Pit & skin dummies for beginners
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It Would be great If someone could post an howto for people like me about changing skins and getting a working pits so I could enjoy flying other aircrafts.
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Follow this for the skins, but be warned that once you change something you will have a very hard time getting it back. Make a copy of anything you plan on changing, incase you make an error, or your system makes one for you. And back-up your logbook too. And key file. Better safe here than sorry later on.
I’m assuming you want to skin an aircraft. Let’s say it’s an F-111D. I’m going to also say you have a clean desktop to play on.
1. Download LOD Editor 6.23 & install. Very helpful to find which .dds numbers are on which aircraft, and which skin set too.
2. Download or create your new skin sets.
3. The readme that comes with a downloaded skin may explain better on where to place things, especially if it comes with a 3d model, too.
4. Find the a/c you want to alter in the LODEditor program, to run LODEditor you need to know where korealod.hdr is located and point it there on program start.
5. Most aircraft have multiple versions, I usually click the vehicle bullet/point(Upper mid-screen, in the view area), then click the name box in the partial spread sheet, and scroll down to the bird I wish to alter.
6. Highlight the aircraft by clicking on it (screen left) - this will fill in the boxes in the middle and right side of the screen.
7. In the box marked Mode under the data section (mid screen), make sure it says 0) Normal. If it doesn’t click another line in the listing until you find one that says normal in the mode box. For the F111D there is only one, so no big deal.
8. On the right side of the program window, at least half way down the window, you’ll see a button saying View LOD Tex. Clilck the button.
9. A new screen pops up, with immages in boxes. These immages are all applied to the F111D in game.
10. Notice there is a set of arrows (l and r) on the right side of the screen? If the a/c has multiple skin sets you can move through them with these arrows. One skin set is listed per page. I like to alter the last page if there is more than one, since on the F-16 skins the first three pages tend to use alot of the same parts, maybe only changing the tail art or something like that.
11. At the top of the screen you see a section labeled Selected texture : you want the Text ID #. It will be different for each immage/part of the skin. And each skin set will likely have different textures. You want all the TEXT ID’s on the pictures on that page, write them down, and maybe a description of what they are/where they would go. Ex. ID 1972 looks like wings, fins, and fuselage, ID 10 looks like the middle fuselage, and ID 1536 looks like engine exhaust/nozzle/afterburner stuff.
12. The ID# is the name of a .dds file found in your BMS directory, this will be the file you want to replace. Make a copy of it in another folder incase you want to revert back to it later on. The directory that those files are located in, for example, is (in my case using windows) [C:/Falcon BMS 4.32/Data/Terrdata/objects/KoreaObj/].
13. Name the new files the same as those you want to replace - if that wasn’t done already by whoever crafted the skin package - match the new ones to the old and use that file name of old on the new. Drag the newly created/downloaded .dds files to the folder listed in step 12. Wait, you already have a file in this folder with this name? That’s the idea! Don’t keep the old one at this point, if you already made a copy of it and stored it elsewhere.
14. Close LOD Editor, close the folder you’re copying from, close the BMS destination folder. At this point I’m saying there are no open windows, I optimise my pc to fly again and launch BMS. When I go to fly my F111D now the new skin set I chose has been painted on and is dry, ready to use. At this point I fly.To the working pit concern, I don’t know at present how to fool around with those - what I have I have. You can set anything to have an F-16 pit, if that’s what you mean by working. If so the information is on the forum here somewhere, click the search button.
Hope you find this helps more than it confuses.
-Babite -
I tried downloading Metalheads F-22 pit & airframe project. Even while trying to follow his directions for installation I managed to mess things up pretty good - I have that talent. The person who releases something will normally have instructions for you to follow to properly install their work. Check EVERY PIECE of documentation that comes with whatever modification you want to use or install. READ IT THROUGH TWICE. In my case I still don’t know what I did wrong, but something got deleted. So if you come across a problem with something first look for posts from others, see if someone else had the same issue and how it was solved, and try their fix. If that doesn’t work, definately start asking for help and describe your issue, what you’ve done, etc… . If someone connected with that mod. sees your problem they may have a quick fix for you - maybe they’ve seen it before - or may be willing to work with you to get it fixed.
-Babite -
Ok, here come some very noobish questions:
“view LOD tex” => I don’t see images, only grey squares. Why?I get the feeling that I’ve done something wrong, since:
- I did not install LOD Editor because there was no setup.exe (or something like that), i just executed LODEditor.exe
- I had to move the mfc71 and msvcr71 dll’s from their default folder to the same folder als LODEditor.exe to be able to use the 3D viewer
- The file numbers of the skins are always very different from the Text ID numbers
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Click on the “Preferences” tab, then click the “Use DDS Skins” line, and then try to check the skin files with the view lod tex button. For example, I select the A-1H, click the view lod tex button, then a window pops up and shows me the skins associated with that model. On my relatively stock installation the A-1H has 4 skin sets. If I were to click on the first texture that came up on the first page it shows a Text ID # of 2107, which would be the .dds file named 2107 in the BMS 4.32/Terrdata/objects/Koreaobj folder. If I chose the first file to come up on the third texture page it has the Text ID # 2115, being 2115.dds located in that same objects folder. To change the skin set or page use the arrow buttons on the right side of the page. There should really be no difference between the texture you see there and the one you want to look at.
TIP Don’t click the X button to close the texture viewer window, it won’t work. Instead click the close button within the window and it will close the window.
-Babite -
Thanks for the quick reply. How stupid of me not to find that preference.
I understood the concept of it, but now there is something else: switching between the skin sets sometimes works, sometimes it doesn’t (completely).e.g: for the A-1H skins, I can follow your example.
