MrJelly or whomever,

Didn't you try out that you don't need the .TES skin file per plane to be viewable at medium render distance?


If not, from what I read by a person named Mosi back in 2000, he said his experiments found that the .TES skin is actually only used when plane detail setting is set to low., rather than actually being viewed at a certain distance.
I'd imagine that not having the TES skin file, saves time for the skinner, saves on loading and memory usage.
But not having a .TES file, will it cause a crash to desktop if the game is set to low detail?

Also noted are that the very long distance views of planes show only the model (the 3DZ) of the plane. And it also uses the default color of the wire frame, usually green or tan at long range rather than using the skin files at all.
or
Has the newer builds of EAW use skins and models all the way upto long max range now?

I am away and will be for some time. I have taken my ancient laptop, but there are some installations on it, plus some source code.
My UAW150V4 folder has no "*.tes" files in it so they are certainly not used in the later versions.
I will check the source code to see what I can find out.

okay, thanks. I would say I remember you experimenting with this or something close to this. But I remember no body realy knew why the game displayed the planes at distances without problems, without the TES skin file. So I'm thinking either a later v140 or v150 code.

Anyhow, I guess I thought that answered your question as in the first post explains why the lack of a TES skin hasn't effected the display of the planes at distance on high detail.

(Sorry if I'm not making too much snese , I'm currently sleep deprived)

With the help of VBH informing me that the TES files are still used in v1.2 exe's unless a render distance mod has been added that overlaps the actual distance a skin is viewed, it may overlap into the TES low res long range distant viewing and there for its not displayed. If that's the case the TES skin could be used for other things/effects.

But in v1.40 I still belive they where just removed as Knegel may have overlaped the view distances early on, based on his old forum postings.