Player Features and Ideas Discussion

If you place armor plating on your ship, it should change what the ship looks like, right? I mean, you are adding tons of plates of armor to the outside of your ship, it would make sense if it made it look more armored and clunky. Armor hardeners could change the color of the actual plating, to make it shine red or blue or whatever hardeners are activated.

Same goes for shields. There should be a circle around your ship that is the shield, and when weapons are fired at you, they should stop before actually impacting your ship, and instead hit the semi-transparent bubble around you. Shield extenders and hardeners would change the size or the color of the shield.

In order to do this, you would need to add:

• Plate graphics to outside of ship hulls
• Color / Visual color graphics for active hardeners
• Shield hardpoints for weapon impact
• Shield "nimbus" look around ship
• change opacity, size, and color of shield depending on active hardeners

This would make it more realistic, and you could tell what the ship had going for it at a glance. It would also look killer.

A non-hardened/extended shield would appear as a slight warping of space around the vessel. If you look closely, the stars behind the ship would flicker (somewhat like the disruption of space around a WH, just toned-down). As you add hardeners or extenders, it gets more visible, but still quite transparent - so you don't have little bright blue balls floating around the field.

For those that say this would give an advantage in PVP, we neanderthals in the 21st century can tell if a tank has craploads of plating, or if an object is giving out a much higher energy signature then normal (more shield). It only makes sense that you would be able to do the same in space ships with basic scanning equipment, although that would just be your eyes in this case.

It should also be toggle-able so that in huge fights or crappy computers wouldn't have to load them, as it would increase lag.

As an optional graphic setting, I can't imagine that would have any negative impact (besides design time taken away from breaking stuff like WHs) yet it would add a vast dose of realism and cool graphics. I can imagine the armor plating would be a nightmare for the design team as they would have to design plating in varying sizes for every ship in the game, but I guess that's what we pay them for, eh?

This could be designed for the new ship designs as they are being produced, leaving older ships alone (because they will theoretically change eventually)

Firstly, quoting the original post for the first reply is obnoxious.

In small-scale PVP you are constantly checking the other ships to see if they have a kite fit or a brawl fit (via guns), and with T3's to see what they are using via their subsystems changing the looks of the ship.

When you have fleets of 10 or more, generally you are only looking for positioning, but a FC could still zoom to get a quick idea of what he is up against, whether they are armor, shield, buffer, active, etc. Really no drawback, as I said. The argument of "I, personally, don't zoom in on ships" just means that you don't have to have the graphics loaded. Others do, and would.

Edit:
Additionally, the design team could simultaneously design the new ships and the plating. Older ships would stay the same, as that would be a waste of time and resources. As they upgrade the new plating / shield graphics could be used. Will add to original post.

Well luckily the design team and dev team are two entities that can do multiple things simultaneously. If this is posted so very often then it should be immediately worked on as a high priority because it's what is being asked for, and what people want.

What I was going to say. General graphic improvemnt comes before specific animations and graphic adds. And with each upgrade you multiply the effort to upgrade, by not having a single ship but many stages of one ship with many more varieties from fittings etc... another reason why this probably won't happen anytime soon. And we know that the dev team and the gr... not sure why I have to explain that developers are also found in the graphic departement°°. You are not talking to dummies here.