Kill Insignia

[Lex2Limit]

Hello community,

sorry for opening a Thred for a trivial Topic...i'm searching but didn't find anything for the awnser...

I want to find out, how Kill Insignia are patched on the planes. I know it's in the decals ini . but where are the textures for that? AND how affect it on the Pilot's data?

Situation: Pilot 1 has a kill counter of 47 - Pilot 2 a kill counter of 17. Both has the kill marks on the left splitter (F-4) Pilot 1 flys a F-5C, Pilot 2 a F-4B.

First i think it's addictet to the Plane decals, but when i flew the same Plane with the two pilots the Kill Marks are different. How i can change that?

Pilot 1 has Kill Marks for 1 Kill, 10 Kill and 50 Kill. Pilot 2 have onla Kill Mark 1. For better explaination two screenies...

[+Flanker562]

Don't worry Wrench won't ding you for necrothreading. I would think going into the stock birds and maybe checking out the decals.ini, that might offer you clues as to how it's done. It could be in one of the CATs, but I would think the Decals.ini of a stock plane show you, or it "knows" to pull from that CAT and display it.

[+Wrench]

Look at a decals ini, and seek out the Level=3 statement

(one can also change them to use differing one, as we did for the WW2 mods)

[+daddyairplanes]

they beat me too it

personally, i dont use the 3 level on decals. in a wartime situation (non Vietnam) a pilots kills wouldnt be displayed(opsec). in peacetime, the aircraft will carry small kill marks (generally credited to the aircraft, although some ranking officers have their kills painted on "their" aircraft). 

when i do add kill marks on skins, its a two level (individual serial numbes and nose arts) and based on that birds history. 

but ww2 or your scenaro in mind could be different. so check decal ini; defineatley stock and possibly some from a mod more in line with what you want 

[Shaolin]

As I had actually made the Bf-109 ones back in the days of SF1, I could maybe add a few details.

Like already mentioned, the kill marks are defined by "DecalLevel=3". And like every other decal you can find them where "FilenameFormat=[some folder]/[base filename]" points to. In SF2 that would be in "Objects\Decals\[some folder]".

What i called [base filename] is the name after the last "/".

The files that are used fo the killmarks now all have to be in the format [base filename][number], with [number] being the amount of kills. So as a result, if you don't like how the killmarks are structured, you can create your own ones, one for ervery possible amount of kills you want to have represented (can be a lot of work ).

 

To make it a little bit easier to understand, let's take the current use of my killmarks as an example (yes, they are still used in current mods, albeit uncredited...):

Exempt from Decals.ini

[Decal1011]
MeshName=Rudder
DecalLevel=3
DecalFacing=Left
FilenameFormat=Bf-109/KM/Bars
Position=-5.78,0.82
Scale=0.65
DecalMaxLOD=4

Which means that the killmarks are in "Objects\Decals\Bf-109\KM\", named "Bars000.tga" to "Bars350.tga". In addition you will find a "Bars.tga", which if I remember correctly is used for kills > 350 (or to be precise, for kills not covered by the existing files), but it was so long ago I might be mistaken on that...

 

I hope this helps a bit, happy modding!

 

(And yes, I AM still alive, and reading on this forum. I just don't write much anymore )

Edited 2 hours ago by Shaolin