[Bee]

For the dense among us, i.e. Me! How do you:

a/ Find the relevant files. I have looked in the mod for .tga files in vain and don't want want to blunder in for fear of screwing something up irretrievably.

b/ Once the file is located how do you extract it for working on?

I have PSP and Photoshop (still learning that beast....jeez!) and some skinning experience. I particularly want to fix the P-47D cockpit.

A brief tutorial perhaps?

Not sure if I can give a tutorial, the art of skinning cockpits is only about 3 days old
Mind you, if you can do a complete reskin, It will be a world first!

I've gathered together all the P-47-10 TGA's and uploaded them for you:
http://www.zshare.net/download/4895700e4a27ba/

Notice how all of them are 256x256 pixels in size. This seems to be the standard for all cockpits.
Most of the instruments can be opened with photoshop without any witchcraft. The others need to be accessed via the method outlined by Desade:

Get the splashscreen changing mod available from this website. Have something like Fraps running to take screenshots.

Get the TGA you want to view. Go for the ones named floor, radio, or lower panel etc. for starters as these hold the most exciting stuff. Put the tga in your GUI folder of your soundmod directory. Renaming it to Background0. Backup any personalised backgrounds you may have created first.

Fire up the game, and you will see the un-openable .tga displayed larger than life for you to snap a screenshot of. Do this with all the .tga's you need. Then you are ready to start editing them.

Depending on the resolution of your monitor, the image of the .tga will be distorted considerably. You just need to resize it to the 256x256 size and make it a tga again for it to work in-game.

Many screenies of tga's have large areas of white on them (voids). These need to be made transparent. It might be worthwhile skinning at a larger size and then shrinking the finished product.

Good luck mate. And don't forget to post any results/findings here :wink: