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Ship SKINs are too poor for the price.

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Jenn aSide
Worthless Carebears
The Initiative.
#41 - 2016-02-01 16:16:23 UTC
I call the original post an example the Dinsdale Syndrome.

I used to tell him that no one would ever know if he actually made a good point because he was one of the WORST communicators I'd ever experienced on a forum. There was no sign of respect or love in his posts, just more "CCP is bad" (and in his case it was "CCP is bad and just a front for the Goons"). So even if he ever did have any kind of salient point, it was drowned out by his odious communication manner.

Same with this poster, rather than rally people together, Fazmarai just pushes people away with these kinds of posts. And this is coming from someone who thinks CCPs approach to Skins leaves much to be desired.
SurrenderMonkey
State Protectorate
Caldari State
#42 - 2016-02-01 16:29:48 UTC
Jenn aSide wrote:
I call the original post an example the Dinsdale Syndrome.



I had forgotten all about that guy, and I preferred it that way.

Thanks a lot, Jenn. Thanks a lot.

"Help, I'm bored with missions!"

http://swiftandbitter.com/eve/wtd/
Vincent Athena
Photosynth
#43 - 2016-02-01 17:01:29 UTC
Jonah Gravenstein wrote:
CCP Darwin wrote:
Jonah Gravenstein wrote:
Is the concept being looked at with a view of giving us access to tools, similar to those used in the fanfest presentation

What tools we can put in the players' hands, and with what flexibility and limitations, is what has not yet been determined.
Ahh that's fair enough. I'll take that as you're looking at it, but have yet to determine how badly we'll pervert and abuse anything you put into our grubby little mitts.

TL;DR You're worried about TTP; Time To P(ink Thorax), and rightly so.

My method for dealing with TTP:
CCP releases tools for designing the vanity item.
Players can design items, and submit the design to CCP, along with a PLEX.
The PLEX is to pay for CCPs time in the next step.
CCP vets the design, insuring that it meets the flavor of Eve, and is not going to be an issue.
If approved, the player gets a BPO for the item. The player has the option of getting more BPOs of their item for more PLEX.

Know a Frozen fan? Check this out

Frozen fanfiction
Miles Winter
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#44 - 2016-02-01 19:20:49 UTC
Vincent Athena wrote:
Jonah Gravenstein wrote:
CCP Darwin wrote:
Jonah Gravenstein wrote:
Is the concept being looked at with a view of giving us access to tools, similar to those used in the fanfest presentation

What tools we can put in the players' hands, and with what flexibility and limitations, is what has not yet been determined.
Ahh that's fair enough. I'll take that as you're looking at it, but have yet to determine how badly we'll pervert and abuse anything you put into our grubby little mitts.

TL;DR You're worried about TTP; Time To P(ink Thorax), and rightly so.

My method for dealing with TTP:
CCP releases tools for designing the vanity item.
Players can design items, and submit the design to CCP, along with a PLEX.
The PLEX is to pay for CCPs time in the next step.
CCP vets the design, insuring that it meets the flavor of Eve, and is not going to be an issue.
If approved, the player gets a BPO for the item. The player has the option of getting more BPOs of their item for more PLEX.


Now introduce 600 player submitted designs and a staff of 15 to work through them.

It's prohibitive. You're going to either get mostly denied designs, or a lot of awful stuff slipping through the cracks.

Let the playerbase themselves vet via a free market system.

The only thing devs really need to do with player-driven creation/design tools is control the palette. Hell, the palette could be specific for each skin (or 'canvas' as I said above) so that you don't get hot pink my little pony ships flying around. With the editable palette limited to the 'style' of a particular skin you can avoid this.

The other issue is the application of vector designs on the hulls and layering them to create artwork. You can get some really amazing stuff doing this - just take a look at Forza. The downside is that players absolutely CAN and WILL use it to make dicks and **** on the sides of their spaceships. You pretty much have to accept this with any customization tools that allow real player-driven artwork on the ships.

I don't think that's really an issue, but CCP artists don't want us to compromise the feel of the game - I really don't blame them. I don't want eve to be another hat fortress 2 or planetside either.

But if we don't go down the player customization route, then we really need to start seeing some nicer skins. Just look at how excited people got over the chinese new year skins - the problem at the moment is that the vast majority of the skins right now just... don't impress. It's more like a quick and dirty "get it done now!" to make cash while the actual implementation and design is finalized.

This approach would've been fine, IF the skins were only on sisi right now. I don't think a half-working system should've gone live though, because now CCP has to design around people already owning skins. It seriously limits what can be changed in the future; CCP boxed themselves into a poorly implemented system that constrains and limits future design and growth.
Mina Sebiestar
Minmatar Inner Space Conglomerate
#45 - 2016-02-01 19:51:12 UTC  |  Edited by: Mina Sebiestar
Quote:
ship redesigns, etc. etc.)


*points scepter of doom at CCP Darwin...Talk!



Edit

That 2014 demo is what i personally want, to be able to custom ship my self within presets allowed by CCP.

