Ability to personalize ships a bit more... I always aprove personalization. It don't make you better, but you're still more unique and isn't it what most players want? Adding a faction logo, some bit other painting... YES.
The IMG shipline material file is 342kb.
That includes quite a few textures.
Someone who does texturing for the mod should be able to shed more light on the actual size of a ship's textures.
Mechanically:
Each different texture style would be a different ship.
Such different ships would reference different material files, where the textures inside are named the same as in the other material files.
This means only 1 CMP file is needed. (CMP files reference texture names. The game is told to pick that CMP and look for the appropriate textures within certain material (MAT) files.)
This would require some FLHook work as it would mean that your ship current ship is replaced with another.
Overall:
Minimal work required aside from the actual texture making, QA and FLHook mechanics. The last aspect could prove to be annoying depending on the sheer number of textures.
Something like that Doc? I'd love it, but it would make the game larger as every skin would need to be included in the mod.
Exactly! Of course, each group would have it's own colors and such.
Listen, I just threw this out there as an idea. I don't have the talent to make skins nor do I have the time. If someone did, if the developer team could and would do it, if the Admin team would allow it then we may have something. For now, it's an idea.
Another thing, I posted this as a player, not an Admin or TAZ leader.
Black.Sails are corsairs. We use the corsair technology because we are proud of it. We use the corsair colors because we are proud of it.
If you want it, make the Raba have twice its cargo capacity and you'll find us happy. It has the fight abilities of a Pirate Transport without its capacity to hold the whole loot of a full transport kill.
Keep in mind that there are groups out there that dont follow the base RP of their NPC faction.
To the point that they are quite unique in the way they do things which explains why some people
would like the idea of custom skins. It makes the group's uniqueness stand out and gives them a
more pronounced identity in-game over the NPC faction default.
' Wrote:The IMG shipline material file is 342kb.
That includes quite a few textures.
Someone who does texturing for the mod should be able to shed more light on the actual size of a ship's textures.
Mechanically:
Each different texture style would be a different ship.
Such different ships would reference different material files, where the textures inside are named the same as in the other material files.
This means only 1 CMP file is needed. (CMP files reference texture names. The game is told to pick that CMP and look for the appropriate textures within certain material (MAT) files.)
This would require some FLHook work as it would mean that your ship current ship is replaced with another.
Overall:
Minimal work required aside from the actual texture making, QA and FLHook mechanics. The last aspect could prove to be annoying depending on the sheer number of textures.
I would assume it would be done by a request based system like you would for SRP.
Perhaps even limited to established RP groups and official factions.
I can see it getting out of hand if it was open to all.
The size of the texture files depends on the stile of texturing. If you texture a certain ships a way the ships are textured in vanilla then the mat file will have only few kilobytes. However if you pic a different method then you can end up with material files 3-4MB big.