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Re: If you start skinning for a new sim, ...
I have almost only skinned for IL-2.
I think my idea will be power consuming.
But what I sometimes wish for is some kind of mapping that allows you to tell exactly what should be glossy/shining and what should be matt.
Then you need at least 3 degrees: matt, silk and gloss and maybe shining for bare metal or metallic paint.
Sounds a bit like what adlabs describes, though I'm not familiar with it.
I second adlabs notes on file transfer. I think starting as early as possible to exchange skins.
For example: in a coop mission one hits 'fly' which means his settings are final. Meanwhile it can take a few to even a lot minutes until the last one is ready. I think that is the best time to exchange skins.
People that have hit the 'fly' button can start transmitting the skins to all other players. And since the game is in rest, you can use a lot bandwidth for that. As soon as the game starts the gam,e data should get full priority.
And using peer to peer like systems for that, also between various/all clients, might help.
Assume you have 4 players:
A, B, C, D
A has a skin. When B is downloading it C and D are in queue waiting.
When B has finished C can start downloading. D would have to be in queue again until C finishes. Meanwhile D could download A's skin from B.
I know it's a very simplified model that does not work when all four of them have skins all others do not have. But it will start working when people fly together a lot and thus have most of eachothers skins.
Another disadvantage of IL-2 is that you only see a skin immediately when it is in your netcache and not when you have the original skin in your skins folder. That cached skin has an unknown filename, so we also have no ways to work around the problem, like puttiong a cached skin there manually to prevent file exchange and thus chance of lag.
I have thought of some skin exchange program where you can exchange skins with friends, but that would not help to ease the problem, since it really needs to be in your cache with the encoded filename.
And I also second that usable voids (PSD or clean voids without shade and dirt effects) would help a lot of people.
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