I am in the progress of building a campaign on the Khalkin-Gol incident in 1939, now the Battles in July. They featured some really big fur-ball type of dog-fights, that I try to recreate.

In order to reduce the load on the computer and enhance speed somewhat, I have set practically all skins to "default". Now I wonder. Is this really correct, or am I making a erroneous assumption here?

Will the load on the CPU lessen if I only use default skins? If so, will it lessen in any meaningful degree?

Won't make a huge difference either way. Skins are...I'm guessing here but it makes sense...pre-cached at the beginning of the mission. If several aircraft share the same skin then they share the same space in memory too. I doubt using custom skins will cause any issues in performance. The AI is by far the biggest graphical hit so you need to think about numbers of aircraft, vehicles, tanks, flak, and other active elements within a mission. Skins are going to be nothing...especially with video cards that have 128mb and greater onboard video capability. CPU will have very little to do with this ...it'll be more of the video card and its access to RAM (which is more or less direct through the bus - very little CPU interaction).

KalkinGol is a scenario that almost requires custom skins otherwise everything on the Russian side will be flying around with the European green camo. I figure they used something else in this area.

Thanks! Good to know these things.

So one has to avoid anything that requires AI/CPU time, like AA-fire, moving objects, parachutes.

PS. Regarding Khalkin-Gol: I've overhauled my "May Battles" Khalkin-Gol Campaign as per your critique on Mission4Today. Thanks! Very helpful!

Also: the camo used by the RKKA in the Mongolia theatre was pretty much the same as in Europe. You can find the same all-olivegreen a/c there as in the west. But then there are of course variations...