Considering there’s this now manic attempt to import liveries onto generics, and that there’s roughly 500 livery packages out there, why not just make airliners look like airliners.
We have olive green/white, orange, 1000 airbus demonstrators touring the world, the blue/white mess of others, etc. I can’t imagine when putting a ‘skin’ on an airliner model to look like any of these(except the required demonstrator licensing version-which seems a bit shameless).
I imagine most would be happy with generic cheat lines/painted tails/top/bottom half bare metal designs.
There’s not going to be any 3rd party one for your own aircraft that will ever optimize for LOD in the sim, and zero chance on xbox.
Why not do up 4 or 5 simple color pattern templates: cheatline stripes and tail, a solid over gray ‘metal’(or white over dark with a matching tail), and other simplified common looks. Easy to make dozens of combinations for each template, and inject those into the sim. To be fancy make a few regional-national specific ones to spread around the globe? Heck put little xbox symbols, ‘MS’, G’s(generic airlines), Windows emblems, whatever on the tails for comic relief.
I imagine this would satisfy most versus looking down and seeing an entire flightline of green/white and orange. Easily managed just like the ugly ones we currently have. I can’t believe this is what airliners are imagined to look like, like some revival of 1980’s capabilities, one generation out of wire-frame gaming.
I would imagine one solid day would need to be invested to make such a simple thing.
Deleting the see-through windows and making generic window textures day/night would probably open up even more resources. I can tell you the static ones from say a LVFR add look a LOT better with virtually zero additional load on the system, and being ‘scenery’ you can see how well they hold up to being scaled for LOD.
Trying to make an AA airbus show up as an AA airbus pulling from countless combinations in every user’s library seems like it would still be a challenge two more console generations of tech from now. Starting at an airport and seeing stripes and tails among whatever countless other adds and static models would be more than enough ‘immersion’. 11 solid orange airliners usually is a bit distracting.