LanceCriminal86

Weirdly I feel like I found more 86/87 pics on the Tomcat side than '88. Finding jets with names and callsigns was not easy. Even tougher, try finding anything for 1991 of VF-11. Outside of the Lock On book series there's almost nothing, and very few of the scans used in the books are readable enough for names. AND it looks like VF-11 had two sets of names on different sides of at least some of their jets on that cruise. I am very appreciative folks have been working on getting the Intruders, E-2s, S-3s, etc. painted up though, as I like replicating photos from the cruise with Reshade and film filters. There's a private A-7E mod out there somewhere too but I'm hoping the Flying Iron project will progress quickly enough to see something next year or so.

11/31 are still getting some more jets and some reworks to the current '88 ones. Shmoo42 did the 31 tails up and I did the rest of the jet, he's going to take over reworking the existing 31 and adding 2 more, and doing more dedicated weathering/roughmets to go with them. I'm working on AE-111 right now, I think I overdid the corrosion control and am probably going to rework it yet again. I'd also say, yeah overdoing the stains and dirt. 11 and 31 have some moderately dirty jets and they had a couple of big exercises up north but none of them looked nearly that rough. Honestly the existing weathering layers and roughmets worked pretty well overall for the 80s gull gray jets. These are a bunch of the reference pics we have been using from the national archives, from '88 and '89 including the exercises TEAM WORK and WEST WIND: https://nara.getarchive.net/search?created_date_from=1988&created_date_to=1989&page=1&q=forrestal Also re-saving over the existing skins is going to degrade the quality since you're importing an already compressed DDS and then compressing it a second time when you save it.

EDIT - Did a repair, re-installed Barthek's 2021 with Taz's trees V5, no issues:

This has been reported numerous times, ground handling has already been listed as a planned rework point in the future.

The /s means sarcasm mode.

60 and 65 were the "production" but really pre-production and test jets that went to Pax River, VX-4, PMTC, and some to VF-124, where they generally stayed or were mothballed until rebuilt in the 80s.

IF the skin author actually put the work in, an "A" skin will have the turbine warning stripe further to the rear on the fuselage to where it's right about at the front edge of the horizontal stabs, while a "B" has them a bit further forwards. Otherwise at this point you'd have to know which squadrons flew Bs and when. Or just decide to not care.

The overarching concern is not just having to cut up the model to add the areas where the numbers need to go, and to add a few variations, but also that the model has to store and load/display/hide a lot of things based on animation arguments. Keep adding stuff on like the desired TCS variants, ALQ-126 antennas, maybe old gun vents, etc. and there's a ton more stuff that can impact performance. And I think it was also mentioned there may be limits to how many arguments can be loaded. Oh, and dynamic MODEX isn't going to be great for when you need digit kerning and raked digits like pretty much every Tomcat squadron used, or really the Navy in general. But it seems the people screaming for dynamic modex aren't the kind that care about accuracy there anyways.

Should be: F-14B F-14a-135-gr Skins technically work for both, but markings for B are different than markings for A in some places. Some don't care, for me it makes for eye twitches.

People: We need more MODEX to actually have a full flight of the same squadron! Also people: My hard drive nooooo!!!!!! If ED allowed for "DLC" of just liveries to be enabled in the module management in DCS, that might be a way to somehow please everyone. Because boy howdy, y'alls hard drives are going to start crying when me and the boys really get working after the model/texture updates someday. I went and got an SSD just for DCS, and had to relocate all of my skinning WIP files and templates. And I know the other skinners have even larger folder sizes because they're churning out full 12 MODEX stacks of liveries.

201 pic would have to be at least '87 or after as that was one of the last A models produced, a -140-GR, the last of which went to their sister squadron in April of '87. 201 might have gotten their two 140s in late 86 or earlier in '87. Their first carrier quals with the Tomcat were in June 1987 on Forrestal and they were still short a few jets, and had to borrow some from VF-202. *The "official" date on that Phoenix shot is August 1987. ALQ-126 showed up at the end of 110-GR with 161168, and then all subsequent blocks. So pinpoint when 161168 was delivered and you have your date, but VF-11 and VF-31 got their spanking new 130-GRs in '85 or '86, so it would seem early 80s for those iterations is right. Apparently 161166 was delivered in March of '81, so anything built around '81 or after would have the ALQ-126. But lots of squadrons still had the older block jets which continued to get shuffled around and were even in use through the 90s and even 00s. And the ALQ-126 are coming for the B and -135 A with a model/texture update after the Viggen gets its big patch this month. There's some stuff up in the air as to whether it can get added like the non-updated gun vents for 80s jets, changes to the ALR antennas for ALR-45 vs ALR-67, the beaver tail, and how the other TCS versions will be done. The desire is stuff to be anim arguments where possible to allow for broader variations to be represented but we'll have to see what we get.

I spent a lot of my time in high school with Silent Hunter 2 and Destroyer command, was on a pretty big naval surface stuff bender. I don't necessarily expect DCS to ever properly get into that Dangerous Waters / Janes Fleet Commander type space in depth, but I really hate seeing the ship options so barren. I used to love reading dad's Bluejacket's Manual and his old ship identification books from his Academy days and still have some stacks of books around here I bought when I was trying to paint ships in Destroyer Command. I'm hoping to have some more free time to dip into boat stuff and modeling here in the future.

