Ships & Modules

I want flames painted down the side of my ships rather than spewing out of them.

except the server also has to transmit ship position, velocity, pilot actions etc. all the ******* time and not only once when you come onto grid.

Yes, I'll concede your point.

It could add up to 0.001% more information being exchanged between server and client (that is a high ball figure I'm estimating you)

In other words, absolutely nothing.

Unless your internet connection consists of a telegraph wired to a NIC card and piped over a satellite connection in the middle of Antarctica.

It will increase the load the same way starting my lawn mower contributes to global warming.

Why do I get the feeling you are commenting on a topic you obviously have no technical insight on what-so-ever?
In fact, how the hell do people like you even figure out how to install the client, let alone play Eve?

Right...you do realise that that extra nugget of information would have to be sent PER client on grid?

So in a grid where there are lots of players, ie fleet fights, trade hubs etc...that extra information adds up. What seems to be a tiny thing to begin with suddenly becomes something substantial.

If it's implemented as a new data field it's going to require tracking on the server, meaning more DB calls. Yay! Sounds good right? I love adding to server load!

As a response to your lawnmower example. Yes, one lawnmower isn't going to make any difference. Thousands however, do. Just like cars. Or cows (methane). Or planes. Or people for that matter.
Or on the opposite front: A single solar panel does very little, a group of them however.....


Also, nice personal attack implying I'm stupid.

Ah? So it would have an impact then? That was my point all along.
Thanks for agreeing with me.


Also, I'm not going to sink to your level of personal attacks, despite you attempting to get me do so.

Hostility and personal attacks are almost never the way to make a convincing point. Buzz merely said that there would be some impact on the amount of network traffic resulting from this change and he's right.

On the other hand, I tend to agree that adding to server load in and of itself is not a reason to avoid a new feature, particularly when the impact would be exceedingly minimal as it would be here. If we're talking about selecting one of a preset number of skins, and thus you'd only need to transfer an identifier for the skin to the client. That's a one-time (per appearance on grid) increase of a few bytes per ship appearing on the grid, which amounts to nothing in the grand scheme of things. It'd be different if they allowed players to upload image files for skinning their ships, but with preset skins, I don't imagine it's any more intensive than showing which modules are equipped on a ship (e.g., which guns a ship has equipped) and could almost certainly be pulled from the DB in the same operation.

Just for the record, communicating custom paint jobs can be done quite easily with 196 bits sent once per ship:
64 bit patternID
64 bit color A/B in 32 bit RGB
64 bit color C/D in 32 bit RGB

That's more potential patterns than could be machine generated in several years, and 4 colors per pattern.
If they wanted to optimise it somewhat and have only 8 patterns per hull type and 128 colors with up to 4 colors per pattern it can all be sent in 32 bits.

196 bits = ######################## (assuming single-byte characters)
32 bits = ####

I imagine they could do something like the background images we select when creating our avatars, such that you don't even need to store color scheme value but rather only need to store the identifier of a preset skin. To that end though - aren't they already planning to do that in upcoming patches?

I love it when good ideas get muffled under a carpet of "Ass kissing CCP helper trolls" thats only contribution to any idea is "Oh but it required work !! No cant be done .. oh no it requires more cpu work / bandwith .. cant be done"

Focus on the ideas and let CCP worry about technical side ... you know they do have real professionals to determine if its possible or not.


I personally think its a great idea ... alliances/corps should be able to make their own "template" that you could apply with a press of a button if you are a member. What would be more awesome sight then a massive fleet of many shiptypes yet same colortheme and logos on the side.

It would be great.

basically what you do is instead of letting people paint their own car any way they like you have them choose between a set number of base colors and give them a selection of decorations that they can put in one or several predefined places on their car. now that i think of it, it's exactly how you customized your car in NFS:Underground and in those days, it was pretty damn awesome...

edit: the advantage is that now the server only needs to tell the client: 'ok, so this ship has base color #15 with decals number #12, #5 and #35 in decal slots #1, #3 and #4 respectively.' this can be pressed into one number and the client knows how to paint the model.