Allowing personal skins on all servers - here's how

[Janosch]

Hello! The thing I like in the good old Il-2 1946 is the ability to paint or decorate your own plane. Now, I heard that you can't  use a personal skin in BoS if it's a ranked server. I don't exactly know what ranked server means, but anyway, it kind of rubs me the wrong way that you supposedly can't use a personal skin at all times.

 

I see the arguments for this decision: flying as one side but camouflaging as the other, limited bandwidth, using obnoxious skins or breaking immersion (even if I don't agree with that one!). But, the choice should be left for the players imho. In the 1946 it's simply handled like this:

 

 

That knob over there lets every player select whether or not to download others' skins. I think it applies to custom noseart, pilot skins, plane skins and custom squadron insignia. This is what I want to see in BoS - there could even be a parental lock or something.

 

As an alternative, I would settle for an option of using a skin myself and being able to see it on all servers, even if it isn't actually uploaded to the server. A certain Russian Il-2 server does this - I can see my own skin, goose bumbs and all, but skin download/upload is off on the server side.

 

So yeah - for me, the main attraction in a flight sim, besides realism, is the ability to customize your experience. Adolf Galland had Mickey Mouse, Soviet pilots had their medals painted on the fuselage, the red baron had red plane and the pink baron had a pink plane. So, how about it? This is my 5 yen, what's yours?

[=LD=Hethwill]

IIRC the Rise of Flight model might be used, with servers allowing mods or not without the need of a in game dedicated system to get the skins ?

[Scott_Steiner]

I see this feature being added as doubtful..

 

the original IL-2 had skins at 1024x1024 resolution and an indexed color palette of 256, the outcome of these poor attributes was a file size of approximately 1 megabyte.

 

In Rise of Flight you have double the resolution, being 2048x2048 and an unlimited RGB color palette, the outcome is a file size of approximately 5 and a half megabytes.

 

Joining a server and loading 60 players with custom skins would mean each player would have to download 330 megabytes while the game is going on, you have 60 people doing this at once and suddenly have 20 gigs of data to transfer between everyone.

 

Some people do not know how to skin very well but yet want a customized plane that is their own so they take a default skin that they like and add a couple stripes on the tail, or they take a green and brown camo'd plane and shift the hue so its red and blue. There isn't much sense in bogging up a server for the download of poor or slightly modified skins.

 

I believe the Rise of Flight model of having user skin packs worked well and it will make sure that users will put more time and dedication into their creation before posting it.

[Razaali1]

AFAIK you can turn the Autopilot and engine assists in flight with key-binds in Normal realism. 

[354thFG_Leifr]

The Rise of Flight model would be best applied here. It worked.