Simming and Skinning

Came across the Flying Legends site (click here), another great source of flight sim news and downloads. Like all such finds, it’s presently on my sidebar (at least, until that grows too unwieldy). I have so far used it to download new Spanish Civil War (Republican) ‘paintjobs’ for the Il 15 and Il 16 planes I’m presently flying in ’46.

It’s nice to be able to modify the look of the planes one flies. The art of doing this is called ‘skinning’ – after the ‘skins’ which are the graphic bitmap ‘bit that you see’ in the game. Thus, a green skin will create a green plane. The creation of skins is basically a graphics exercise, using programs such as paintshop on a pre-created template for any particular type of plane.

Skinning has been well beyond my time to develop the skills necessary to do properly. And, as there are so many skins created by enthusiasts freely available out in cyberspace, I’ve always seen my limited computer flightsim time being better spent flying (eg. learning to land). I’ve just never actually gotten around to working out exactly how to get other skins to work for me…

That is, until I visited the Flying Legends downloads section, where there’s heaps of downloads available for all versions of the IL 2 family of games. All you need at one spot. For example, I got myself a ‘skins manager’ (originally created by ‘Serval’ and sourced from Simmers Paintshop) to simplify the process initially, and a ‘skinpack’ of SCW republican skins by ‘Harpia Mafraa 55’. Within 5 minutes I was flying my first Spanish plane!

The joys of the internet (though still no further luck with the Teamspeak challenge).