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[sakivano]

Hello everyone. Yesterday I purchased IL2 Battle of Stalingrad/Moscow/Kuban and got amazed at que quality of the sim and graphics. Awesome. The problem is, I've just downloaded this pack of skins and I've unzipped them in "c:\Program files (86)\1C Game Studios\IL-2 Sturmovik Great Battles\data\graphics\skins". All the skins are now there, but when I launch the sim, I only see the original skins... Can anybody help me? I guess something is missing... In the official forum they say that once in game, I have to chose Custom instead of official, but there is no skin there to choose

[sakivano]

All right, I can make them work provided that the skin folder is in the game folder. If I follow the advice by SAS~Storebror (place the skin folder in another hard disk and drop it in the game folder as symbolic link) nothing appears.

[SAS~Storebror]

I guess you've mixed up symbolic links and shortcuts.

Shortcuts - the things you can create with Windows per default, just by dragging something with right mouse button and selecting "create shortcut here" on drop - won't work.
IL-2 doesn't see them and almost any other game won't see the contents behind such shortcuts either.

Symbolic Links are completely different.
They work on file system level and the game - IL-2 in this case - doesn't even know that the folder it's trying to access isn't a real folder but a symbolic link to another location.
Windows doesn't support the creation of Symbolic Links without special command line commands and/or specific tools.
The easiest free tool I've seen so far for symbolic link creation (and hard link creation for a similar effect) on Windows is Link Shell Extension.

Symbolic Links definitely work with the custom skins folder.
I'm using it myself that way.


Mike

[sakivano]

Oh, you are right, what I did was to create a shorcut. I`ll try the other way 

[sakivano]

Oh, it works perfectly as you said. Thanks so much!

[SAS~Storebror]

You're welcome


Mike

[SAS~Storebror]

Version 3 of the Skinpack is available in first post.
It's pretty much up to date (last skin updates were about a week ago) and contains almost everything that's available on the net, minus the A&A Paintworks stuff which is still useless online due to the explicit request not to share their skins.


Mike

[JonRedcorn]

Did you put this together? Quite impressive, although I am extremely sour at the delayed p-51. First time I've been actually pissed a the il2 devs.

[SAS~Ghost129er]

Did you put this together? Quite impressive, although I am extremely sour at the delayed p-51. First time I've been actually pissed a the il2 devs.

I've seen some Lagg/Yak skins painted like P51s. Kinda funny but then I realized I'd do the same until I can get me a P51.  

[Mission_bug]

Version 3 of the Skinpack is available in first post.
It's pretty much up to date (last skin updates were about a week ago) and contains almost everything that's available on the net, minus the A&A Paintworks stuff which is still useless online due to the explicit request not to share their skins.


Mike

Thank you very much Mike, really appreciated.

The skin system for the GB series is difficult, most images take a age to load so you can see what is available and then it seems every skin has to have a individual link, maybe the artists need to know which are the most popular, who knows, putting everything into some kind of pack is always more preferable and easier for the user as we can delete anything that is not to our liking or needs.

Take care.


Wishing you all the very best, Pete.

[SAS~Storebror]

I think the biggest caveat of the IL-2 Great Battles custom skins is that they cannot be transferred to other clients automatically like they do in IL-2 1946.
This means that whenever a user wants to use a custom skin online, all others have to have that same skin file too in order to actually see the skin.
No way to get it transferred automatically and no way to download and install it after the game started.
That's a half-baked solution unfortunately, but I don't think the devs care.


Mike

[JonRedcorn]

Their reasoning is anti cheat, ala team dildos.