Com-Central.net

This was a pretty good tip on AVSIM by the ACES developer "Tdragger", worth keeping around:

The new menu feature which can provide preview thumbnails is great and easy to use by saving the little pic named "thumbnail.jpg" in the texture folder for each individual repaint, but sometimes you run into a connundrum when there are multiple versions of an aircraft which share the saem texture - the FSD T-38 Talon is a case in point, for each texture it uses there are two aircraft (one with baggage pod and one without).....not to mention sometimes it gets confusing which testure is which when the devloper uses texture folder names like "texture.1" instead of "texture.red_and_gold" or what have you.

So how to have seperate preview thumbnails for models sharing a common repaint, or how to implement thumbnails using meaningful names??

Here's the tip:

Just add a line like this one to each "fltsim.#" section of the AIRCRAFT.CFG file:

ui_thumbnailfile=c:\whatever_you_want.jpg

You can point to any JPEG, BMP or PNG you want. You aren't limited by the default "thumbnail.jpg" in the texture folder.

(Full discussion with a couple other details is here:)

---> http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=121&topic_id=372099&mode=full

Which means you can give the little preview JPG's real, meaningful names and save them in the aircraft root folder (next to the "aircraft.cfg" file) and not even have to include a path. OR you could make a "thumbnails" folder and reference it in the path, which might be good for an aircraft that has many many repaints (like the COm-C collections for Milton's aircraft).

Works pretty good and although it's a little time-consumng to do this, it gets quicker with practice and it's really cool to have your "hangar" all whipped into shade for those favorite rides...

Excellent find Stoopy.

Thanks.

Very Nice ~S~