Personalized aircraft

[Hortlund]

I would like to see the ability for each pilot to personalize his plane, much like the squads can today with the nose art, but on an individual level.  

Im not talking about painting the aircraft pink or something like that (although Im pretty sure some might want to do that), rather the ability to add a name or a small heart/gun/playing card/whatever under the cockpit.

[Swoop]

Kill markings of the current streak would be cool.

[Slash27]

Both great ideas. Would be nice to have a "paint shop" to customize planes with "approved" schemes.

[Innominate]

I'd be happy with per-player noseart.

[Bluedog]

Originally posted by Swoop
Kill markings of the current streak would be cool.

Seconded in a big way!!
Perhaps with player selected positioning, eg, on rudder, under canopy rail or on nose.


Blue

[Vulcan]

The problem with individual art is the storage space required, and the amount of textures required.

For example, in a worst case scenario you could have 64 aircraft in one area all with individual textures. Then each player could potentially texture every aircraft, whats that 70 odd planes by 3000 players? 210000 stored textures. Everytime a new player came within view you'd be doing the WW2OL texture shuffle and watching your fps drop to 0.3.

It also lends itself to 'tweaking', if there were individual texture files how hard would it be to find Swoops individual textures and tweak em to some fluorescent pink?

[Innominate]

Vulcan, I dont think they mean completly unique textures for thier planes.

Just custom decal type things.

The current nose-art places almost no demand on any system, even 56k modems dont have any problem dealing with files that small.

[ramzey]

how about sybstitute?

live current squadron logo and add letters and numbers marking system?

each pilot have his own number and letter in squadron



that require only 32 bitmaps for letter and 32 x 4 color bitmaps for numbers /or more  colors if need/.

every plane have place for numbers or  letters /or allmost all, i have no idea how should this look for IJN and USAF/

Numbers can work on same system like squadron logo, mby more dificult;)

for LW planes

 

for RAF planes




now when u type AAR u can use "i was flying yellow 1" or "my spit DW-D" or "i shot dwn 109 marked red one"

imho much more simply system then personal logo and thousands of bitmaps

haw  about that?

ramzey

ps. of course letters for aircraft historical marked by letters, and numbers for aircraft marked historical by numbers

[Midnight]

I think it would be great to have the ability to custom number/letter each aircraft in the squad. The number/letter could be assigned by the squad CO and be a primary key in the database to prevent same number/letter by two members of the same squad.

Something maybe more difficult would be to make squad colors available on A/C somehow. Perhaps by adding 3 color bands around the fusealage or vertical stab. The squad CO could then choose colors and they would appear on the squadron A/C.


Something that is very hard to do in the current MA is find the guy you want to kill. Many a battle have been fought where you know pilot X is in plane Y. You start fighting, but all the sudden 5 more of plane Y show up, and you have no idea who is who.

[acepilot2]

I think kill markings would be cool, but instead of personalized aircraft, there should just be different skins you can choose for aircraft.  For example, a silver or green p38, or differen camo schemes for desert, jungle, etc.

[J_A_B]

The problem with things like numbers or even the current squad artwork is it's pretty much invisible at the ranges we usually fight at in AH.   Sure it looks cool in screenshots, but in day-to-day flying it may as well not even exist.  

In order to be visible at the ranges typically used in AH, something the size of an entire airplane texture is practically required.

I think it'd be a great feature to allow each player a SINGLE personal texture for ONE plane at a time--this would prevent everyone from having 30 different textures per player to download.    If necessary due to download constraints, such textures could be made smaller in size than the "default" airplane textures (in other words use lower res textures for the individual artwork)--at combat ranges, such a lower rexture resolution wouldn't look much different anyhow and it'd do much to save on upload/download times.    It's been done in other games (maybe not in a flightsim, but it HAS been done), so the tech is there.

Some sort of system could be invented to prevent players from manipulating the artwork of others.

Sure some players would doubtlessly prefer things like, say, bright red airplanes.  My thought is that such should be disabled in the "ToD" arena, but is NOT out of place in the free-for-all MA (Classic).  

J_A_B

[ALF]

The only doable solution I can see given bandwidth and texture size limitations would be squad specific color bars, much like the normandy invasion balck.white bars on planes, but customizable for each squad.

This would be a ZERO impact on texture size since its just a color overlay, and would be very visable.

[ramzey]

and we becom Circuis with clowns?
sorry this has nothing to do with history and imho looks colorfull but stiupid

ramzey

[J_A_B]

By the end of the war there WAS a huge amount of variety in color patterns, at least in USAAF aircraft (IJA aircraft also seemed to display a large amount of variety).  One could say that it DID almost look like a circus; Mustang paintjobs ranged from camo paintjobs to blue nose with silver bodies to red nose with yellow stripes to yellow nose with green bodies to silver bodies with red tails to all kinds of other variations.  Certainly every airplane didn't look exactly alike as is currently the case in AH.  

Despite the truth of that statement, the fact is the MA has nothing to do with history, so there is little reason to be obsessed with absolute historical detail in the MA environment.  Remember, the MA is the Rook-Bish-Knight war, and who is to say that these (fictional) countries WOULDN'T let their pilots choose their own paintjobs?  Strict historical realism is what ToD will be for, and presuably such a feature would be either turned off or greatly restricted in ToD.  Strict--borderline unimaginative--realism should be back seat in the MA to fun.  If some guy wants to fly around in an orange plane with purple stripes (and maybe a TYPE-R sticker for good measure), I say let him....It'd sure beat looking at the same bland generic skins all day long.  I'd be good to get a laugh now and then    

I'm all for the variety.  IMO this is the sort of feature that would actually make a graphic upgrade worth it (I tend to be of the opinion that eye candy is worthless; but individual plane skins would be AWESOME).

Remember that AH2 will be TWO games; both the "gamers" AND the "simmers" can be made happy if HTC wishes to satifsy both crowds.  There no longer has to be comprimises.

J_A_B

[Regurge]

Most planes in AH already have some sort of coloring on the nose/spinner and tail band/rudder. Why not be able to choose the colors. A P51 with say, a red nose and yellow rudder would be recognized from a reasonable distance and wouldnt look too ahistorical. The colors could be limited to certain shades chosen by HTC to eliminate neon pink/green planes, although that wouldnt bother me personally. Like ALF's idea, the download would be negligable since all you have to store is a set of RGB values. I think this is best used at the squad level since noone will remember more than a few color combinations. For instance, is every AK had his own colors I couldnt remember them all but I run into them often enough that I'd surely recognize their squad colors.

I like ramzey's idea for individual markings, but it would never be noticed unless graphics are improved so that we dont need icons. It would make for a good gimmick though, like the current squad nose art.