Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So I got around to thinking back to an age old topic:

Why can't we have custom skins for our ships? Why does every drake have to look exactly like everyone else's drake? You would think thousands of years in the future they would have the technology to paint the side of a ship..

Of course the biggest reason CCP won't let us have custom skins is because the first thing people will do is paint their itty Vs to look like a giant floating man-junk and that would just take away from the whole eve universe.

So what if it was done a little differently. You know how the different pirate factions have their own ship colorations?
Guristas - brownish, khaki
Blood Raiders- Brownish with the dark red accents
Angels- Reddish/rust colored

you get the idea..

So what if we could do the same sort of thing for player run alliances? Or maybe corporations (probably not)
The CEO of the head corporation in the alliance could use a skin color design tool to "paint" their alliance ships.
There would be some sort of color wheel or color selector where you could choose primary, secondary, and maybe a third color. They would all have sort of an EvE Feel to them, so no pink and white kestrels!!

There would also be maybe 2 or 3 different "styles" for coloration on the ships. Somewhat in the way how the nighthawk has that red stripe on it, you know what I mean?

And all of this would kind of go together with the whole alliance/corp logo being painted onto ships. It would be a way alliances could identify themselves and not everyone's ships would look exactly the same. However you'd rarely have rainbow fleets either since the alliance would all have the same kinds of ships.

Imagine a RED alliance fleet, black hulls with dark red accents, getting into a fight with a roaming gang of Goons, with their hulls being black and yellow, It just makes battles that much more epic!

Lag wouldn't be a big issue either, it would all be done client side. In the same way alliance logos are pulled up when you look at someone's bio, their ship's color would also be loaded. That isn't very much code. Lets do some math:

lets say theres 24 colors to choose from
and 3 different color "regions"
in 3 different color schemes
Thats 216 different possible combinations
translate that to binary, 8 bits gives you 255 useable values

So each ship would only need 8 bits of extra data sent over the server for the colors to be rendered. 8 BITS!

for those of you who dont know binary, thats this much:
10010110

THATS IT!
That wouldn't cause any notable amount of lag. The data would be carried with the character, so when that character comes on grid, your computer client will read the "color" code from the server, and put the skin on the ship in the appropriate way based on all of the physical textures being saved to the client.

So any thoughs on this? It would be a pretty big jump from the way CCP currently handles ship textures, as each new texture being considered a different ship, but it would just add that much to the immersion factor of Eve Online!

Because we can already imagine the 'pank and furple' roaming fleets. I'm all for it, so long as they provide me an option to turn this garbage off, so my system doesn't have to load that **** a couple of thousand times in a massive fleet fight.

Would love this.

What's the big deal about white and pink though? I wouldn't do it but it should be an option for those who like those colours - or those who want to **** off people like you who hate pink.

I first thought that would be a kewl option. But looking at our options for corp "colors" and emblems...best to just offer dyes and maybe rally stripes for ships (much like the options offered in racing games).

Those would have to be server side or no one else would see them, then we could all have permanent tidi

http://i.imgur.com/4Gh5hO4.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/EQpQh4G.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/zj7CNEe.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/NNPNK8V.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/908uNbl.jpg

http://imgur.com/a/uablN

www.tinyurl.com/cppcsurvey

:3 enjoy

Pink Thorax.

Nah...

We need NPC corps shins

Screw coloured ships, allow us to put our alliance logo on our ships.

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