You choke behind a smile a fake behind the fear

Because >>I is too hard
Indahmawar Fazmarai
#46 - 2016-02-01 21:30:07 UTC  |  Edited by: Indahmawar Fazmarai
CCP Darwin wrote:
Indahmawar Fazmarai wrote:
And then, accidentally, we know that any SKINs can be applied to any ships... which means that they are not created individually for each ship. I would bet that they're a process, not an object.

Or so they look like. Blink


Your original post contained a lot of speculation about details of how ships were authored that were somewhat hard for me to map to our actual processes, so I had some trouble understanding the nature of your concern.

You are right that in the current system, you can think of SKINs as swapping out packages of material attributes for predefined regions of the ship, though it's more than just color. For example, a metallic look can be replaced with a plastic look. Predefined in-game factions have more flexibility and can arbitrarily replace texture maps on a ship as needed. (This, for example, is how we apply the red splotches on Blood Raider ships.)

That said, different ship hulls have different material counts and thus there's work involved in ensuring that a SKIN material set will apply properly to each ship. Yes, internally our engine will assemble any ship with any material set on a "best effort" basis, but we check SKINs on each ship and quality control each combination separately, because in the case of a ship/SKIN mismatch that best effort can result in regions of a ship being set to default material values. (Also, this will result in large numbers of errors being dumped to the log, which is why we expressed concerns about there being a performance impact when that ship SKIN UI bug existed that allowed applying any SKIN to any ship.)

As I mentioned earlier, the projection-based technology shown at Fanfest 2014 is still on our roadmap, and will much more easily enable the kind of designs it sounds like you're after, like a series of SKINs with racing stripes, for example.

As for the concept of painting custom maps per-ship for each SKIN, while that would absolutely be technically possible, there's no possibility we could deliver that volume of texture painting work along with everything else we are working on currently (Citadels, Force Auxiliary capitals, ship redesigns, etc. etc.)


First, I want to thank you for the time taken wading through my words. It's difficult to talk about matters I don't master, without technical words, and in a language that's not mine.

I understood and tried to explain that the current procedure changes attributes of a graphic package (or how it's called the mix of textures and mapping required to "dress up" a 3D object) rather than be a new package of its own. I also understood that the reason to do that is that making a whole new set of textures for each ship would require more work than can be done with the current resources and needs (not the least, that cosmetic items must pay themselves).

I hope that the projection technology will work better so we can see lines along the edges of the hull, stripes and other shapes anywhere (sharkmouths and nosearts anyone? P), so any ship wearing a certain SKIN actually looks like other hulls sporting the same SKIN.
Tamazaki
Doomheim
#47 - 2016-02-01 21:45:16 UTC
And just what is wrong with a pink Thorax anyway? Sad
Bumblefck
Kerensky Initiatives
#48 - 2016-02-01 22:25:20 UTC
Tamazaki wrote:
And just what is wrong with a pink Thorax anyway? Sad




Nothing at all...but if it's being used for it's intended purpose it should not be publicly visible OopsXShocked

Perfection is a dish best served like wasabi .

Bumble's Space Log
Oshien
Imperial Academy
Amarr Empire
#49 - 2016-02-01 23:23:40 UTC
The skins being cosmetic makes me think they should charge enough to make a profit from the art and database cost of these things. They have no real effect on gameplay and honestly I think many of them look pretty awesome. Keep them how they are at this level and maybe even introduce corp/alliance skins later when the tech/assets come along to allow it and charge what CCP deems to be a proper price ... people will buy them or choose not to and then CCP will adjust accordingly.
Iyokus Patrouette
University of Caille
Gallente Federation
#50 - 2016-02-02 06:35:31 UTC
CCP Darwin wrote:
(Also, this will result in large numbers of errors being dumped to the log, which is why we expressed concerns about there being a performance impact when that ship SKIN UI bug existed that allowed applying any SKIN to any ship.


I still have sweet dreams about my police issue Vexor, Vigilant, Dominix etc that i discovered from that little skin ui bug.
please hurry and let me cruise around in my police skins already..

oh also theres a purple dress in the shop that i've been eye balling for close to a year now.. can i has that seeded to, Please i promise i will take out the rubbish and do my homework and wash the dishes and all my other chores!

---- Advocate for the initiation of purple coloured wormholes----

Indahmawar Fazmarai
#51 - 2016-02-02 07:23:12 UTC
Iyokus Patrouette wrote:
(...)

oh also theres a purple dress in the shop that i've been eye balling for close to a year now.. can i has that seeded to, Please i promise i will take out the rubbish and do my homework and wash the dishes and all my other chores!


Next April will be the 5th anniversary of "Waiting for the 'Structure' dress". First seen on Singularity test server around April 2011, the 'Structure' dress seemed to be part of the initial batch of apparel to be sold to capsuleers. But alas!, for some uknown reasons, many apparel pieces available at Singularity never have been seeded at Tranquility, and among them, the 'Structure' dress has been waiting for release since Incarna.

And yet we keep waiting, as these are the erratic misterious ways of !!CCP!!



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