DescentBB

Something I don't remember seeing discussed elsewhere:

Will Core Decision allow us to easily customize our ships? D3 lets you import a small 64x64 .tga file. Will Core Decision have more places where we could stick graphics \"labels\" (hopefully jpg or gif)?

I think it was a cool idea. But I actually thought, when I saw it executed in D3, it cheapened the game a little. Random graphics spewed on ships doesn't look good IMHO. And to add to that, it was almost pointless since you couldn't see the graphics on the ship unless they weren't moving.

I think a better way of doing this (associated custom graphics with each user) could be made.

This was brought up in a way. I believe there was discussion whether you be able to customize the color of the ship, but it was decided that if it was allowed, one half would use a camo skin, and the other half of players would choose a completely black skin. So limiting it to a square on the ship like in D3 would be best I think.

Sniper, you need not chase down a pilot to look at their graphic in D3 on their ship. Just hit F7 and hit page up/down and highlight their name in the list it will show tight there in the players list

BUBBALOU wrote:Sniper, you need not chase down a pilot to look at their graphic in D3 on their ship. Just hit F7 and hit page up/down and highlight their name in the list it will show tight there in the players list

Yes, this is exactly what I am referring to. I think this is the best way to do it. BUT to NOT show it on the sides of the ships. IMHO it looks ugly. Just my two-cents.

Ship graphics are ugly in general.


In UT2004, they had the Hellbender and on the license plate, I noticed that when a player jumps into the vehicle, it will display their name on the license plate. You could do something like that around the canopy, the enable clan tags on the wings, simply in lettering with different color shades.


Skins aren't bad, if you have a set of pre-built skins like Mech Warrior did. (referring to the statement about ship color).

That's a cool idea... I always thought the color variety in MW4 was pretty cool.

Color customization, like in Warhammer 40K, would be a cool thing to build off of.

The \"license plate\" idea is subtle enough to not be ugly, but enough to give some sense of customization. I like the idea of having an avatar, but just not on the ship itself. XD

complete custom ship skins will drag a server down. IL2 has the ability to do this, but it's disabled most of the time on combat servers. It's just too much data to push with all the other game data being piped.

It's pretty cool for a squad thing (or rather a clan thing in Descent). So if the clan wants to get together and have an event or two clans,(once everyone's skins are uploaded) it would be cool, but not in just a generic server.

Duper wrote:complete custom ship skins will drag a server down.

Ok, this has to be put into consideration. The data has to be shrinked in this extent, that it doesn't influence. Instead of full skin capapility there could be for instance an option to color certain fields on the ships' surface. So a player could chose something like a flag (eg. blue wing tips, red frames, black body). something like that, what gives a player the opportunity to show his "face".
The question ist, how much bandwidth should be reserved for non obligatory game data like skins/logos, audtiotaunts, voip etc.

The only problem with thee textures, and audiotaunts, is that if they're big, it there would have to be a time when first connected to the server where you have to set aside time to download all that information from teh server. THough that's no problem for audio taunts, they were always small. Any bigger and people would just abuse them by making big ones just to force other people to dl them.

I'm happy with just a square patch like we get in D3. I just want to be able to put a jpeg there.

And no, they often aren't pretty, but they DO help me identify who I'm being shot up by.