Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I had an idea for a Ship Creator which I think would be an amazing game feature, but ultimately I decided that it was a rather unrealistic idea, so I decided that a Ship Editor would be a more conceivable concept while almost adding the same level of depth that a Ship Creator would. A Ship Editor would basically be an in-game tool where players in Eve could drastically modify their ships.

I know that fitting modules onto a ship is a form of modification, but I am not talking about ship modules here I am talking about basic ship attributes, particularly the aesthetics, but also perhaps things like basic ship bonuses and ship statistics could be modified to suit one's needs as well.

I know Eve has a pretty decent amount of ships already but for the sake of immersion, and role-playing, I think CCP should strive to have as many ships as possible in this game.

My idea of a Ship Editor would basically be a tool which you could use in game, it would probably be something similar to the Ship Fitting tool in a station, where you could choose from a variety of modifications to your ship.

Say you bought an Executioner class frigate. If this Ship Editor were introduced, you could then go into the Ship Editor, and modify all of the physical characteristics of the ship; different hull variations, body modifications, hull accessories, thrusters, command decks, turret slot arrangements, even different miscellaneous adjustments like engine trail colours, window and light colours, ship skins.

The idea would be just to add more variation to these ships and give pilots a chance for more customization of their vessels. Current ship skins are OK but pretty cheap in the grand scheme of things.

Here are some tips to avoid lag

- Own a quality PC
- Stay out of Jita
- Keep settings on low if you have to

Hope that was helpful

hmm... no, not just about the part of "poor people should have lag" but because of what arya said: lag.

afaik Eve loads up all ship models, stations, statics and textures when you leave a station, because you could have any one of them on grid at any time.

Having a limited number of ship hulls and using different skins to differentiate between some ships keeps the server load tolerable.
CCP adding very limited numbers of skins and hulls kind of attests to this.

now add in any number of customized modules, each with different textures that change ships appearances. Every one of those has to be loaded, every players basic hull type, skins and custom mods have to be loaded. thats a lot of server load added just for cosmetic appeal.

the argument of "you can just lower settings" isn't valid, we're talking server load and not computer load. if you have super low graphics settings, the server still needs to load it and thats where the lag comes in.

reduced ti-di > bling

tldr; unsupported

And that helps when the servers have to note all the bells and whistles of two or three thousand customs ships by...?

Bingo. Currently, a fleet undocking brings a server to its knees. Jita is a reinforced node and it gets traffic controlled all the time.
That's with all ships being clones of one another.

Now every ship is a special snowflake; soul crushing lag(in the good old days) kicks in because:

In order to be a special snowflake multiple versions of the same bling have to be present. Then there's the multiple hull sizes. Wireframes scale easily but look like crap when scaled up (detail density goes down. Things look blocky) meaning each hull class needs its multiple types of modifications. Each race has an art style, so that must be taken into consideration with regards to models.

so 1 modification has to have 5 size models ( we could say 3, but destroyers and battlecruisers would look funny with the modifications of the ship class under it), times 4 player races. That's 20 models to be loaded just for one insert-blingy-modification-here. Multiply that by the number of options for that type of bling( how many different models), and the multiply that by the things you want visually modded and the number of things to be loaded. That's not including placement or hull redesign.

Now we reach a fun part of your "wouldn't it be nice" thread:
Dev time.
Each of these modifications has to be located on a hull, so that hull needs to be remade to make sure it can take the generic bling because there can only be so many places things may be located on a model. Unless each ship has individual bling made for it, an idea that should quickly be ridiculed.

Seams between ship and bling models have to fit perfectly, or artifacting may take place. so the joining "hard point" that particular bling is attached to needs to be generic across all race-shipclass models.

Adjusting the looks of the hull is more rediculous, uv's have to be adjusted every time the wireframe is changed, and UV unwrapping is one of the most irritating And monotonous tasks artists have to do. Get it wrong, things look like ****.

Edit* misread a portion of the op, erased offending bits.

Edit#2* erased quotes, can't get rid of whatever that thing is

But I want to customize my ship......

Scroll out until you don't see it any longer - problem fixed.

I didn't bother reading what you said.

But the thingy at the top....it's growing...

Not helpful if you are lagging because the server is struggling to send your client all the info it needs to load grid like every single variation of ships currently present.

Being insulting on to of utterly clueless doesn't support your case. If you still think it could be done, then you didn't bother reading the posts that explained to you why it can't. Go back and re-read the thread.

Oh, and that just covers the aesthetic aspect of your suggestion. I won't even get into how having the ability to tinker with stats and bonuses would totally **** on everything CCP has done over the last 12 years to try and maintain a balance in the game.