There are two files that are important for planes in this mater. Those are "Gloss1D0o.mat" and "Glass2.mat". They can be open and edited with notepad or wordpad.
"Gloss1D0o.mat" determines the "look" and the light of the plane's body, while "Glass2.mat" determines the same for the canopies and other glass parts.
Both has the same parameters, and the most important for this mod would be:
[LightParams]
Ambient 0.75
Diffuse 1.25
Specular 0.4
SpecularPow 10
Shine 0.0
- Ambient is the visibility of the object,if the number is higher the plane is brighter, and if the number is lower the plane is darker.
- Diffuse does the same for the colors on the object. You can see that I set Ambient 0.75 and Diffuse 1.25, and in that way make plane more contrasted.
- Specular defines a planes shininess, the biger number the more intensive "light", and vice versa.
- SpecularPow usually stands for specular power, but as I know so far that is "specular" in IL2, while SpecularPow determines the size of the specular light. The bigger the size, the area will be smaller on the plane, If it is too small looks funny because of the low polygon count of the planes in IL2, therefore depends from plane to plane.
- Shine determines the emitting light of the object, if you want the plane (or the canopy) to be more visible during night. I didn't see any difference during the day.
Can be made in dll some sort of filter that could pre-proces the textures (according to their mat files)? Maybe if some kind of list could be written in dll? In that way we could even have maybe "bloom".
We have already texture sizes 2048x2048 as BumpH files for textures in the maps, but nobody used them. With properly done Bump texture, the "main" texture can be only splat of color, nothing more, and to look even the better, for example. We already can have maps very different than today, but problem is that people just like IL2 style maps (yellow and flat) and don't want too see something different (or even more realistic).