But if I select the F-16C50 (C#2467, so the 0) normal - version) and I select e.g. the vertical stabilizer (SP, red) texture;
and then switch to the next skin set, then the Text ID is updated correctly but the visual representation of the texture in LODEditor is not.
I checked with Gimp that ID’s 3472 (SP blue) , 3473 (SW red), 3482, 3491, 3500 are indeed all the different vertical stabilizers,
but in LODEditor, I still see the red SP stabilizer. This is very weird since the representation of the texture in LODEditor
is correct in the case of the A-1H but wrong for the F-16C50, C30, C15…This is not really a problem if the order the sorts of textures is identical in every set,
but it is weird. -
I follow you somewhat. I can say this: If you have not clicked on that texture in the tex viewer window to get it to expand somewhat you may not notice a difference in the skins associated with that aircraft. I don’t think the box updates on each page of the texture viewer, but if you were to click to zoom in some you should see a different skin. The other thing that I have noticed wiht the F-16 sets - when they have six sets/pages of skins - is that the first three pages tend to share many of the same skin sets/paint jobs, like the nose, back, belly, wings … then pages 4-6 differ somewhat from the first 3. Is that what you mean, or are you after something else?
My skills with LodEditor are not great - I’ve done some bad things myself. I freely admit I am still “green” when it comes to that. But hopefully you find my limited experience helpful.
-Babite
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…"I don’t think the box updates on each page of the texture viewer, but if you were to click to zoom in some you should see a different skin. -Babite
=>This is what I meant, zooming indeed shows the correct texture, but the small version in the main window is not the correct one. Using the refresh button does not change this. But this is not a real problem, zooming works fine.
… The other thing that I have noticed wiht the F-16 sets - when they have six sets/pages of skins - is that the first three pages tend to share many of the same skins … then pages 4-6 differ somewhat from the first 3. -Babite
=>This appears to be the case, so if you only want to change a skin which is accidentally one of the first three of the set of six, then the other two skins of this subset of 3 will be partially
changed as well. E.g. they could now have the arctic camo skin body with a standard SP stabilizer. Solved this for the moment by swapping the stabilizers of e.g. skin 3 and 4, which luckily had the same body paint scheme, and then changing skin 4, which does not change skins 1 to 3. This sharing of skin textures could be annoying to some.…But hopefully you find my limited experience helpful. -Babite
=>Very helpful, thanks a lot.
It should be (it probably is, but I haven’t looked for this thoroughly) possible within a skin set to change the pointers to the skins instead of the dds-textures itself.
Then sharing is no problem, you would also be able to add as much skins as you like and only use a number of them or change them independently at will. -
… This sharing of skin textures could be annoying to some.
It should be (it probably is, but I haven’t looked for this thoroughly) possible within a skin set to change the pointers to the skins instead of the dds-textures itself.
Then sharing is no problem, you would also be able to add as much skins as you like and only use a number of them or change them independently at will.Annoying to share the skins across three different styles - YES! Especially when the 3d viewer uses the first skin set and so you need to manipulate more controls to get the skin set that you want!
I don’t know what you mean on the last part of your post: the pointers to the skins instead of the dds textures - the skin files are .dds extentions that aren’t supposed to loose as much information due to compression as a .jpeg file does. I found this out a while back when I saved a file as .jpeg, shut down my system for a day and the next day when I opened it up to continue working on it I found a WHOLE BUNCH of NOISE in the file. By noise I may mean artifacts that get left behind from the compression of the file. PC graphics terms are not something I’m fully fluent in. But I know that the graphics get messed up the more I alter and save them.
-Babite -
Pointers store the (starting) address of a variable or file. A file name or variable name is just
the for-humans-readable symbolic form of this address.Example about pointers:
E.g. in skin set 2 the upper right wing texture is expected to be named e.g. 1234.dds.
What we do to change the skin in game, is overwrite 1234.dds; because the game expects the upper right wing texture to be named that way,
the pointer to (= file name of) the texture is fixed apparently.Instead, we could change the pointer to the texture and say that the upper right wing texture to be used is now to be found at a different address,
in e.g. newupperrightwing.dds instead of 1234.dds.
No need to overwrite an existing file, just link the “right wing” in the skin set to a different texture.
The texture is found in two steps: the game goes to look for the right wing texture, it finds reads the pointer to it(which you can adapt)
to the location of the texture, it follows that pointer and uses the texture at that location were it was pointed to.This does not change anything for the game itself, it just needs to look at the location where you said that the right wing is, newupperrightwing.dds.
Then you could have e.g. newupperrightwing.dds, newupperrightwing_v2.dds, newupperrightwing_v3.dds and so on,
and just switch to a new right wing by changing the file name the game needs to look for.Long story short, you then only have to change the pointer to the texture, not the texture itself.
Then you could e.g. delete all but one F16C skin sets, and make all F-16C’s look the same,
or store hundreds of skin sets and change to a different skin set at will or even combine parts of different skin sets together.
But now, it seems to appear as if the file names for the textures are be “hard coded”
(=litteraly using “1234.dds” in the code instead of a variable named e.g. “right_wing_file” which contains the
filename of the file that contains the right wing texture and is adjustable by the user, “right_wing_file” is the adjustable pointer, “1234.dds” is the fixed pointer),
meaning the game will e.g. always look for e.g. “1234.dds” to find the right wing,
so we are left with no other option than to overwrite this dds, and then shared dds-files limit the flexibility.This could be annoying and maybe the code was just not made with this in mind, but I don’t mean to whine about this, BMS is awesome.
