Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I agree with the ability to put our corp/alliance logos on our ships, it will be sweet and the ability make our own pain jobs but thats about it.
Everything else is non-useful....this is not wow where u get to make your char look like a X-mas tree.

agreed..but what i meant for non-useful things were the engines exhaust colors, random light all over the ships hull and thing like this that will make eve look to childish.

Not so. Skins will be downloaded through a patched client, so they will be stored client-side. No skins or textures will have to be downloaded from the server in-game, as that would be really, really stupid in practice. I'm pretty sure CCP knows how to optimize their bandwidth.

From there, the ship skin-type information only needs to be passed on session load, loaded from the user's hard-drive almost instantly, which will then be rendered. So from the server's perspective, practically zero impact on latency.

Yes, the client will need to render more skins, but consider: EVE is not a texture-heavy game at all, and UV textures are relatively very small. Every modern-day graphics card will have plenty of RAM to spare for a few extra skins. But if you really are concerned about performance, I'm assuming it could easily be a toggle-able option.

Source: I was a video-game designer for six years before I moved into web development.

This is right, client can take it from cache. But client still have to receive information which visual customization was used for each and every ship on grid. If corp or alliance decides to change their logo, or any individual player makes their exhaust rainbow-like - client will have to download this new logo or customization info to be able to display it correctly.

A toggle option for viewing custom skins sounds like a good plan.

I know CCP are looking at options for these sorts of changes, hopefully for when the V3 and V3+ process is complete.

Accessory kits, with things like spikes, fins, skulls, wings and other paraphernalia would be very. oil, but I think the main thing holding it all back will be server and client workloads.

Custom skins and corp/alliance logos on ships would be great, especially if we can get dome more options for those as well.

I am kind of expecting swarms of spikey black and yellow ships on one side with huge flying penises on the other.

CCP have claimed time and time again that the reason they don't do it is because of the "Time-to-Penis" where they don't want everyone flying around ships like that, but to be perfectly honest it boggles the mind how that would even be possible or how likely that would actually be.

I mean you look at games like Spore, sure there was a major issue with Penis-Shaped Races ... but that game on the whole really appealed to a more immature player base. Also agree there might be a reasonable share of immature players here as well, but something that I'd point to would be the Forza Community - where they have frankly tools available to creatively make some incredibly impressive stuff, you would expect hundreds of "Penis-Design" Cars driving about; but you don't.

All you have to do is look at the number of player portraits, where sure; there are an annoying number who have used that bug to basically have thier female avatars in nothing but a Bra with a jacket on ... but honestly for each player who has done that there are 100 more who haven't. It is such a small number of the community who frankly are immature like that.

The last reason we were given as to why they aren't quite ready to do it actually made sense, that the memory requirements would've increase dramatically particularly in large fights. This is actually a valid reason to be honest, especially when you're looking at it in the way that CCP currently impliment the paint schemes via Diffuse + Mask + Sub-Mask = Final Result.

Still I think this is an issue with Version 3 Shaders, as they are not designed for custom schemes as there still has to be quite a bit of Artist Input to create the initial Diffuse (base colour & pattern) then the Sub-Mask and finally the Mask.

If the Shaders were redesigned, which right now they aren't particularly optimised well so performance could be improve as could memory footprint per instance so that they were more customisable with the .Black (binary python) input configurations against a collection of base schemes similar to for example the Corporation Logos.

Then rather than sharing the final product, all that would need to be done would be to share the base material (a few kb at most) that would provide all of the information to procedurally generate the final results as required.

In a way the in-game Turrets already sort-of adhere to this methodology as well, because they will change the scheme to fit the Racial Ship... this is still purely done via the base Colours though, and patterns are entirely lost; hense why you don't see Navy Issue launchers with that Racial Navy Skin, or Pirate Factions also getting a custom skin on the weaponry.

This is because the Diffuse and Specular for the models are still being done "by hand" so to speak. Such a thing can actually take quite a long time as well depending on the model, uv layout, etc...

Now as I said at the start, part of the problem implimenting this comes from the Tech 2 sharing identical models; but there are some instances where the base models are different - again though CCP have done this in quite a wasteful way.

Look at for example the Stabber, Stabber Fleet Issue and Vagabond. They are all slight variations of the same base model, but all three of these ships are completely seperate models... now the limitation here isn't with the model format (Granny 2.8) that CCP are using, as it is actually a very flexible model format that you can customised to your own requirements.

So realistically there is absolutely no need for the Stabber to have all 3 variations as different models, what instead they need to do is have it all as a single model variation. I do this within UDK and Maya all the time with Hierachy Groups, where a model is exported as a single resource with each of the individual mesh following a naming scheme.

This model ends up slightly larger than if they were each a single model, but the increase in memory footprint is often <10% so should I want all three; all I do is call the Model Instance, then apply the configuration script that hides/shows the mesh that are required for that particular variation.

It works very well for models that have a few variations, often this can be used to great effect for creating crowds of people as you simply make hundreds of instances with seeded variations. As it is all the same model using the same shader, literally the instances cost very little both memory and rendering wise so you can have hundreds or thousands without much of a performance hit while the minor variations add some sense of diversity.

This said another method, this I have a feeling they actually use in DUST 514 is to create a Shared Model. This is all of the base mesh that are shared with all of your variations, then you either use a bone or if the engine supports it a socket where the add-on mesh go. You then store all of the "extras" as individual models that you load in and connect.

In-fact this is how Tech 3 ships work within EVE itself... without CCP doing that, then Tech 3s would've taken up ALOT more space in the memory, and hard disk; but to be honest HDD space is cheap, memory space isn't. Especially when you consider that anything that has to be rendered often much fit within however much the Graphics Card has available.

CCP on the whole has the technology in-place for most of this, Shaders I definately believe need to be over-hauled and optimised better - but as I say the tech is there, it just needs to be unified a bit better with a more streamline pipeline.

-could we at least get some slider bars for colors and refection and battle damage and rust????



ps- i have no shirt on

<3

Perhaps.

Maybe it is time to allow people to see THEIR SHIP with a custom paint job. But if the trend in the game goes towards forcing players like me to see your lame pink torpedo ship with a purple bunny-rabbit on it flying in space, then my vote is a solid NO WAY.

Options are good. And if it is an OPTION (read: Choice™) that players can enable or disable, then maybe it's time to shut these whiners up about it.

Go ahead. Have your pink torpedo ship. As long as I have the option to turn it off and render (pun intended) all your efforts useless.

Thank you.

Respect the EVE.

Exactly