Some interesting points made @ naming custom skins

[Bearcat]

I was looking at this thread and there were some interesting points made in it about custom skin names. 

 

Considering that this community is a very creative one and we are just scratching the surface with all of this.. it might be a good idea to establish a "protocol" so to speak for lack of a better term for naming custom skins.

 

Based on what I saw in the thread linkied above.. a good place to start would be....

 

plane name all lowercase_customskinname .. for example: fw190a3_customskinnamehere or lagg3s29_customskinnamehere

 

What do you guys think? Do you think we even need to establish this? If so it would be best to do it early yeah? Whaddyathink?

[TG-55Panthercules]

Hey Bearcat - I think this is a good idea (some sort of standardization at least) - it may be a bit tough to police/enforce given how this skin stuff is playing out over here with BoS so far (with no official/centralized skin submission/review/approval process like they use in RoF), but I think there are some things that players might find helpful if people would adopt some sort of standard approach.

 

One thing in particular that seems to have worked pretty well in RoF is to come up with a simple prefix/code to distinguish between historical skins and fictional/personal ones.  For example, in RoF we use a "z" at the beginning of every personal/fictional skin name - that drops the fictional skins to the bottom of the list (below all the historical ones, since the list is sorted alphabetically), and also alerts the player to which types are which.  (Because of how they handled skins in RoF, we do it there with the skin name that shows up in the in-game menu list, not the file name as such, but the general concept could be applied to the file name.)

 

Given that (so far at least) BoS doesn't have separate in-game skin names (it seems to use the file name) and also doesn't have preview pictures for the custom skins (as far as I can tell, anyway) like RoF does, we probably would need to adopt such a convention in the file name itself.  For example, my personal Stuka winter skin might be called something like "Ju87D_z_Panther_W.dds" - somebody else's might be named "Ju87D_z_Leopard3.dds", etc., whereas an historical skin might be named something like "Ju87D_JG18_Black6.dds"

 

I hope it turns out that there isn't the same character length limitation for BoS that there is in RoF, because it's hard enough to have file names that are very useful/descriptive within those limits and trying to add any sort of code/indicator like the "z" in the file name itself will only make that harder.  But, the basic concept has worked well in RoF and might be worth at least considering over here.

 

For the historical skins in RoF we also set up a standard naming convention for how to reflect the name/number designation of the relevant squadrons or units (again, with RoF we could do that in the in-game descriptive name and didn't have to do it in the file name itself, though I tended to try to also use something similar for my file names as well).  It really helped group the skin names on the in-game list and make it easier for players to figure out which skins they might want to use, and might be worth some consideration over here as well.  

 

I suspect the way that I will try to keep things organized for my own BoS installation, at least initially until some form of naming convention might be adopted, is simply to put the skins I want in JSGME packages (where I can be as descriptive as I want to be in the name of the mod packages), and have those mod packages organized into separate groups of historical and fictional skins that I'll just activate and de-activate with JSGME depending on what types of skins I want to fly with during any session.  

Edited January 16, 2015 by TG-55Panthercules

[Yakdriver]

names got to be short.

A) the install process

 

B) the use process

 

 

A) skin in zip: Plane name_descriptivename --> when you download you want to know what plane the skin belongs to

 

B) DDS file No plane name, it clogs up the Ingame menu. Only Descriptivename

_W for winter Variant  (absence=summer variant)
_HK for Historically Korrekt [the spoiler thing]  >> alternatively _PC for Politically Correct
_GEN for generic. >>>>alternative _NM for no markings

_trop for tropical variant [sand filters on the Model]

 

 

 

 

=========================

tests - can you read and understand this?

 

LaGG3s29_Fbomb.zip

109F4_Galland42_W_HK.zip

F4U_Blacksheep_NM.zip

HurriIIb_Murmansk.zip

D.520_FAFL_gen.zip

109F4_Marseille_trop.zip

Emil4B_Leningrad41_HK_W.zip

B-29_BocksCar_nm.zip

P40C_Welsh.zip

 

 

 

and for the ingame menu with the Plane visible, the DDS file drops the Plane type:

F-Bomb

Galland42_w_hk
Blacksheep_nm

Musmansk

FAFL_gen

Marseille_trop

Leningrad_w_hk
BocksCar_nm

Welch

 

 

Of course, to the complete noob this wil remain cryptic. but once he has sifted through a bunch of Books or Magazines,  he will pick up the Nicknames (emil, Hurri) and the type descriptions (109F4, P40C)

Edited January 16, 2015 by Yakdriver