Most photos I found of the class do show a good portion of the black paint band being exposed while anchored and underway, but I wasn't sure if it should have more of that black band, which I understand is there to combat corrosion at the waterline, should also extend more past the waterline. While trying to see if I'm totally wrong about it, I came across this, and there's a few others of the class in extremely rough seas with the whole bows exposed to the bottom, and they appeared to be completely black, or possibly the red bottoms were covered or discolored from being at sea: I'm not sure if this is a different sub-class as it looks like the turret is gone, or maybe a conversion of some kind? If I'm reading right this would be the Leander herself. Is this the Ikara system? In whatever case I'm glad to be proven wrong, I've just noticed a lot more lately that with DCS' current water implementation the waterlines and red underside paint become a lot more obvious. Proper sea transparency and visibility dropoff plus actual wakes and churn should alleviate it but some ships have looked like they are riding pretty high. It looks like across this whole class and the follow on classes there was always a black band visible so definitely not asking for that to change.

I'm curious about the waterline paint, shouldn't the black band extend deeper? Or should the ship sit a little lower? The current DCS water doesn't help being almost crystal clear at these angles but it seems like the ship is riding pretty high. I did see some photos that appeared to look that way though, but then others at sea/underway didn't.

Technically I've only released one skin and it's super out of date. My problem is the opposite on the perfectionist spectrum where I want to just release them once and be done, so waiting for some of the deeper texture/model fixes, and the right helmets, etc. But hey, at least I got some VF-11 skins done, I do need to get one more MODEX in for 1988 and make a nice weathering/unique detail pass on each. Might try to improve the helmets too, still not 100% happy with the lines. It's not easy doing that pattern the way the helmet was unwrapped but miles better than the Hornet helmet.

Also, I've been using the old Simmer's Paintshop values minus about 10% brightness for all my skins, and I've turned off the "final adjustment" layers in the template. I think to me those values looked pretty good in balancing between some of the photos I have seen of more modern jets and the older photos/slide scans. Some of the samples of Light Ghost hex values seemed to have it with almost a red/purple hue, which in some photos seems to look right, but not in older 80s/90s ones. https://web.archive.org/web/20060719170212/http://www.simmerspaintshop.com/colours/fs595b-3000.html

Dude, Rick and I went through that on the 1991 VF-31 skins he did. It's clearly not just Light Gull, or just Light or Dark Ghost. Some of the photos from the Lock On book clearly show that the jets were a strange patchwork of the two. I'm trying to do some VF-11 to go with them and at least one VF-11 jet was that way, the tails are clearly Light Gull but lots of the rest of the jet forwards are light or maybe dark ghost-ish. And there's so few photos of those jets that all we have to go on are scans of a book, which weren't great and in themselves messed with the colors. You've also got VF-41 that went totally Medium Gray in 1999 timeframe, where some sources said Dark Ghost. Why? Because reasons. I've also got some photos of VF-201's last 101 jet that really looked like it was overall dark ghost, but I'm undecided if I'm going to go that way on the skin or not. Sometimes it's almost impossible to pick out the TPS pattern. There are some good values out there to use, I think it's smart to sort of standardize on a value and then adjust some saturation/brightness values here and there to add those variations but try to stay near a central tone. Adding some corrosion control and fading also helps.

But the rest of the guy's shots aren't really like that. I've seen some actual super blue shifted photos where old Kodachrome slides were scanned and they didn't do the tungsten color offsets, and this does not look like that. Here's VF-142 from the same year, looking at the Light Gull tails in the background, those are pretty damn close to the same shades of LGG I've seen in all kinds of photos so far, to include the VF-31 or VF-101 jet that got it at the end and went on display in California: It doesn't look over saturated or fake HDRd to me, but it does seem like the colors are quite different from the typical Medium Gray, Dark Ghost, and Light Ghost we see. Here's his album, he's got some great stuff on Flickr to include one of Gunfighter 160 in the Light Gull scheme. I really don't think these two pics were overprocessed. https://www.flickr.com/photos/147668976@N06/albums/72157668182600938/with/39862897610/

Also fun is that when trying to turn FS colors to Hex or RGB values, you will find a few different versions and standards out there. TPS colors I have like 3 different Hex value sets and all 3 have different looks. Then sampling model reference sheets and paint company samples you get another set of shades. Kodachrome was an iconic film and most of the great Tomcat pics were taken with it, but it makes things really rough trying to figure out the colors for making skins. There's also some photos out there from 1981 of VF-142 and VF-143 that really look like they were experimenting with different grays and blues for the TPS scheme, maybe even using the same blue as the Farris scheme did. But, again, it could be photo processing and the actual film making Medium Gray FS35237 look really blue, though it seems there is still a darker blue/gray on top. It could also be a different color than dark ghost gray on the sides and tails, and on the sides of the intake.

Use snapping in Photoshop, then drag the actual DDS files from the skin folder onto the 3 in 1. Photoshop will link those files, and as they are updated in the folder you can have it auto-update them. I got it working to where I could move the psd from one skin folder to the next and it would update based on whatever folder it was in, for the most part. Also work methodically top left to right. If you have snapping on, it will snap the first one to the top left corner, then the next one right next to it, etc.

Re-saving DDS files loses quality. It would be better for Isoko to natively re-export as BC7 with mips.

Couldn't find a 104 after the last one was lost off Ranger in 1987. 107 was 160694 from Oct 1990 through 91 at least and looks like through 93 when they shut down. 162611 was NE-111 from May of 87 to Dec 1991 at least. 160887 was NE-112 from Feb 1989 to December of 91 at least. 162592 was NE-113 from December '87 to June '92.

Drop this in after the texture section but before the country list: custom_args = { [509] = 1.0, --Helmet Change }

I guess the alternative ED maintains a list of which skins to use per module, or, modules/mods just have a LUA callout somewhere which sets to use.