There's always the question of "How Can I get the decals from my 1stGen aircraft, into SF2 the quickest and easiest way" or, you have a skin/decal set you want to add.
Well, the simple truth is, it's so easy, it'll make your airplane spin!!
Well use in our example, just a something 'pulled out the air', so to speak. All others will be similiar; this is just an example for showing what to move, and what to delete (we'll get to that in a minuite...)
You've download and unzipped the aircraft....our example is my older B-66 skin pak..
then, it's a simple copy/paste of the "86BS" folder to the B-66 (note, the 86BS highlighted)
now, since the /D (or decals subfolder) is STILL inside the skin folder, the Game Engine will not see them. So, the easiest/simplest/quickest way, is to simply copy/patse the ENTIRE SKIN FOLDER -WITH THE INTACT /D SUBFOLDER to the correspondingly named aircaft foler in the ModFolder's /Decals subfolder... please note the highlighted full file pathway -that'll be important in a minute!
Then, simply open this folder, and DELETE everything, but the /D subfolder
that leaves you with an empty skin folder --don't need all the stuff, as this is ONLY for the decals. What this does, is keep the decal callout paths exactly the same, without adding the extra work of editing the decals.ini for each and every skins
example:
[Decal007]
MeshName=Nose
DecalLevel=0
DecalFacing=Left
FilenameFormat=B-66B/84BS/D/NTagL
Position=7.3,-0.40
Rotation=0.0
Scale=2.5
MaxLod=3
you'll notice that I've highlighted the MaxLod= line. There are literaly hundreds of old, perfeclty usable 1stGen skin/decal sets that are completly lacking this line. SF2 NEEDS this line and it must be added, or you decals won't show up. This is expecially true on lots of the WW2 stuff.
SO, open the decals ini and check it. If not, it's an super esay text edit (you just type it in!!) to add.
This is the easiest and simplest way I've found to do it! It works for all skins/decal paks; it'll even work in 08 Level 1stGens too, as they also possess the /Objects/Decals folder.
any questions, comments, request for clairifications, post in the SF2 Mods & Skinning Forums
wrench
kevin stein