Sugjestion for X4: Bring back the spray shop from X3, in a better form.

[Matterom]

One of the features from X3 i always liked the idea of but could never properly use en mass was the spray shop. The other trouble was how unwieldy it was to use, you could never really tell what you were going to get from it by applying it to one ship vs another. Worse yet on some ships it didn't really seem to change much.

Basically what i'm suggesting is, try to build a system for adding additional texture layers to objects that could in some in game UI be adjusted by the player, then applied either globally, or Saveable and simply re-applicable. I imagine something similar to Dawn of War's Army Coloring Tool. Possibly including other things like the logo swaps similar to what could be done in XRebirth using Unitrader's mod.

[mr.WHO]

Customizable/uploadable ship decals/logos and nameplates would be great for Sprayshop.


For Example Battlestart Galactica decal/logo:


And the nameplate would show the ship name you set, e.g. BSG-75 Galactica

[BugMeister]

Exogenesis (Dave Toome) made a brilliant 3D Model viewer for the X3 series - it has a spray-shop option so you can check what colour effects you could get..

- don't know if it's still available, but it looks smashing with TC and AP

[linolafett]

Custom playerlogos are a thing in X4.
The numbers on ships are not changeable in vanilla i think.

[Skeeter]

Player logos arnt new they've been done before in xbtf etc.

As I suggested in another topic, they have basically a framework allready for a mod shop which is station module building or ship customisation screen, that I believe could be with a little extra code work and added ui could be made into a interface to where you can pick a ship, have a 3d rotatable view and then you can change the primary and secondary colours say and also freely add decals to the ship, save it as a template and so when you go buy em at shipyard u can say you want to buy, nova custom 1, and buy 20 and they will be as you made em look. Cool if say you want wings of fighters to be all one colour and another wing say green wing be that other one.

Cant see it being too hard as it's just basically doing extra layer of info over main textures, plenty of games do it like homeworld, car games, etc.

[Honved]

The one issue with paint jobs is that the colors look entirely different as you go from sector to sector, and the color of the light changes. What looks good under white light may look horrible in red or green light.

I liked Homeworld's color menus, where you could specify a primary and secondary color for different areas of the ships. I assume that should be a simple thing to do if done up front, with the areas assigned a color index value which can then be mapped to any color later.

[Matterom]

Ship Id's would be nice from the standpoint of an Elite dangerous player who had to wait... 2-4? years before they introduced that as a paid shop feature.

[Karvat]

Am I the only one who thinks that details like this should be put even after 2 Dlc, where first the borons and the splits are eventually reintroduced? I mean, I would put the priority of details like this right at the end of the list, end end.

[A5PECT]

Am I the only one who thinks that details like this should be put even after 2 Dlc, where first the borons and the splits are eventually reintroduced? I mean, I would put the priority of details like this right at the end of the list, end end.

"X little detail should be done after more important Y feature is implemented first" isn't always a valid argument.

Sometimes implementing X feature doesn't actually interfere with the development of Y feature. When that's the case, the base game is better off with that minor feature added off the bat, rather arbitrarily walling it behind another development milestone.

Putting a simple two-dimensional plane that draws a single, user-defined texture onto ships is much, much easier than adding an entire race to the game. Doing the former isn't going to significantly interfere with the completion of the latter at all.

[Matterom]

Honestly it's never just that simple. The engine would still have to support it and that would require someone having the forethought to put it in, or add it as a development milestone to "Support" the implementation later. If that doesn't happen, you're looking at a serious overhaul of a deeper system. Usually. When i was speaking to the developers of Space Engineers, Properly overhauling a decal system was a decently painful process, and even then, it's only partially open to modding which means it's missing several key functions for modders to add things like Number Decals, logos, and so on. Specifically we can't get a list of all decals, we can't track the lifetime, and we don't have on decal removed events to re apply them. the framework for it just isn't there.

[mr.WHO]

Custom playerlogos are a thing in X4.
The numbers on ships are not changeable in vanilla i think.

Question - is player logo something global (same for all player ships and stations), or something which could be picked for individual ship/station?

Because If we could use multiple decals for diffrent ships the we don't need nameplates at all as we can added them to decal (E.g. capship decal with that ship name).

[Matterom]

Id imagine the logos themselves are somewhat preset. So even if you could select per ship, you won't get the functionality you want from it.

[Nanook]

Id imagine the logos themselves are somewhat preset....

Why? There may be preset ones, but I can't imagine the devs would make it impossible for players to create and add in their own.

[Matterom]

If they have a internal tool for it that supports shapes and colors sure, but outside of that I'd expect that mostly would be done through photoshop and added in.

Custom can mean many different things

[A5PECT]

X:BTF and X2 let you upload any (compatible) image file on your PC into the game to use as a player logo.

It'd be odd if X4's player logo system regressed into a less customizable implementation.

[The Q]

X:BTF and X2 let you upload any (compatible) image file on your PC into the game to use as a player logo.

It'd be odd if X4's player logo system regressed into a less customizable implementation.

I feel that's a flawed logic, as X4 logo system will hardly be based on X2's logo system.

[linolafett]

The plan is, that you can use simple image textures as player logos.

Cant see it being too hard as it's just basically doing extra layer of info over main textures, plenty of games do it like homeworld, car games, etc.

Sorry skeeter, but this is not how we do our assets.
The ships are not using unique textures. They all share atlas textures with all the other assets in the game. with unique textures we would not be able to achieve the texel density we need.
Therefore they do not have a UV layout where each pixel is only used once.
Even when we would add such a layer (wich in itself is not a big deal) the resolution will be probably lackluster.
Also this would need do be properly blended with our dirt layer and the projected decals on the ships.
Its all not impossible, but harder to do than in the named games.

[birdtable]

What about ships lights … could they be altered in colour range ????

[Karvat]

X:BTF and X2 let you upload any (compatible) image file on your PC into the game to use as a player logo.

It'd be odd if X4's player logo system regressed into a less customizable implementation.

Odd you mean like releasing the game with almost half the population of the universe?

[linolafett]

What about ships lights … could they be altered in colour range ????

Not via the game itself, but its super easy via editing the ships xml files.