Heavier than Air

This mod is Ironman / Achievments compatible.

The first goal of this mod was to replace every black silhouettes of generic icons of air equipment, including jets and rocket powered interceptors, by a picture in the same style of those already existing in the vanilla game.


Then I decided to give accurate icons for the main nations jets (ENG, FRA, GER, ITA, JAP, USA, USSR). I also added localisation for some jets not included in the vanilla game and changed the name of some others.


The third step was to remove some unfounded flavor names.
For example, in the original game, the localisation file for air equipments, equip_air_l_[your-language], calls almost every improved Close air support aircrafts for commonwealth countries as the english one, Hawker Typhoon. As an alternate history video game, New Zealand should take the decision to either get a license for the Typhoon, ask for a lend-lease to U.K. or develop their own 2nd generation CAS aircraft, which would be just called "Close Air Support II" if I find no suitable alternative.

The general rule I used is to let these localisations unchanged if a country had already bought a license at the start date in 1936, even if the technology is still locked. This is the case for Switzerland with the Fokker C.V-E, so once they have researched early tactical bombers, they can build their own "K+W / Fokker C.V-E".
There might be some exceptions... either by choice or by omission.


Now for aesthetic choices:

• all aircraft face towards right in the tech tree;

• no serial numbers;

• national roundel/insigna for nation specific equipment (ie swedish roundel for every SWE_*.dds icons);

• generic aircraft are all gren/greenish (except naval bombers, which are light grey floatplanes);

• no distinctive sign on generic aircraft (cleaned of all insigna and serial numbers);

• it's impossible to use a proportional scale for every aircraft as the Tupolev Tu-16 is almost 6 time longer than the Polikarpov I-15. But I even if it can't be linear, I still try to use an increasing function, so bombers will look bigger than fighters. I have used a function f(x)=M*(1-exp(-x*ln(2)/L)) where M is the max pixel width and L is the length of an airplane whose icon we want to be M/2 pixels wide.

  Versions history

09/23/2017

• Updated localization for every major nations (GER, ENG, USA, SOV, JAP, ITA, FRA), Commonwealth nations and some other minor nations (SWE, NOR, FIN, HOL, BEL, SWI, SPA, ARG);
• Icons for every land-based aircraft for ENG;
• Icons for aircrafts whose localization is different from vanilla for GER, USA, SOV, JAP, ITA, FRA;
• Icons for jets for every major nations;
• English, French and German localization files should be in the correct language. Spanish, Portuguese and Polish ones are just a copy of the English one (I will translate them later). Russian is not supported.

10/04/2017

• minor bug fixes in localisation files;
• Spanish now fully supported;
• 16 icons for Swedish aircraft.