- There are AI variants of many aircraft under AI/Aircraft which are used in preference.
I haven't checked, but I have been following some of the threads having to do with AI aircraft - the focus seemed to be to provide low vertex count versions of models, not so much to provide lowres textures and effect maps - which seems to be the issue here.
As much as it's a neat feature, I consider (and this data confirms), that we shouldn't use the multiple choice of textures in the material files, we're only making a bad issue worse, the more the terrain is detailed, the more it will load extra textures for the same landclass.
Well... expanding the procedural texturing strategy as I have in mind anyway, we might get by with three 512x512 texture sheets per landclass which is cheaper than a single 1024x1024 (not to mention three of those...), with several of them in multiple use. The whole rational of defining multiple textures per landclass is to ease the repetition problem, but procedural texturing does that anyway, so we can optimize memory usage at the expense of spending more processing power.