WOE:BC Update 3

My work on the campaign for Wings over Europe has spawned a little side-project: Loading and Hangar screens.

While building the campaign I make a habit of replacing the loading screen and hangar screen for each aircraft. The loading screen usually is an ingame shot of the involved aircraft while the hangar screens are based on the default WOE hangar screens.

Now i always find it annoying that when a mission is loaded, you always get to see a generic loading screen or a picture of the involved aircraft which to me breaks the immersion. I thought it would be nice to have a screenshot of your aircraft when loading the mission or selecting the loadout. But with so many excellent skins it would be quite a hassle to create and manage the screens. So I set out to find an easy and manageable way to have multiple loading screens available for a single aircraft.

The trick is quite simple: for each aircraft skin I create a hangar and loadingscreen. Those screens are saved under the names texturesetxxx_hangar and texturesetxxx_loading. In the aircraft ini file I add now for each textureset the lines to the appropriate hangar and loading screen and block those lines with "//" prefix. If I want the sim to use a specific loading screen, I simply delete the // prefix before the appropriate line.

Its an easy and quick way to swap between screens. The added advantage is that it will be much easier for other people to upload the data, if they want to rebuild my campaign. But rest assured , i am still a long way from releasing the campaign (I still have to add the French and Dutch Airforce and some other minor nato air forces).

If you are interested in my hangar and loading screen packs, you can download the first two ones at combatace:

• F-16XL
• Mirage IIIE

Have fun