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:cough: all the interbus ships :cough:

I seem to remember the old tattoo mechanic was better than it currently is. You guys remember when one could pick from 5 or 6 different tattoo designs, scale it within reason up or down 30%, and just drag it around on your face for positioning? I still want that back...but more to the point:

How about we apply something like that to the ship models? They can be very simple shader transforms/vectors or whatever magic happens. Could be only 5 or 6 actual designs (tiger stripe, pair of different camos, color bars, solid color overlay, whatever) and simply have a selector for 16 different colors. Could get real fancy and add a 4 level opacity or something too.

I would imagine that on a regular battlefield with 500 ships on it, that given the various hulls involved, this would add a rather trivial amount of work for both the client itself and the video card. Identification of ship is already sent, as well as full weapon system status, shield/armor cycles, movement, placement in space, etc. This would only add the data required to

1) select a basic skin overlay
2) scale it a limited quantity
3) color it

These things are easily duplicated for each ship, and I would imagine add less overhead than the already working shadow shaders. I bet it could also function like the drone models - can turn them off on your client if you don't want to render 9000 drone models flying around.

Thus saving, speculating on current implementation:
1) Developer time repainting custom models/paintjobs for each ship
2) Video load and overhead since if there is one of these on field, then one must load more crap into memory and process it differently from everything else
3) Rage at how the options would otherwise be so limited (see above rant about tattoos...I don't want my tattoo centered nor do I want my scar in one of hte 2 locations allowed).

Is it deliberate that customization has taken a back seat when all the great games of the past 20 yrs have included a high level of customization from the beginning?

It is free...

ISK in EVE is not real money. Unless you are one of this **** poor sobs in EVE that needs to buy PLEX with Real money just to buy things.

However it would have been nice if we had control the paint scheme. But I can see now that is something that will be heavily abused. I am fine with fixed paint jobs as long as I get my Black Legion.

It is a one-use BPC so each time you want to paint your ship, that is an AUR cost.

Erm, no.
There will also be multi run BPC's.

You will also be able to purchase them with ISK from other players via market/contracts, or just buy the finished ships themselves.

This won't be the final version of the mechanic, this is only a temporary proof of concept test.

It may be "free" to you, but SOMEONE has to pay for it and that is ********, doubly so for a pilot program that may not even be implemented in full.

- Paint job costs money and is destroyed on death, offers no benefit beyond cosmetic.
- This game is all about blowing up your spaceship over and over, and spending ISK efficiently.
- Paint job's initial injection into the game is tied up in a secondary currency no one cares about.
- You generally don't see your ship in this game, or anyone else's, as you tend to be zoomed out pretty far. Even if you zoom in on your ship for a bit, the ship models are so dark when undocked you don't get a good look anyway.

Can't see myself using this much, and would be surprised if it becomes popular with the general player base. There are additional reasons I'm not excited about this as well. There are lots of skin swaps in the game already and they usually denote altered stats. This concept will become pretty fuzzy. Sometimes if a ship looks different, it will be different. Sometimes it will not actually be different. When skins that do not alter stats are folded into the default ID and don't have a different name on the overview, then it won't matter as much. Since, again, you don't really see the ships much in this game. I can see this initial implementation being confusing to new players though.

I also wonder if this just creates more work for the artists every time a ship model needs to be upgraded.

I would have rather seen the corp logo generator overhauled, and the option to display your logo on your ship in place of the standard company logo - free of charge. Or even just the ability to put decals in certain spots of the ship, not necessarily only corp logos. Replace front logo with corp logo, replace side logo with skull and cross bones, for example.

If by this you mean he has a valid point and that it's too tiring for you to reply with anything other than snark, then yes please I second the suggestion. Just sayin.

Stoked for ship skins.

Not so stoked for the rollout format but I understand it's not necessarily going to be that way forever.

Not so stoked to have to use AUR either. I don't care whether I can use ISK to buy AUR or not. It's just a step I don't really want to do.

I feel the proposed costs are too high, especially for frigs, but even for battleships. I wouldn't buy a car and then pay a detailer 30% to 1000% or more of the car's value to repaint it for me--so why should I spend virtual currency that way on virtual goods?

I would rather use LP and/or mission for agent rewards to earn "static" ship skins that are predetermined according to a pattern that matches an NPC corp, like the ones in the devblog. This would make working for certain NPC corps (and grinding standings/LP) more meaningful. I hope for a rig/subsystem that can be fitted to the ship I want to use that skin on.

Like others, I also would also like the ability to custom paint my ship in ways that do not conform to NPC corps. I could maybe grudgingly pay AUR for this but not at the costs proposed. I don't necessarily want to paint whatever I want, but something like the tattoo system, where I can pick from a selection of patterns suitable for each hull, and then subsequently choose from a selection of colors, would be good for me. I would like to be able to apply a "primary" color and a "highlight" color.

If capsuleers can apply and change their facial tattoos at will (nanites), then surely the same kind of technology should be plausibly applied to ship hulls, and that kind of technology should be cheap and offer a lot of options. ;)