Military AI Works

The most recent version 2 for download has that spot removed. Alan you may have gotten the first release version of V2 before I had a chance to remove that spot.

I'm still not even sure how it got there in the first place, that's the weird part.

To answer Regan's question about the textures, the base model is one of two types, Pratt and Whitney or General Electric powered. The differences are seen at the engine inlet and the engine exhaust. Otherwise the two basic versions are 99% identical from a modeling standpoint.

What happens inside of FSDS when working with the models is that as Kevin and I share parts back and forth between a P&W powered F-16 and a GE powered F-16, we have to use a global texture renaming trick to get the part to pick up the texture.

The only difference on the texture sheets is essentially how the engine exhausts look, so again even the sheets are 99% the same except for their actual file names with only the 'GE' or 'PW' being different.

I'm guessing the model's hold onto their original texture assignments somewhere deep in their coding that we don't ever see. So while it may throw a flag using a program like Regan is using, it is otherwise transparent to the user.

With a project this massive, with the two different engine types, going the extra mile to keep the files from ever sharing parts back and forth and therefore never crossing the texture file names would make the project all but impossible to complete.

I think that's true Mike. In Gmax, the Material Manager has two lists of Materials (textures) - "Entire" and "Applied". The "Entire" lists all the materials that are currently applied + all those that have previously been applied, irrespective of whether they are currently assigned to parts or not. The "Applied", as the name suggests, lists only those materials (textures) that are currently assigned to parts.

I normally delete any materials not assigned, so both lists read the same, but leaving the unassigned in has no visible penalty in the model, but may well be detected by an analytical program. There might be a small file size overhead, but I wouldn't worry about it if you can't edit the list in FSDS.

John