Skinners Templates
 

What are the chances of getting the aircraft templates before release?

Depend on which release. If russia gets it by the 25th I'd say pretty good for us getting it on the 31st ;)

It will be interesting to see just how good the vanilla skins are, the only decent one in il2:1946 IMHO was the tempest skin.

Also did I hear somewhere here that the vanilla templates are locked?

But you guys know that we will not have skins in the usual form?

I just hope that the servers are able to enforce skins to be used online, vanilla or not.
Would be cool to have authentic skins with swastikas and all, but if it cant be forced to everyone use "real" skins, I'd rather go with vanilla ones so we don't get "unmarked hard to tell the difference" skins.

Really? I haven't done much skinning just played around with skins in il2:1946, so what's the difference between il2:1946 skins and clods skins?

+1

Hopefully they have taken a leaf out of rise of flight and will have a historical and fictional skin pack voted on by the community.

This way you will always see a normal skin unless the other players also have the official skin pack installed.. No downloading at the start of the game, only problem is that the skin packs are getting larger and larger.

This method is by far the best you will always see a historic skin unless you have the fictional skin pack installed.

Oleg or Luthier told that skin files will contain separated layers for riveting/panels, weathing, markings and pure coloring.

AFAIK only the pure color layer will be editable. The benefit is that those separated color layers can be much smaller than the others so online traffic can be saved when it comes to spread them via server to all clients.

I was hoping skins would not be server set, as I said before it should use a system similar to rise of flight, it's a more user friendly way of obtaining skins rather than being forced to download someones obnoxious flame skin or bright pink coloured skin.

Seriously my skin folder was full if so many large files and aggravating color schemes that I'd delete the whole folder rather than search through it for the one or two decent skins.....

As already said, the skins will already come with multiple layers.
I can only imagine that the "rivets" layer and some others will be locked (you can't really change the rivets locations on a real plane) with the ability to only change the "paint" layer.
This will make the skinning process much easier for novice skinners but imagine how much greater work the experienced skinners will produce.
Il2 had 512x512 but I read at one point a couple years back that Oleg was talking about 2048x2048.
Is this still the resolution for the new skins?