Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I can see that. I, too, can read. Thank you. But it looks like at the moment there are only 1500 ish responses out a MUCH larger community...

I used to play Soldier of Fortune where everyone had the ability to change the look of their weapons which showed some very interesting imagination such as Grenades with Smiley Faces on them and so forth.

I do remember that you could change the look of your weapon but not for every server though. I think if the client had the skin then the server would also have to have the same skin in order for everyone to see the players skin, otherwise the player saw the skins that they had their weapons only.

What this means is that 100 people could have 100 different weapons skins which would cause a lot of server issues as the server attempted to translate each different skin to each players client where the largest data usage would come in the form of LOD or level of detail that the weapon would be seen at from various distances.

Hopefully CCP would be able to create a customizable paint shop based off of the Medal Creation mechanics.

When a medal is created there is a base of choice for each medal relating to certain aspects of the type of device used to create the medal there are also various color schemes as well to render the color of the medal in.

Now lets suppose that the base devices for medal creation are certain parts of the ship's exterior hull. The section of the hull is selected and the custom paint job is applied based upon a selectable base of customization the same as the medal creation.

Because the medal creation graphics are stored in the server and in the clients PC then regardless of how the medal is created and viewed by anyone in the environment there would not be any data transmission issues because all of the devices and colors of the medal would be part of a group and or groups of objects that are readily recognized by both the server and the client.

Lets use the Retriever as a our base of example. You dock your barge in the Customization Shop where a screen then appears where the following areas of the barge can be customized.

1.Hull - would include the base hull and super structure except for the small base that the mining lasers are slotted at along with the middle super structure located on the upper hull.

2.WIngy Bits - four projected shields plus the support pylons

3.Diving Board - located at the aft of the barge.

4.Engines - would include the engine nozzles exterior and interior.

5.Grindings - would include the flour the mashing gears at the fore of the ship the pistons and the rubbing your belly pusher arms.

6. Railing - rails that run amid ships and aft through the engine support pylons.

7. Amid Ships Super Structure - section of the raised super structure located in the middle of the barge.

8. Windows - Sections of the barge that have windows.

9.Blinkies - various parts of the ship where navigation lighting is located.

Basically each section of the ship listed above would have to have a new model texture created for it that could then selected from the list of available textures that would be located on the server side as well as the client side.

The base of this new type of ship customization should begin with the smaller sections of the ship such as the Windows and Nav Beacons because if CCP builds their textures like I think they do they use a layered texture where the windows that you see are actually cut-outs on the main texture itself with the window texture being a layer underneath of the actual hull texture that could be changed rather easily.

The Nav Beacons for each ship would in my opinion be the easiest to change since are a Particle Animation with a color texture added to it. Each Nav Beacon on the barge that blinks in a different time sequence could be considered one section that could be modified in the shop that because both Particle Animations exist in the server and the client at the same time having a system that allows the color to be changed similar to the medal creation system would allow for everyone to see the color change as well.

I think this is too overly complex. It really only need consist of:
• Define base hull color
• Define ship lighting color
• Define ship effects color (drone bays, searchlights)
• Define skin, primary and secondary colors
• Define engine exhaust color (optional)