Some new official info from ubi forums
 

For those of you who haven't read it yet:

The Dev team are trying to answer all of your frequently answered questions. To kick things off here are a couple they’ve answered for you this week…

Community Answers – Part 2

Q. What options are available to skinners? For example, will they have any control over weathering layers and panel lines or is that hardcoded?

A. The panel lines and weathering are not available for editing. You can only do the overall paintjob. We felt that this was the most balanced decision, considering the fact that most paintschemes on online servers in our previous titles were horrible quick hack-jobs that made aircraft look atrocious. By expertly applying professional overlays on top of your custom skin we ensure that every single skin looks good. We even feel that this is historically accurate. As a real person approaching a real aircraft with a bucket of paint, you can paint over the existing structure any way you like, but you can’t re-rivet the skin or rearrange the panels.

Q. How many campaigns are there? One Spitfire, one Hurricane, one 109, one 110?

A. One British campaign, in which you fly the Hurricane and the Spitfire, and one German campaign in which you fly the 109, the 110 and the Stuka.

Q. How big are the bomber formations in most missions? Is the 'bomber unit' size scalable in campaigns?

A. We balanced our campaign missions for minimum spec machines, so bomber formations are pretty small. The largest mission is about 50 planes total, 21 of them bombers and the rest fighters.
If you have a more powerful machine, larger battles are of course possible.

Q. Are the airfields and surroundings 'alive' in campaigns - you know, vehicles moving around, crew figures, a NAAFI truck?

A. All life has to be hand-built by the mission designer. All our stock missions come with very busy airfields.

Q. Are there any animated characters in briefings, on the field before or after flights?

A. No

Q. Do kill markings get recorded on your aircraft skin? (Probably not, but it's nice to day dream.)

A. There are actually kill markings. They are applied as a separate decal onto some, but not all, fighters. You just enter a “kills” number into your plane options, and voila, it’s there.


http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/t...9/m/5151024809

Thanks:) Interesting

"considering the fact that most paintschemes on online servers in our previous titles were horrible quick hack-jobs that made aircraft look atrocious"

Sorry?? They appear to be quite out of touch with the community here. There are tons of professional skinners who would rather drop dead than produce a quick hack-job, let alone the number of improved internal and corrected riveting layers is boundless.

i have a lot of very weird and ugly skins in my cache folder from flying online in the VOW online war......................

anyway, could you imagine how big CoD quility skins would be for the network traffic ?!?!?!
so, "only" the colors have to be tranfered.
I belive its a good solution, even some crack skinners will not like it !

I am certainly aware of the fact that the basic idea is to reduce network traffic, yet lost why they do not state this as their main reason. The statement I quoted is simply offensive and not representative of the actual truth. Of course, there are atrocious skins, but they certainly are not the majority like it is conveyed by the above statement.

Yes, i've seen some terrible terrible looking skins. Oleg made a wise decision in my eyes. It should make skinning easier for the average user, thus giving us (the community) alot more quality skins to choose from for our own self-built campaigns and missions. All in all its going to be much more professional looking than 1946 is.

You are aware that the colour layer is the one that actually turns a skin into an atrocious one, right? Just because you can't alter rivets and weathering doesn't mean people will stop putting Hello Kitty stickers on them or black flames or whatever nonsense floats their boat. So this decision will have no impact on this whatsoever.

I disagree. Where the skinner doesn't have to go in and personally apply every rivet, and apply weathering by hand it's no doubt going to make the process alot easier. And, if people are really going to put hello kitty on their plane than thats just making them a big huge target. Not only for being shot at, but for being flamed as well. For those of us that actually take this sim more seriously, this decision by Oleg is a good one. This is my personal belief, i'm not necessarily sticking up for Oleg.

The skinners actually enjoy this process, that is why they are skinners in the first place. Painting a simple camo pattern is kindergarten level and will certainly discourage the top skinners of our community.

A bomber-formation of 21? I understand if the user can increase this, but that is just pathetic. I hope there is an easy way for the user to select formation sizes in order to increase them for the campaign.
I was hoping, with the improvement in technology, that it would be possible to have huge formation sizes like in BoB2. Of course, this could all change, but I was hoping for a larger size than this as a baseline.