I'm ranting about something that bugs me because why not. Stinker in SP2 set me off about this.
Paint!
You know paint? Helps make planes look pretty, very important!
There's custom paint too, for custom colours and finishes! Now also textures as well!
Lovely, lovely.
Except for one thing: When the right squares aren't used!
It makes the other default presets unusable!
First square is body, second is wings, third is surfaces, fourth is trim, etc.
There's one for wheels, nozzles, cannons, and canopies!
AND PEOPLE NEVER USE THEM RAAHAHHHHH!!!!
Some planes it just doesn't work for, and that's fine I guess, but can people at least try?
I always try to make them compatible if possible. Seriously, boot up a Graingy aircraft from the past couple years and flip through the colour presets. Chances are they'll work decently well because even with the default Custom preset the tires use the tire square, the fuselage uses the fuselage square, and the glass uses the canopy square. The SAN-74 "Candygram" is one of my favourite examples, personally, since (ignoring the cockpit where the colours get more varied) all the presets look decent enough aside from the Rudolph-themed paintjob it ships with
But in SP even the stock craft don't use the paint right! EVEN SP2 DOESN'T!
Stinker, the biplane in SP2 that I mentioned earlier? Little red thing? Good plane, I'm taking it about right now to see if it's actually simple (another topic, much more serious, is that SP2 seems to lack craft that aren't highly dependent on nebulous and incredibly complicated - thus hostile to reverse-engineering and modification from for all but the most advanced players - FT, though that's a discussion for elsewhere). For the most part the other paint options work well... yet the canopy is the trim square and so are the tires. Why. It's piss easy to do this correctly. Why.
With Blue Angel paint the canopy and tires are bright yellow.
Doesn't help that textures (and the extra UI layer in the colour selector) make it all more difficult to change things to be the right square.
Is any of this particularly important? Not really, but a forum post is of so little consequence that I might as well rant about it.
TL;DR: Please for the love of all that is good learn to use the paint menu properly so that other presets don't look godawful when applied. It's not hard!
The Candygram, so you can see what I mean.
Valid crashout
a lot of the funky trees on the new stock crafts are there to make them easier to use, say driving the cork without assists is probably a nightmare to most new players. personally I think the real issue is the fact that funky trees as a whole lacks resources that properly convey how to learn it, thus making even simple expressions unapproachable
@HuskyDynamics01 Nice.
Yeah, sometimes the allure of the Faux Preset is too strong.
Funny thing, the other day the patterns on it just... disappeared. Wonder if I should've submitted a bug report for that...
@Graingy fun fact the Kicking Fish is actually perfectly* compatible with all the other paint slots. The only reason it isn't on the Green Slime one by default is because I wanted to do fun patterns and edit the material finishes.
*minus the decals, because those aren't part of the paint palette. They stay green.
For more complicated crafts, though (especially stuff that uses multiple paint patterns for the fuselage), it makes way more sense to group the paint slots according to what they do on the build. That's a part of the guidelines we were given to follow.
Being able to easily swap to the old palettes is cool, sure, but it tends to make the build's custom palette a lot more confusing because paint colors end up scattered around it instead of grouped together logically, which ends up making it harder to modify them later.
(As for knowing what does what, that's why the slots have names now!)
@BaconEggs You are the death of all whimsy and joy.
I want my Green Slime and I shall have it at will!
@HuskyDynamics01 Oh absolutely.
Messing around with textures a bit for the first time a moment ago (if only for a few minutes), it's clear the compatibility with the old system may not be quite as great.
Of course, all this doesn't seriously impact the crafts as they were designed, but it's nice if you want your craft to look a little different with only a few clicks of a button. Want a red plane? Boom, red plane. Blue plane? Beige plane? Green plane? No problem, all those work quickly. It also helps quickly get yourself oriented if you want to modify another paintjob; you immediately know what slot changes what.
Frankly I'm surprised none of the Devs told you.
At the same time, most of the old 1.2(?)-era stock craft don't use it properly either, including (ironically) the P-51. So, uh, Devs don't seem to use it either. Hm.
For all I know, I'm one of a small handful of people who actually bother to get the paints to line up.
the paint presets are an 11 year old feature that should be taken out back and sent to the void
@Graingy That's quite helpful, thank you.
I can't guarantee that the stock crafts will all have their paintwork redone to fit this (since there's, like, 20+ people involved with creating them and everyone has their own ways of doing things), but I'll pass this along.
@HuskyDynamics01 Gotcha.
Not every part, as far as I'm aware, has a direct tie (or at least not one that's obvious). Some of them do appear to be unused (such as the unrepentant yellow).
Probably the easiest way to work it out is to take TutorialPlane and see what changes between presets.
I'm a bit short on time, but I'll boot up SP2 to see what goes where.
Aight.
First is fuselage (and other Primary slots), second is wing, third is surfaces, fourth is Trims, fifth is propeller hubs, sixth is engine nozzles, seventh is tires, eighth is canopies, ninth I think is pylons, tenth appears unmapped, annnd pretty much everything past that I believe is also unmapped, except for sixteen which is glass and nineteen which is instruments.
Is that what you meant? Or did you mean something else?
@Graingy I am well aware of how the system works in general. However, lacking reference information to work with, it is difficult to convert an existing paint palette. Grabbing legacy SP1 parts at random from the menu is not a very practical form of reference.
The last ten slots, for instance. Those are the same color on every default palette, yet are not the default for any parts pulled from the menu. Is there a standard for what those are "supposed" to be?
Also, what would (or "should") happen if a craft were to theoretically have, say, two different colors for its tires?
If my memory serves me right, going from right to left and then down a row...
Fuselage, wing, control surface, trim, gun barrel,
engine nozzle, tire, cockpit, ?, ?, ?,
Glass, ?, instrument(?), ?, ?
It's been a while since I've played SP, so my memory is foggy. That's the gist, though.
@HuskyDynamics01 ... I would figure someone would work it out themselves after a few years when finding how ugly other presets would look if done wrong, but apparently not.
When each part type is taken out of the inventory its paint is already mapped to a given slot (e.g. the top right being minigun and cannon barrels, if my memory serves). This is reflected in the other presents (e.g. tires being grey, canopies usually being blue/grey, etc.), which all behave accordingly. The whole point here is that if mapped correctly, all presets can be used while looking as they are supposed to. If your plane's fuselage turns yellow when switching to "Military" you've done something very wrong.
Not all craft with these mistakes have them especially badly (as mentioned, Stinker in SP2 is mostly good with the notable exceptions of the canopy and tires), but it's still annoying. It should be noted, of course, that's there's a cockpit and a glass preset. The cockpit colour varies by preset, while glass is always the same.
The paint presents only work if mapped correctly, otherwise they have errors. Sometimes these errors are only noticeable on some presets but not others; sometimes they're incredibly obvious in all of them (usually the worse with the unchanging/barely changing paints on the bottom and right).
Do you have a list of what is "supposed" to correspond to each of the 20 paint slots? Also, keep in mind that your personal set of standards may not be the only one in use.
Turns out that Stinker is in fact not simple. It has FT tail surfaces.
Since there's no Overload in SP2 yet I have no idea how complicated exactly (it's possible it's just to have different up- and down-pitch limits - though this wouldn't explain why the rudder also has FT inputs), but this is still a very bad sign.