Custom object skins?

[Aragon 0]

I've seen a few people asking for vehicles to come with a few different types of "skins" for the objects showing off different weathering like rust, dirt and battle damage.

From what I know about the current OFP engine to use different skins (textures) on the vehicles would require a duplicate of the vehicle to be made.

Wouldn’t it be nice if in Game 2 we could make and add our own skins?

This works very well in IL-2 Sturmovik, which allows users to place additional skins in directory that has a matching name to the plane’s name the skins are to be used with.

In multiplayer if Skin downloads is enabled these skins (when used) are hashed and given a unique id number (used to construct a new name), which is then shared first with the server followed by the other clients.

Currently in OFP one or more objects are nicely packed away into pbo files. IL-2s implementation doesn’t fit perfectly with this but I would appreciate adding the ability for custom skins and saving us the trouble of having duplicates of addons where the only difference is the textures used.

I don’t think it would be too hard to work out how to make skins work. For example to select a skin for a vehicle it could be up to the mission makers, be choosing it from a list in the object properties window in the mission editor. The list would be constructed from listing all the skins in a directory with the same name as the object, if the directory exists. A default skin (there could also be a number of other skins) would be included in the pbo the object comes in, so if clients don’t have the custom skins they are defaulted to the one that everyone has.

I also think it would be a good thing to manage skins on the server side, so only custom skins on the server are used. Combine this with the type of skin hashing I mentioned above it stops people being able to make and use silly skins, like pure red ones to make objects stand out. They might have the same file names but the hashes would be different, and changing only one pixel of a texture would change the hash.

Just an idea, I can imaging that custom skins would suck if people had the ability to make unrealistic ones and use them in online games for personal gain or just plain bad taste on their behalf but if there is a level of control over them (server administrators and mission makers) then they would be another way to spice up the game in the future and wouldn’t require duplication of addons to achieve.

What do you guys think?