[emark4]

I want to do some small edits to an existing fighter, Ex: having lines on the cckpit canopy like an X-wing, or retexturing the Blue Planst Uhlan fighter with a different color. What program should I be using?

[coffeesoft]

 - You need a image software like Photoshop, you can try GIMP, is a free software, many people uses it.

 - You can find the textures of all the ships inside "maps" folder, if you don´t have it yet.
 Sometimes some of the data is stored on compress format  *.vp  , if so, you need to decompress them first.

 - There are several types of textures that the game uses, pay attention to that, some of them...
   Diffuse : Is the most important, the base texture, in this is where you can draw your changes, colors, etc...
   Normal : Gives the feeling of 3d
   Glow : Used to make lights and make them shiny

 - You can use PCS2 ( POF model Viewer ) to see the changes without using the game.

Here some nice tutorials

https://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?board=266.0

[coffeesoft]

And here information about textures on the Freespace Wiki



http://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/Texture_Replacement

http://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/Texturing

http://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/Herra_Tohtori%27s_texturing_tutorial