I'm talking about TEXTURES.
It would probably be hard to set up, but it would be useful and may even help drop the part number levels.
The game Freelancer is a good example of use of textures on ships.
Some of the player built creations, made using an external editor, make very good use of them.
In SimplePlanes they could be used for wing insignia, those small things that take half a dozen pieces to make and only have a poofteenth of it showing above the main surface of the model, things like that.
@exosuit @Mickk it does, or, it can. You'd just have to save image files for parts with custom textures. E.g. if you were to use a spray paint tool on a fuselage, it would work as if you were spray painting a 2D image in MS Paint, except the image would be applied to a 3D model and saved as soon as you finish the edits. This would increase the file size a lot, compared to the current system which just uses plain text. Decals are an other thing; you could have just a short text redirect to a decal somewhere in the SP files and also a text storing the position of the decal on the part. That could be done, and if people wanted more decals, they could just add them into their own directory and share them using third-party sites like imgur.
@Mickk the game engine doesn't work like that
@exosuit Like I said it would be hard to set up.
Possibly something could be done with the 'spray paints'.
The game engine doesn't work like that