Hull ID, Decals, Paint, and Customization

[scienceguy8]

I realize that this idea (and the one I had earlier about how carried ships should be deployed and recovered) are not particularly useful at this time. My ideas will be much more useful after Vega Strike has gone under some further polishing and bug-squashing, but I still want to throw my ideas out there early just in case they are more complex then I believe them to be and require a large amount of work on some sort of supporting system that can only be added now during the early stages.

I noticed something while I was flying around today in my Sickle fighter: most of the ships I encountered were all the same appearance-wise. I think that maybe somebody would at least give their ship a new paint job in order to make it unique. That got me thinking about how all ships could be customized in some way and have different levels of customization. I believe that this would lead to a more realistic and immersive single player experience, and for multi player, could allow a player to show off his/her creative skills to his/her fellow players.

1. No Customization: At purchase, a player has the option to give his or her ship a name. This name, along with a ship ID number, are painted in grey on the tail section of fighters and either on the middle or front section of larger ships. If no name is chosen, only an ID number is given.

2. Emblem: The pilot can choose an emblem, either a government/faction logo or a neutral design, that serves as the background for the name of the ship. The name is printed in a matching color and font. The emblem can be placed on any flat, visible surface of the ship. The ship ID is either part of the emblem or printed directly below it. Human players can choose an emblem of their own design by creating one in Photoshop or GIMP and saving it as a .png file and opening it in VS.

3. Full Paint Job: VS will present the pilot with a number of different paint job patterns (at least 5 for each ship model). The player then selects what color goes into what field. Prepackaged color combinations will be included so the player or computer pilot can deck out their ship in their favorite government's/faction's colors.

4. Full Paint Job Super Custom: The player can obtain a skin pattern for their ship from a folder that comes with VS, create their own skin in Photoshop or GIMP, and then upload it into the game.

[ace123]

Paint jobs would be pretty cool. We do support custom textures, however creating one might be kind of difficult. No reason it can't be done, however--we could see if we can borrow GIMP's code.

We actually do have faction-specific emblems/logos that get put in specific places (only based on your faction, but considering that "privateer" is a separate faction....). They might be turned off, however, and they aren't very customizable.

[Turbo]

Paint jobs are not difficult to make, it just takes some time to tweak the textures so they wrap nicely around the corners.

This one is simply the original texture overlaid with a new partly transparent pattern.
http://www.willadsenfamily.org/us/don/t ... irefly.png

Since this function is not yet built in, there are a few steps to take to make only your ship use the custom texture, instead of all of the ships of that model. You have to copy the Gawain folder to a new one called gawain.custom, replace the original texture in the new folder with the new version, and hack your saved game ship stats to point to the new folder. None of these steps are difficult if you read the VS documentation, but are only practical in single-player mode.

It may be possible to simply make it a faction texture, of the Privateer faction, but I have not read up on how that works.

Turbo

[arbuthnot]

I thought I'd try this, but neither Photoshop nor Fireworks would open the (usually flexible) png files, both giving 'unknown file type' messages. Does it require a specific program?

[loki1950]

All of the textures in the shipped version are compressed into DDS format there is a plug-in for both Photoshop and the GIMP as well infrnview with all it's plug-ins will open them and you can convert them to png jpeg or what ever.there's a link to them here on the forum you can most likely find them with a search.

Enjoy the Choice

[Deus Siddis]

Well when it comes to visible ship customization, I much rather see upgrades getting visibly added onto my ship (or into alcoves if it is an Aera ship) when I purchase them. This is already done for turrets, so I don't know if it would really be that difficult on the coding end, but it wouldn't be too much work on the art end though if it was done now while the project is about to shift to a newer generation of models.

But if alot of folks did want support for making custom paint jobs in game, this tool would have to paint both new diffuse and specular textures with each brush stroke, intelligently, or else it would look terrible next to what was created outside of the game in gimp. The program could also not allow certain parts of the ship to be painted on, like thrusters, the cockpit, weapon barrels, etc. These areas might have to be defined by yet another texture map (fortunately a gray-scale one) created by the artist when he makes a ship.