Hi space friends!
Team Size Matters at CCP has recently shipped a very cool feature that I’ve already praised in this post. In short, you can now apply different paintjobs to your ships, and you can even change them mid-flight, in space!
The first time I saw it in game I realized it would be damn cool to use CCP WebGL and have it in LMeve as well – either for reference, or to choose which SKINs you’d like to buy.
Steve Ronuken again proved his place on the CSM is one well deserved. He was so helpful, that he already imported the new SKIN YAML files to his MySQL conversion of EVE Static Data.
All I had to do is bind them to Database module in LMeve. Sounds easy, right?
Well, not so fast. While CCP was generally very helpful by providing all the data I need, they provided this data in a bit inconsistent way. I’m talking about SKIN icons in Image Export Collection. Every typeID in the game, be it a ship, module or even DUST weaponry has two sizes of icons in Types.zip file. It applies to all items, but not SKINs! SKINs have their icons in Icons.zip “because SKINs are not linked to typeIDs” according to CCP FoxFour. Well, I agree to some extent, but then when you look at it, all SKIN Licenses typeIDs have an icon in Types.zip already – they just have this exclamation mark icon instead of the pretty hull colour preview known from the game client.
I didn’t realize that these icons were in the other file – as soon as I saw the exclamation mark, instead of digging in more files, I have immediately set out to create a piece of code to draw these icons myself.
It didn’t take long before I ended up with this JavaScript piece: https://jsfiddle.net/zbasb4jc/
Possible? Possible! It does not look *exactly* like SKIN icon in game. First I didn’t know how to do gradients of the top of my head, and secondly, by now you’ve realized the first icon above is for Wiyrkomi SKIN, right? Then it means it is good enough 😉
The second step was to modify the Database view to display a list of available SKINs for selected ship, and modifying code handling CCP WebGL to load the correctly skinned version.
Here’s an example page for Caldari Raven, and a fullscreen 3D preview:
Feel free to explore this new feature yourself – the public version of LMeve Database has been updated to show SKINs as well!
http://pozniak.pl/database/index.php?id=10&id2=1&nr=638