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I've been running the WoP P-51D for FS2004 that I received as a Christmas gift a couple of years ago and it's been an absolute gem - thoroughly enjoyable. But I see several repaints available for the WW2 Fighters P-51 version - most notably Grant MacLean's rendition of Dennis Bradley's late, lamented CF-BAU of which I was very familiar with and a great fan of during my time with the CWH Museum years ago - that are unusable with the earlier WoP version. What exactly is the difference between the two versions and is there any way of adapting WW2 Fighter skins to the WoP Mustang?

Cheers and Happy Holidays to all,

N.

The Wings of Power II P-51D was a model rebuild to allow the Mustang to have greater detail and higher resolution textures. It was originally released as part of the "WWII Fighters: Special Edition" CD but later it was made available as an individual download in the SOLO line of products. (Additionally, you can get the WoP2 P-51D on both the Aircraft Power Power Pack or the Aircraft Power Pack 2--search Amazon.com if you are interested.)

Edit: I installed "WWII Fighters: Special Edition" to FS2004 to compare the original Wings of Power textures to the newer Wings of Power II textures. Both are in .BMP format but there are more required for the WoP2 model:



A texture set for the older WoP P-51D model (the 'no drop tanks' variant) is on the left while the single texture set that comes with the WoP2/WWII Fighters/SOLO model is on the right. Looking at them side-by-side, it does seem that textures named sw_p51d_1_t.bmp and sw_p51d_2_2.bmp from the newer model's texture set could be compatible with the older WoP model.

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120th Fighter Wing, Montana Air National Guard

"It's de ja vu, all over again."

Regardless, I successfully copied over the two textures from WWII Fighters model -- and only those two textures -- into an original Wings of Power P-51D model's texture folder. For this experiment I copied sw_p51d_1_t.bmp and sw_p51d_2_t.bmp into the Wings of Power P-51D folder named texture.1 (aka, the textures for E2-V "Croghan Cruiser").



I don't know yet what the result will be if I try this with the 'drop tank' version of the WoP model.

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120th Fighter Wing, Montana Air National Guard

And here is the 'drop tank' version of the Wings of Power P-51D "Croghan Cruiser" after replacing the same textures as above with the versions that come with the Wings of Power II / WWII Fighters / SOLO version of the P-51D.

The important factor is that the replacement textures have to be .BMP format. However, the FSX version of the WoP2 Mustang uses .DDS format textures. If painters are only offering an FSX version that only has the .DDS textures, you won't be able to use those with the original FS2004 P-51 pack aircraft.

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120th Fighter Wing, Montana Air National Guard

I just downloaded the RCAF CF-BAU texture by Grant MacLean and unfortunately it does not come with the textures you need to skin the WoP model.

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120th Fighter Wing, Montana Air National Guard

OK guys, thanks for the replies; I do appreciate them. I'd forgotten that I'd asked this question some while ago.

Have a great Christmas and a terrific New Year.

N.

If I could get my hands on an old paint kit I might be able to make a CF-BAU for you from scratch. I thought about cutting/pasting from Grant MacLean's textures onto existing "sw_p51d_..." textures but I can't open some of the bitmaps with my version of Photoshop.

I've handled this roadblock before, though, and coincidently with a P-51D model that went through model rebuilds that also changed the .bmp texture layouts. In that particular case it was for the game Jane's WWII Fighters by Electronic Arts. As I recall, I was able to convert bitmaps to JPEGs in Microsoft Paint, open them up in Photoshop to edit them, and then resave the finished work to bitmaps in PhotoShop. I may play around with that later this weekend and see what kind of a Frankenstein monster I can build for you.

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I like Thunderbolts! (Link to MySpace tribute page)


120th Fighter Wing, Montana Air National Guard

I started by cutting-and-pasting to the nose area after converting all textures to TIFF files so I could opent them in PhotoShop; the alignment worked out but I can't figure out how to save it so that the textures appear in the game. The screenshot above is the only version that I got to render in FS2004, and obviously it is not acceptable quality. I got this by resaving in Paint as a 256-colors Bitmap.

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I like Thunderbolts! (Link to MySpace tribute page)


120th Fighter Wing, Montana Air National Guard