Livery Standards
File Conventions
For mod size control and the convenience of making edits to liveries, CSG8 squadrons should employ DCS's CoreMods functionality to load textures shared between aircraft as a CoreMod. This means that you only need to include one copy of all textures and each individual aircraft livery does not need to contain all the custom textures.
If you are used to making liveries by including every custom texture file in every airframe's folder, the process does require a bit more planning. Divide all of your textures into textures that appear in all aircraft and textures that appear in singular aircraft (Such as the XO's or CO's unique skin or custom helmets). Textures that do appear in all aircraft (Such as the Hornet's DIFF 2 texture typically), should be placed in the CoreMods path. Textures that are unique to specific aircraft should be placed in their aircraft's folder, like normal.
The file structure of your ZIP file that you provide to the SysOps team to upload to OvGME should look as follows:
Where {Your Aircraft} should be replaced with the standard name for your airframe in DCS folders.
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All shared textures go in the aircraft folder located inside the Textures folder of the CoreMods path.
All unique textures go inside the aircraft's folder in the Liveries path.
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Please adhere to the following names for the description.lua and folder names:
VF(A)-## CAG
VF(A)-## CO
VF(A)-## XO
VF(A)-## Low
VFA(A)-## {Pilot Names}
File Names
Warning:
It is extremely important that all textures includes in the CoreMods folder are unique everywhere in DCS, as loading a texture via the CoreMods folder will cause it to overwrite any texture, for any aircraft, if it shares a name.
To keep matter simple and aid in the identification of liveries, it is recommended you simply append your squadron short abbreviation to each texture file. Texture files that go into CoreMods must be uniquely named within the whole game. While this requirement does not exist for textures in the Liveries folder, it is still preferred to append your squadron abbreviation.
Example Names:
HB_F14_WING_RIGHT_VF11
F18C_1_DIFF_2_VFA81
description.lua
Each description.lua should be similarly formatted at the end with an in-game name that matches the folder name prepended with the squadron abbreviation and preferably with the countries line commented out (allowing the skin to be used no matter the nationality of the aircraft).
name = "VFA-45 Low"
--countries = {"USA",}
For texture panels that are shared, and thus need to be loaded from CoreMods, the line for that panel will look this:
{"HB_F14_EXT_03", 0 ,"VF-11_EXT_03",true};
And for texture panels that are unique to the aircraft, and thus loaded from the aircraft's livery folder, the line should read false, meaning it is loaded from the local folder:
{"HB_F14_EXT_02", 0 ,"HB_F14_EXT_02",false};
Mod README
Include with the ZIP file a README with the following filled out:
Version: (Optional)
Date:
Uncompressed Size:
Maintained By:
Liveries Included / Liveries Updated:
If a version is not provided, the current versioning system will be used:
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Where major updates represent updates that require the whole livery pack to be reinstalled, Minor updates overwrite the files from the same Major update, and hotfixes are minor and small livery or description.lua fixes that overwrite Minor updates.
