Skin sets for weapons - Experiment

[ranger822]

As part of Phantom project I discovered that current database doesn't seem to support having mutiple texture sets for weapons. This a somewhat of an issue for things like wing tanks for aircraft. For example; the F-4F has had three major camouflage schemes: 1) N72 - (Grey/Green), N81 Grey/Tan/Green) and N90 (light grey/light bluegrey). THere have also been a variety of experiemental schemes and sub-variations to help complicate the problem if folks want to model these variants. Now the issue is if you want to have multiple skins, if you try to mix the camouflage schemes like N72 and N81 - - the wing tanks will not match up . . . because there is only one skin set assigned to the weapon CT for the wingtank that is assigned to the left and right wing tanks for the F4F. Although you can reassign left and right wing tanks if you wanted the problem still remains you have to choose one skin set to represent the wing tanks.

My experiment was to rework the wingtank models with multiple skin sets to match the vehicile model that carries the wingtanks. I matched up with the five skin sets for the F-4F with the skin sets on the wingtank model, rewrote the parent record and then took a look at the result.

I have to report that it appears that Falcon - Cobra doesn't support more than one texture set for the weapons ... however, it also doesn't seem to influence game play. Falcon seems to ignore or not use the additional skin sets.

If it were possible to have multiple skin sets for weapons it might be possible to better tailor skins and weapons stores and reduce the need to add new CTs for aircraft to accurately represent camouflage schemes. This would seem like a area for coders to look into.

If someone has some sort of work around and knows something that I might have missed please let me know . . .