Paints and registrations

[FCRO]

Hello

I just would like to know why do painters related to military ai, paint each one of the registrations but that is not used in comercial AI traffic???

[MIKE JG]

Typically a commercial airline fleet will have just one or two paint schemes at most. There are airlines that have many different tail schemes (Frontier) but that is an exception not a rule. Southwest has quite a few different paint jobs as well.

Military aircraft, while generally painted the same in each squadron, have more variations to their paint schemes than do commercial airline fleets. Painting each individual aircraft in a package allows for greater realism and allows the many unique and varied military aircraft paint schemes to be used in a given package. In addition, military AI aircraft have weapons that hang off of them and those have to be textured as well. Sometimes the textures for those weapons cannot fit on just a single common texture that each aircraft can use.

Long ago MAIW decided that we would include a texture for each individual aircraft in our packages and then allow the users to decide if they wanted to use them all or delete all but one like Airline AI packages.

This also helps us track the individual AI aircraft as they execute their flight plans from one point to another during the testing of each package.

[Graham King]

The registration, relative to the size of the aircraft, is much larger on military aircraft than on civil. When I first started painting I would paint one aircraft per squadron plus any special schemes.

When a whole squadron was represented with flight plans the result was a flight line of identical aircraft. My first attempt to break up this effect was to paint 4 aircraft per squadron, 4 registrations and 4 levels of fade.

This then lead me to produce the actual paints programmatically from my paint template. I found I was not always getting the registration and level of fade correct so I was always going back to make corrections so I developed macros and scripts to do the job automatically and with greater accuracy. From here it was not a great leap to add all a squadron's registrations to be painted.

The result is a more realistic experience as you taxi past a line of aircraft.

The down side is the amount of hard disk space used and the number of entries in the aircraft.cfg. In the 7 years since FS2004 was released we all must have updated our computers at least once and with the current price of hard disks slow load times and capacity is much less of a problem. In fact at the beginning of the year we took a decision to increase the size of the aircraft folders by using mipmaps and placing all the required textures in each aircraft folder rather than in a common texture folder. We did this to actually increase the visual performance of our aircraft in the simulator.

If slow load times of FS or hard disk capacity is a problem then you can decompile the flight plans to use only one or two aircraft and recompile them and then remove the aircraft texture folders and cfg entries that are not being used.

So why do not we produce "light" packages? Out of thousands of users only one or two want this format and the effort required on our part to produce a second package is quite considerable, when we could producing the next package. Remember to us this is a hobby.

[james84]

Right, of course, as Graham said, there is a trade-off among disk space/loading time on one side and realism.
Anybody has his own PC, so is free to decide whether to keep all the textures or not.
Personally, I prefer using only one texture per squadron, except for those which spot several different schemes, and keep all the aircrafts wearing special liveries. Also, I usually install all the aircrafts belonging to different packages in a single folder (i.e. I have ALL the NBAI F-15s released so far in a single "NBAI F-15 folder"), though keeping all the entries. Of course, the installation takes more time comparing to when one simply executes the auto-installer, but this way I manage to increase the performances of my system a bit and save disk space.
Of course, this is just a personal choice, anybody is free to choose a different solution!

[BadPvtDan]

This helps as well.

[Firebird]

Yeah Dan, it helps to live in the US.

[BadPvtDan]

Yeah Dan, it helps to live in the US.

Because the beer is so poor we have better computers in return?

[Garysb]

Have you partaken in some English brews Danny?

Just about to try a bit of Jennings "Sneck Lifter"

http://www.jenningsbrewery.co.uk/

You dont need many of these and be able to walk home

Gary

[BadPvtDan]

Nah, I don't drink at all.

[Graham King]

So you would not be interested in this http://fullers.co.uk/rte.asp?id=47

I used to live a few miles from the brewery in my youth.