Aircraft Profile Discussion Thread

[garrisonchisholm]

This almost shouldn't be here since I have no skills to create such a thing, I'm just an idea guy, but I think this idea has some legs.

I expressed this thought to tortugapower a while back and I thought I would open a more public conversation on the topic, for his benefit and others.

I couldn't help but feel that what would be nice is to have an "aircraft data card" much like the ship cards now in the game, so that you could click on an aircraft and then the mod would bring up a 3-view profile, perhaps lifted straight from Wikipedia (legality?).  The profiles would be sorted by nation and "era" (to be determined) so that when the computer randomizes your aircraft you would find a hopefully appropriate profile from your nations production and experimental aircraft history which could more-or-less match the design.  The 3-view would then be presented on the card along with the aircraft's game stats.

Additional stats could come later as gravy-  randomly generate an appropriate power plant and perhaps use the Fire-power factor to randomize armament.

But like I said, I'm an idea guy and I have no concept of how hard this might be.  Any ideas?

Also note it would seem a mod with these general parameters would also be able to do the same for submarines.

[tortugapower]

Jun 1, 2019 12:23:50 GMT -6 garrisonchisholm said:

I couldn't help but feel that what would be nice is to have an "aircraft data card" much like the ship cards now in the game, so that you could click on an aircraft and then the mod would bring up a 3-view profile, perhaps lifted straight from Wikipedia (legality?).  The profiles would be sorted by nation and "era" (to be determined) so that when the computer randomizes your aircraft you would find a hopefully appropriate profile from your nations production and experimental aircraft history which could more-or-less match the design.  The 3-view would then be presented on the card along with the aircraft's game stats.

For the image, you want something like this generated:

Is that correct?

[garrisonchisholm]

Yup, that's exactly like what I was thinking, though for rendering reasons maybe all black silhouettes would look better, but yes that was my thought.

[aetreus]

Instinctively I would say that the way to do this would be to break the aircraft up(wing root, wing span, cockpit, engine mount, propeller, tail assembly) and then have hand-drawn pieces programmatically connected together(with splines or something). That could create a lot of different aircraft that could be designed to match various eras.

[dizzy]

Aircraft data cards would be amazing. If each aircraft data card could contain a small comparison to your own plane, it'd make it even more useful. I see this as a unique feature because we all have various different type ships, so ship data cards wouldnt benefit from a comparison stat, but with planes, you have 6 roles, and you only use one type per role (in the case of 2 in service, the last model year would be used). I'd love to see that in the game. Great idea, guys!

[garychildress]

How about something like this? I could do top views also, however, these take a couple hours a piece just to do one view. So it would take me forever to do two or three views of each and every aircraft for over a half dozen nations from 1913 - 1950.

Another problem with historic designs is that some countries like Japan didn't have a lot of indigenous aircraft designs to start out with, so they used borrowed designs initially. Also, Austria-Hungary would be impossible to do historic aircraft for beyond 1918, unless you just want to copy German airframes as being Austro-Hungarian as well. 

[garrisonchisholm]

I agree with both of your points, at a certain extent we would have to use the models of aircraft that nation's actually used even if they were 'bought' from over seas, or just decide certain monoplanes were so "generic" that they might suit for a standard.

Regarding your art that would be fantastic, but equally impossible I think due to the magnitude of having 4-6 (my thought) models per era per type per state. That would be well over 100 varieties per state. I think grabbing art from wikipedia would be the easiest, since it is numerous and available.

Now, if we could procedural generate pixel side-views like that that might be our solution, though they would have little relevance to real designs and might produce some wonky ick too. And toss in that I know nothing about how to do such a thing.

[garychildress]

It would definitely be a daunting task, still I would like to see someone put together a list of likely candidates for aircraft drawings for each nation and each type of plane, just to get a feel for how many aircraft it would take to cover the game period. Over time I could knock off aircraft on the list. Maybe start out with Wikipedia line drawings and at some point down the line I could have a large enough collection of fleshed out drawings to add to the game as an alternative.

[dizzy]

Pics just make the game so much more immersive. Hope it happens.

[mycophobia]

Honestly just the side or just the top view will suffice for me. I'd hope for something like the ship Image generator we have, which allows us to put pre-designed shapes together to generate the plane. This way we don't need to worry about having to create way too many varieties, just leave it to the player and they can do it themselves. (It can also includes couple sets for basic color schemes, and the nationality of the plane can be differentiated by roundels that we can put on).

For starters I think just having basic choices of fuselage, tail shape and wing shape+some attachable weapons/roundel/cockpit will suffice. The modding community can always contribute any further parts as they had with the ship parts in rtw 1.

[hmssophia]

I'd be up for helping with this art-wise

[garrisonchisholm]

Well once someone has the bandwidth to start on this idea, the first decision is will we be Creating art of Collecting art. They would both require labor but of a different sort. Ideally I'd think we would want a healthy variety of images so if you request (example) 3 prototypes in one year you don't have the same 2 designs 4 or 5 times each.

[hmssophia]

If someone can figure out the answer to "How do you make the image generator work?" Then I can kick out parts in relatively short order.
I'd probably look at doing era standards per decade for:
- Fuselage
- wing
- Cockpit
- Engine
- Tail
- Armament
So that would be a part for 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940, 1950 and 1960. Then each decade and part would get one for each class as well (float planet, flying boat, medium bomber, fighter etc).
So in total it would be... maybe 150 parts? Seeing as some things could be reused.
I could definitely do that, art-wise. I doubt it would even take me that long at the scales we're talking.

[hmssophia]

Turns out it doesn't take me long at all.
Also, that twin engine torpedo bomber is definitely one of the dumbest things I've ever drawn.

[jeeweej]

Jun 5, 2019 4:53:18 GMT -6 hmssophia said:

-snip-

Oh that's some VERY nice work!