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Nice to see the devs are finally looking at this considering it's been a possibility since V3 came out.

I am sure different hulls for each paint scheme isn't going to happen due to the overhead, both coding and player ( because who wan't so have to troll through the market for the specific one of a dozen variants of a vessel. if that happened nobody would bother to buy and sell alternate schemes).

I am hoping for something like a righ slot that changes the ship skin.
I am hoping we have limited customization to make our own scheme, though rather than just being stuck with various corporate/faction skins. As much as I love the KK paint scheme, I would like to have the ability to be able to set a pattern a, base color a secondary color and a trim color for instance. Plenty of customization options there.

I would not mind if they were truly micro, but hte prices are hefty.. for a texture. I think anyone that assmbles a ship for the first time should haver the option to choose a preset of cheap or free skins... and then add some collectable rare skins for a bit higher price, but still 'micro' and not the price of half a plex or more. This does make CCP look good to the already paying customers.

And I agree about the plex for some words in a time capsule.

I agree with Bohneik - a different mechanic is needed vs changing ship names like this via a blueprint.

Picture 2 years from now with 20 different color pallets to choose from for a given hull and a fleet op where an FC is trying to order his list to call primary targets...

That hull name needs to remain constant irrespective of the pretty colors someone chooses.

If I could paint my thorax or Mega I would pay for it but atm it's a waste of isk for me sadly, really want to make my mega look nice

Well said, +1

Thank god.... I will finally have a chance to change the dumb green camo on the republic fleet issue ships.

Talking about micro-transactions for a purely cosmetic feature that is also available for in-game money is dumb...at best. The AUR store is by far the best choice to run this feature on, for four reasons.

1. A lot of code has been put on it already.
2. It is de-facto the correct place for vanity/cosmetic items.
3. It is under-utilized.
4. It is already linked with the player market.

AUR can be bought with isk at a current rate of ~187000isk per AUR if you choose a 1000AUR token or a plex conversion (500AUR tokens trade for 160000isk per AUR and 100AUR tokens for 230000isk per AUR). For a single run BP for the Hyperion Aliastra Edition, you will need 350AUR. That means you will have to pay about 65mil isk for your paint-job (the same as a faction EANM for example). Thats not bad at all, especially since the hull already goes for 223mil isk...

The only problem with this procedure is that each distinct paint job is added as an additional hull in the game, and this produces a soft limit on the number of different variants you can have in the end. But the current system is also good because it gives you the opportunity to buy an already painted ship at the market. At the time of this post you will pay a 2mil premium for it, but you wont have to do any work like buying AUR via tokens/plex, buying the hull and producing the ship.

As others have said, it is possible to circumvent the additional item id problem by coding a new system with paint and decal/logo slots in the hulls. Its not as easy as it sounds though, and I really think CCP will move on it only if a pilot program like this goes well.

Just read the dev blog first. this is the PILOT. It is not supposed to be this way in the future if the pilot is successful. But they did want to do it without any modification to the code. And code does not allow different skins with the same ID and name.

IF this pilot succeeds they will put a programer on the job of code modification so the paint job will be something like rig or whatever. But CCP don't want to commit a programmer on thing nobody would care about.


I have just one fear about this project and it is a ship selection. Granted the frigates are generally used, however the selected battleships don't see much action in PvP. So some mission runners might buy some but will only lose them sporadically. So I expect the demand for new hulls to decline.

I have an idea for the Ship Painting Pilot Program of how to solve the issue of having unique records in the database tables that store ship and ship information. I don't know if this is technically feasible so keep in mind this is only an idea. However, if it is possible it may solve the issue of having to perform tons of repetitive tasks for the Devs and make our Ship Painting feature a reality.


In the matter of requiring all unique typeID as the primary key and new ship names one possible solution could be to create a new field in the current ship database as a Foreign Key with some number as it's value. That value then shares a relationship with the Primary Key of a new Table in the database that contains different color or skins for each of it's fields.

The idea is that this new database table will then store all the available colors and skins [as different fields] and the different blueprint copy for each color or skin will call upon a particular field in the unique record for each ship and be able to use the same name for the ship because it is sharing a relationship. Also, there would have to be a field or some way to refer to the color by a name, like "green" or "SoE Skin" but this can be a field next to each color field and the database call would point to at least two fields, 1) the color or skin itself, and 2) the name of the color or skin. This of course can be scaled up to include other meaningful information.


There would be no reason to create different ship names or have different names for the overview, however, the Market would introduce additional work and other issues to overcome. To make things easier to implement the Ship Painting simply do not give us the ability to sell our customized ships in the Market, at all period. Do give us the ability to trade in station and also sell on the Contract system. This puts greater use of the Contract system but would need to add an data label on the contract itself to show that the color or skin has been modded or changed from the default. My suggestion would be to use the color or skin name from the newly created database table and insert that into the details of the contract.

If the Devs wanted to generate pictures of the colors or skins after they have been applied then just make the addition in the newly created database table by extending the database call. Then grab that information and data to insert into the contract details. When new ships are added add records to the current ship database and then also this new Table. When there's more colors or skins to make available add them into the newly created Table. We're still using most of the same code and databases so the work needed to construct this should be minimal but give a tremendous amount of expandability and robust-ness for future use.

If CCP makes a firm commitment to this endeavour with a wider assortment of skins that can be applied to a hulls of a given race and includes the ability to apply these through an interface, they'll win over many converts. This includes the ability to modify not only the base ship color, but the ship lighting and effects colors as well as the primary and secondary skin colors. These needs to be achievable to existing rigged ships through a station service (and not manufacturing).