.

Also, players should NOT be allowed to paint OTHER players planes on their own FE. That would lead to outright cheating by having all the other planes painted bright pink or neon green so you can shoot them easier.

[Revvin]

Perhaps I did not explain or you guys are missing the point, only art submittedto HTC would get included, it would not take the form of an easily changed standard format such as a .jpeg, .gif, .bmp it would be some kind of downloadable file, for the sake of argument call it a 'skin pack' this pack would be the only external art file to work in Aces High and the file would could be digitally signed and encrypted the same way the other files areso that if an altered file was trying to be used the user would fail the security check AH has in place now that stops people modding the game and boot them from the server.

What I am asking for is the facility to make camo's and submit them to HTC for inclusion, and ONLY those camo's for inclusion, what I am not asking for is just another little paint prog to paint pink/neon planes or to paint your plane to look like some lame hot-rod with flaming wheel arches etc.

So just to re-cap incase there is still any confusion....there would not be any way a player could make pink/neon planes and use them unless HTC authorised that artwork for some strange reason.

[Kieran]

 

Here is one of the dangers of playerside-only graphics. Only 5 minutes in Photoshop...

[Nath-BDP]

It took you 5 minutes to drag a Yak cockpit over a screenshot of a zeke, then lower the opacity? eek.

[Zigrat]

jesus you worrywarts just dont get it!

thats why we submit teh skin designs to a skin group with intelligent non cheaters picked by htc like the CMs


not just let any dipshit paint stuff pink

you guys really are wayy too paranoid

[AKSeaWulfe]

I don't care if there is player submitted skin, so long as it is only unique for squads... squads with 4 people or more in them. Otherwise you'll have 150 seperate skins in the air at once, and if you do WANT to see unique skins you are stuck cuz then everyone and their mother is using them and that will kill your framerate due to texture loading.
-SW

[DRILL]

 well the only problum i see with it is im no artist

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DRILL

[Kieran]

No, it only took 5 minutes to go to the HTC site, select two screen shots, do a select on the Yak cockpit, mask out the sky, drop it onto the zeke screenshot, then lowered the opacity. I'm at work, you see, no game installed here.  

I think I did pretty well in 5 minutes, don't you?

And the point is many are clamoring for player-only art without realizing there are valid reasons for restricting it- the cloud-colored a/c example being one. Who is to say you can't make all planes bright pink on your display so that people cannot sneak up on you?

IF proper precautions are taken player-only art MIGHT work. It is important and complicated enough that any game developer concerned with the integrity of their product will move cautiously in this area.

[sling322]

 

Originally posted by hazed-:
This should be something you have to earn i think tho
one good way would be to finish in the top 50 in a tour in any catagory(planes/vehicles) means you are 'entitled' to personalise your plane/vehicle


hazed

I think I like this idea....yeah....it would make a great way to find those top level pilots and organize squad night hunts for them.  Can you imagine the level of whining when you swoop down over him repeatedly on the runway and vulch him over and over?  Oh joy....  

[Tac]

 

Originally posted by Zigrat:
jesus you worrywarts just dont get it!

thats why we submit teh skin designs to a skin group with intelligent non cheaters picked by htc like the CMs


not just let any dipshit paint stuff pink

you guys really are wayy too paranoid

Exactly what i'm saying. Only HTC-approved skins and textures would be put in the hard-coded part of the game so the player can select his skin/texture.

As far as the coloring, if I want to have my P-38 seen black or pink or red by everyone else, that is MY choice. What I dont want players to be allowed to do is set how they see other's plane's camo/skins in their FE.

I remember in Jane's F-15 you would just edit the skin on the f15 to be bright yellow and ALL f-15's in the air would look bright yellow..but only to you. Talk about easy gunfights.

"not just let any dipshit paint stuff pink"

Yep, if I wanted to paint my plane pink, only MY plane would be pink, all others would see my plane pink, I wouldnt see other's planes pink. For my part, I'd love to paint my P-38 completely black so that everyone knows who they are shooting down  

[This message has been edited by Tac (edited 03-07-2001).]

[Revvin]

<sigh> OK Kieren well done m8 so you lowered the opacity from a screenshot, now I challenge you to use that cockpit online..go on m8 if it really is that easy, tell you what I don't want to see you waste your time because you just won't be able to do it...why? because HTC control the artwork as they would with user submitted stuff and you can't use any old image and go online and use it because the security checks the server does when you log on will not permit it as they would if you went online in a pink plane or tried to use pink planes as the texture for other aircraft.

<shrug> I guess I should have used less syllable's in my post and spaced my wording so small little fingers could follow it as they read it

[jedi]

I think some guys just don't understand how easy this whole thing becomes if the development team is willing to support it.

OK, say you've got some gee-whiz, transparent skin for your plane and hot pink skins for all the CHogs on your FE.  How do you use it online?  Go ahead, use it!  You can't, can you?  Not without hacking.  And if you could "safely" hack it THEN, you can safely hack it NOW, so it's a non-issue.

The only skins you'll see are the ones you DOWNLOAD, just as the only planes you can fly are the ones included in the "sanctioned" software updates.  The only skins you can DOWNLOAD are the ones HTC authorizes.  The GRAPHIC file for the skin can be .bmp, .tif, whatever, but the ACTUAL file is something encoded by HTC.  Which means, again, the only guys who can cheat are the guys with the expertise to HACK, and those guys can hack the artwork right NOW, so player-submitted skins, with HTC "quality/security control" are not any more likely to be cheated on than anything in the sim right now.

At the worst, you make the skin an integral part of the aircraft model itself (again, "encoded" by HTC) and you have several "authorized" versions of each plane, differing only in paint scheme.  Don't want a bunch of "extra" planes?  Don't download 'em.

Now consider the added "fun factor" of having all those skins for scenarios, historical squad colors, etc, etc  



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[AKSeaWulfe]

Okay, but you missed somein' Revvin.

Even if HTC controls and monitors the skins being submitted, HTC still has to allow the FE to be "updated" with imported images that are used to skin the aircraft. So, this in turn allows a guy to futz around with his own FE, thus giving him the ability to have an imported invisible mode cockpit. See here's how it works.. HTC approves the skin, then releases some kind of update or something that imports the skin and instead of importing the approved one.. he changes it a little and voila, he imports an invisi mode cockpit.

Now lets say they don't let the end user import the graphics. Imagine how much SLOWER the dev time becomes because they have to approve the skins, then PRODUCE an UPDATE that PACKAGES these skins together to ensure the end user can't swap skins to bright pink or invisible cockpit on his FE.

-SW