PilotEdge Forums

I put Keith's tail number on there for good fun. This is my first rotor repaint. Not perfect and need to fix the night texture but I like it!

Sweet! Nice job on the colors. Totally looks like a typcial company 'copter, flying around to deliver controllers between locations during shift change.

This is awesome Marcus!

Marcus, that is awesome. Can you do a version with no tail num? Stay with me for a moment...

Once I started working on HD CSL's, I had an idea about private liveries. Since the new models are loaded on demand in the new system (rather than being loaded at xplane startup time), it's now possible to have an absolutely massive set of HD CSL's, since the only HD models that get loaded are the ones that you encounter on a given flight (and at some point we'll have dynamic unloading, too).

So, what if we had, say, a livery to represent PE controllers and staff members, and configured the server to only allow people to connect as that livery if they were on the 'allowed' list for the livery. Everyone would have the livery installed (ie, they can SEE it), but you can only connect using that livery if you are on the guest list.

The same could be done for the ATP liveries. Everyone would have them installed, but you can't connect with the livery (ie, be seen by others in that paint job) unless you were on the ATP pilot list.

The possibilities for this are pretty neat. I asked Chris to connect with specific 407 livery during one of the flyouts and the difference was amazing. Being able to visually identify one 407 out of a sea of 407's just by the paint job was huge.

Does anyone have any thoughts or concerns on this?

Keith Smith wrote:Marcus, that is awesome. Can you do a version with no tail num?

Absolutely. I have the textures layered so removing the tail number is as simple as pressing one button. Neat idea!

Ultimately, it would be lovely to have individual liveries with tailnumbers. It's doable as long as the callsign texture is separate, that way we can share the main textures to save memory. If the tail numbers are baked into the single, large texture, then we have a scale issue and people will run out of VRAM pretty quickly.

However, this approach requires an underlying object (a flat plane) to be incorporated into the model to house the tail number texture. Long term, that's where I'd love to go, but generic (ie no tail number) private liveries are a great start.

All of the commercial product repaints I've done have tail numbers on the main texture files themselves rather than separate. To me, no big deal as you can't see the tail number anyway unless you are less than 50 feet away. Maybe it's my old eyes.

Marcus, you're quite right, the presence of the tail number is not a big deal either way.

Keith Smith wrote:Once I started working on HD CSL's, I had an idea about private liveries. Since the new models are loaded on demand in the new system (rather than being loaded at xplane startup time), it's now possible to have an absolutely massive set of HD CSL's, since the only HD models that get loaded are the ones that you encounter on a given flight (and at some point we'll have dynamic unloading, too).

So, what if we had, say, a livery to represent PE controllers and staff members, and configured the server to only allow people to connect as that livery if they were on the 'allowed' list for the livery. Everyone would have the livery installed (ie, they can SEE it), but you can only connect using that livery if you are on the guest list.

What about a drone livery? Does the file size or complexity of the livery have an affect on X-Plane frame rate on the client size?

Come to think of it, I'm not normally close enough to a drone during a flight to see livery details anyway.

PS--What about a Kevin Meyers (sp?) drone livery for the crazy helicopter flights like the one off the city hall building in your twitch.tv video?

An honorary KC drone livery, that would be spectacular.

Liveries are just textures, there's no additional triangles being drawn, so you can go nuts on the texture. Drones currently don't send a particular airline/livery code, but they could be hardcoded to send a single distinct airline/livery combo. It would be another step of complexity to have different drones identify themselves as being a different airline/livery than the others, but not impossible.

I have considered a generic drone livery feature in the past so you can visually distinguish drones from live traffic. We have previously said, "hey it shouldn't matter whether it's live or a drone," but there is a social factor that comes into play knowing whether the traffic at the field is live or a drone, and it would be nice to be able to visually distinguish so you don't have to look on the map. It's also very handy in mixed environments such as AVX which frequently has live and drone traffic (as we did during the fly-in).

So, it's something I'd like to move towards when we have an all-HD CSL library.