Some template layers for Gladiator J8A

[WTE_Galway]

Originally Posted by Eckhart

Great work Galway! I always wanted to have the true internals of a Gladiator and not to fly around in a J8A. Now how can I make it work?

Sorry I am quite a noob regarding skin making: I tried to use your mech layer with a J8A template I downloaded. No matter what I do, I always get the standard internals once I start flying. Could you give me a step by step description how I can make it work (do I have to delete the original mech layer? do i have to change the void? etc.)

Many thanks for this great work!

Cheers,

Eckhart

Firstly just to clarify. These layers will only change what cockpit you see when looking from outside the plane. They replace the cockpit you see when looking over the pilots shoulder through the canopy in external view not the cockpit you get when flying.

There is no currrent way to change the cockpit you see from inside the plane.

In external view the default cockpit actually seems to be a darkened version of a Gladiator instrument panel. The Gladiator panel was in 3 parts with different gauges. The J8A had a single one piece panel. The default external view does no provide a J8A pit.

Interestingly the in game external spinning prop once the motor starts also seems to be a modelled on a Gladiator. it is probably the 3 bladed one as you can see a yellow prop tip. I assume these oddities are leftovers from the decision to change from a Gladiator flyable to a J8A flyable part way through.

At one stage there were templates around that had alternate panels. I have seen excellent skins based on a template by Cpt_Haddock that had an beautiful J8A cockpit but this template is no longer available. Hence the reason I decide to post these ones up.


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Getting the templates to work.

Basically you need to choose the cockpit layer you want to use (and engine layer if you want to update that) and put it above the existing mech layer in photoshop, paintshop pro or gimp.

You still need to have either the existing mech layer or void mechs as I only updated the cockpits and engine.

When you zoom in on the cockpit area of the skin you should see the new cockpit as it is above the old one in the layers. You then need to save the resultant skin as a 256 bit indexed BMP in the J8A skin folder. The best way of doing this is to use "Bright" which you can download from sites like Mission 4 Today or Simmers Paintshop.

If you just want to replace the cockpit on an existing skin, open the skin in your editor, past the cockpit layer above teh original skin and make sure it lines up and once again save as a 256 color indexed BMP.

Good luck with it.