Hi Guys,
This is my first post here but I have been a long time lurker.
I am a founder of the Axis and Allies Paintworks website. We pride our selves on making historically accurate skins to the best of our ability within the limitations of the virtual world. Il-2 has, for many years, provided us with
the best platform to make historically correct skins and this is purely because of it's fully customizable (in most cases) templates.
Some people posting in this thread seem to take offence that we are questioning the means of skinning in this new game and say that we are elitist and "big headed" just for worrying about the future integrity of our hobby. Are we suddenly wrong for wanting and aiming for perfection? For years, people have downloaded our work because of this historical accuracy, the time, effort and research we put into our skins. To then be dismissed by the company which we have supported for the past 10 years is deeply offending and disheartening.
In principal, the idea of having multi layered skins with the panel lines in a separate file is an excellent idea to help new people coming into skinning, BUT, If Il-2 is anything to go by, we have seen that skinning is not a high priority on the list of things to do as some of the original release skins were truly dreadful... Many of you have been saying that "well, the skins have improved over time, look at the 4.09 release". Yes, I agree, but that is because many of them have been done by us. Members of the community who have spent months building these templates to get them as accurate as possible, hours researching colours (Just recently Myself and a friend spent 3 days messing with colours trying to get the most accurate match for the photographs of the aircraft in question), and months researching, reading and searching for information on particular aircraft.
I am not against having the panel lines as being none editable, BUT, as it is possible to turn off the weathering in game if we want, why not make it possible to turn these off? People here are saying that "These panel lines and rivets are 100% accurate, why would you want to change it!?!" Well, that's simple, I can guarantee you that they are not. That is not to say that ours would be 100% either (Perfection is, as they say, something you spend 99% of the time chasing and rarely achieve) however not having these layers as editable means that we would not be able to change opacity of the lines or rivets which in itself can be a major downfall of an otherwise great skin.
As I said, I am not here to say "this sucks, that sucks" and get into a pointless argument over X,Y and Z but surely you can see from the sheer number of downloads of skins over the last 10 years, that skinning is a huge part of Il-2 and really does add to the game... I am all for helping new people get into skinning, the more the merrier, but for us old hands who've been at it for a while, this is a severely limiting factor.
Please do not take this as an offensive post to Oleg, 1C, Ubisoft or any other single individual, myself and my friends here such as Cheruskerarmin who started this thread are merely trying to ensure that our hobby is here for the long term. I realise that many of you out there say that "Most people dont care about 100% accuracy" but the fact is that there are some people that do. I've never heard of anybody complaining about something being too accurate but ofcourse I have heard of the reverse. Remember the old days of Il-2 when people complained of aircraft having porked FM's? This is just as bigger deal as that to us. For all our time, effort and dedication which we put into skinning, to be dismissed as "Horrible 10 minute hack jobs" was extremely wrong.
All the best,
Rob.
www.axis-and-allies-paintworks.com