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[SAS~Storebror]

Hi folks,

We'd like to share the collection of skins, which I've gathered throughout the past months for IL-2 Great Battles, with you.
Note: These are skins we've gathered elsewhere.
We don't claim ownership of any of them.
The fact that we don't put up a credits list here is simply because there are so many skinners involved, and for some of the skins we don't even know where we got them from anymore.
If you are one of those who made a skin provided in this pack and would like to be credited explicitely, please let us know and we'll add your name to this post.

The full set of downloads is about 55 Gigabytes, separated by plane and tank types, available for all planes and tanks of IL-2 Great Battles.

Download Links of Skin Pack Version 3:

Download Link (MediaFire): IL-2 Great Battles Skin Pack Version 3 @MediaFire
Download Link (OneDrive): IL-2 Great Battles Skin Pack Version 3 @OneDrive
Torrent: IL-2 Great Battles Skin Pack Version 3 Torrent

Installation instructions:
Extract each downloaded rar archive file to the IL-2 Great Battles Skins folder. The rar  includes the plane's subfolder name, so if you extract the rar as-is, all skins will end up in the plane subfolder they belong to.
The default skin folder location is:
C:\Program Files (x86)\1C Game Studios\IL-2 Sturmovik Battle of <Stalingrad/Moscow/Kuban>\data\graphics\skins
If you have a Steam installation, the default location is:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\IL-2 Sturmovik Battle of <Stalingrad/Moscow/Kuban>\data\graphics\skins

Q&A:

Q: No Credits?
A: Will be added on demand.
Q: Why do you do this at all? The Skins are available already from their original authors!
A: It's for the sake of simplicity and because IL-2 Great Battles has some nasty behaviour with custom skins online: You see them if both participants (the one who's flying with custom skin and the one who's watching) have the same skin installed. Otherwise the one who's watching will just see the default skin.
Simplicity adresses the way skins are rolled out to the wider public.
Unfortunately all the forums dealing with skins failed in establishing a working gallery and clear rules for skin distribution.
Therefore 10-15% of all existing skin download links are dead, the others use about 10 different hosters and the downloaded files use 5 different formats and endless different internal folder structures.
The download threads of e.g. the official il2sturmovik.com forum are cluttered with endless chatter, it's hard to find any real D/L link among them at all, sometimes you have like 20 posts per page but just one of them is a skin download, and the link is hidden behind a spoiler.
Furthermore some skinners established a nasty habit of adding fancy prefixes to their skins like "@1_" or "1A" of "__" to make them appear upfront of any other skin.
All of this is fixed in one go with this pack.

Cheers!
Mike

[cgagan]

Many thanks Mike!!!!

[sniperton]

Thanks a lot, Mike, a very a good idea, and a really useful collection

[SAS~Skylla]

Thank you Mike, much appreciated

[Forager]

SAS~Storebror, THANK YOU!

I have just decided to get back into the Battle of series and your gift has arrived at the perfect time.
Trying to find skins at the official site was, as you said, very difficult.

Again, thanks.

[Paulo Hirth]

  20hours 32min download utorrent!!  That's a huge pack!! BIG TY!

[Blaubaer]

It is a pity that other (multiplayer) pilots can only see your cool skin if they have it installed as well. As it is now, maybe squads can benefit. Freelancers remain alone with their skins.

Regards, Michael

[SAS~Gerax]

Many thanks for all your work with this skinpack Mike! 

btw, do you thinks its a good idea to move the then large skin folder to a 'normal' HD
and so away from the SSD from where I run BoX with using symbolic link(s) ?
When does BoX load the skins? At startup? Or is it critical for performance to not have
the skins on SSD? I play SP only (of course  ).

[SAS~Storebror]

I would definitely not recommend wasting precious SSD space with custom skins.
Never ever.
Not in IL-2 1946 and not in IL-2 Great Battles either.

Having the game itself on SSD is always a good idea as it fights all kind of lag and stutters, namely Spawn-Lag on IL-2 1946 and Lag all over the place on IL-2 Great Battles after the 3.001 update.
Skins however are a different thing.
Their files will only ever get accessed once in a game session (from then on, that texture is in RAM) and the files are large but compared to other files to be loaded they're just very few and they never come in a bunch.
Therefore parallel access to many files (IOPS = Input/Output operations per second) doesn't cound, seek time doesn't count, all that counts - if at all - is the sequential transfer rate, and in that regard good HDDs are not that much different from cheap SSDs and that's by far sufficient for the task.

As you have suggested correctly Gerhard, the key to success is to use Symbolic Links if you have your game on SSD.
Windows Users will have easy access to Symbolic Links using this tool: Link Shell Extension

Now if your game is on SSD, you will want to create a separate Folder on HDD to hold your skins (name it whatever you want, I call it "D:\MyIL2GBFiles" for this time).
Then you go to the game's skin folder.
The default skin folder location for IL-2 Great Battles is:
C:\Program Files (x86)\1C Game Studios\IL-2 Sturmovik Battle of <Stalingrad/Moscow/Kuban>\data\graphics\skins
If you have a Steam installation, the default location is:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\IL-2 Sturmovik Battle of <Stalingrad/Moscow/Kuban>\data\graphics\skins
Go back one step and move the "skins" folder to your "D:\MyIL2GBFiles" folder.

Next open up two Explorer Windows.
In one of the windows, you navigate to the IL-2 Great Battles "data\graphics" folder.
In the other window, you navigate to the folder holding your new HDD skins folder, in this case it'2 "D:\MyIL2GBFiles".
Now right-click the "skins" folder inside there and drag it over to the other window, then release the right mouse button.
A menu will pop up from which you select "drop as"->"Symbolic Link".
This will get you a symbolically linked subfolder "skins", which points to "D:\MyIL2GBFiles\skins", inside your IL-2 Great Battles "data\graphics" folder.
Voilá, you're done.

Cheers!
Mike

[Duggy]

Mike I do hope none of these are from A&A, we are checking.
It is quite clear when downloaded that they are not to be uploaded elsewhere.

Duggy

[SAS~Storebror]

Hi Duggy,

Yes I've seen that note and did not include any skins which I got from A&A website in that pack for that very reason.

Cheers!
Mike

[Duggy]

Appreciated Mike 

Regards Duggy