One thing I hate about IL2 is you need a software degree in skinning. I'll never be able to paint my skins in IL2 without purchasing some expensive software and learning how to use it.

In RB, it was a lot easier to paint your plane.

I hope KOE comes with a simple interface to allow you to make your own original skins.

But one thing IL2 got better than RB was that you could actually SEE people's individual skins instead of having to download a pack.

You can't have it all you know - simple to do will be simple looking too, although the RB's idea of using separate parts to make up a skin is IMO in some ways superior concept to IL2's approach. But that eventually leads to a huge number of files. I have a slew of IL2 skins and if they were each made of several bmp files any housekeeping would be that much more time consuming...

And many servers and clients disable the skin download because of the bandwidth issue.

I think NASCAR Racing 2003 Season is a good benchmark for ease of skinning. All the tools are integrated right into the sim, plus an integrated import / export option. Anyone can do it - even me.

I have to agree with JAS Grippen , fact is you can't do quality RBII/3D skins without something on the order of PaintShopPro either

I like the RB3D parts system too , alot of files , but many reusable .. in some respects it's more efficient than 1024x1024 ( as example ) for each plane.

I do hope there's a better system for MP paints (I do have some ideas about this), though dynamic download is probably not it.

For those that don't know , I maintain RB3D\'s Community MMP Paints