Tag: ship skins

I don’t usually fly Amarr. When I first began playing EVE ten years ago, I’ve chosen Gallente for my main character. Gallente felt most European from all the races, and I really didn’t like the slavery thing in Amarr background. Caldari reminded me too much about rat race, and I was afraid the Minmatar ships will break itself apart. Let’s say I didn’t trust in the rust back then.

But now thanks to the new SKIN system I began to fly Amarr. Why? Because Khanid Oracle is simply gorgeous.

Ship skins and customization isn’t a new idea. I mused about flying Gurista Raven back in 2012, and T’Amber has been developing his ship painting tools for at least a couple of years. So what makes ship skinning such a spot-on feature? It’s microtransactions after all, and players didn’t seem to like them back in Incarna.

There’s a couple of reasons. Incarna failed, because avatar customization in a spaceship game was not really meaningful for the players. EVE is a spaceship game, set in space, so SHIP customization feels way more fitting. Other developers understood it earlier. In WoW the main way of transportation are mounts. Thus mounts make an important element of core gameplay. There are premium mounts, which, except for different looks, work exactly the same as their regular counterparts. The core gameplay of World of Tanks is… surprise: tanks. Tanks can have different camo patterns that can be purchased for in game money (time limited) or real money (permanent). Why do people buy them? Because they can customize element of the core gameplay (well camo reduces tank visibility, so it has actual in game function, too). And now EVE has ship skins. Fits just right!

So why do I like Khanid Oracle? As I said earlier, I didn’t like Amarr. Khanid Kingdom is part of Amarr Empire, but they are closer to Caldari, and I can live with flying Caldari ships (because Gallente should know their nemesis). That’s one of the reasons I really liked flying my brick tanked Damnation 🙂 Ship skins are not just a way to customize ships, for me it actually opens up a whole race I’ve been ignoring for the past 10 years.

So my TL;DR feedback for CCP FoxFour and the whole Team Size Matters is: SKINS ARE GREAT, I WANT MORE! 🙂

What next?

Well, some skins could have an actual in-game meaning or mechanic tied to them. For example pirate ship skins, when activated, would cause NPCs of the same faction to ignore the player’s ship. But should the player engage these NPCs, the skin would expire immediately and rats would start shooting. This is of course just one example, but with working skin system, the possibilities are there.

*) The above idea is intended only for 30-day pirate NPC skins which drop as loot.

After yesterday’s dev-blog about ship skins, most players again discuss the micropayment issues. Others discuss the technical aspects – instead of introducing 8 ship skins, maybe it should be possible to create your own, unique color sets?

Remember the game Homeworld? Even though it’s several years old, it allowed changing the colors of the stripes on all ships in the fleet. Would that be possible to do in EVE Online? Could corporations have their own “stripe colors”?

The answer is YES, technically it’s not very difficult*

* – I know for sure it’s possible to do in CCP WebGL, but I do not have enough knowledge about EVE Online client code

When me and T’Amber talked about CCP WebGL, I remember we’ve discussed ship shaders being text files. What does it mean? Each CCP WebGL ship skin is simply an XML plaintext file that says which files contain the 3d model, what textures to load and all the other parameters (hue, specular, effects etc.) are set there as well, all in plain text.

How does that apply to fully customizable ship skins? Some parameters could be dynamically changed at runtime, for example Diffuse Color (hue). You wouldn’t be freely able to change the entire textures, or shape of the ship, but you would get the Homeworld-like ability to change the colourable parts of the hull to any shade you want. Like Punkturis’ neon pink? Change the hue to pink (#FF00FF) and set saturation to max. Like matte black? Change the saturation to zero and luminosity to low, and you’ll get your black.

As an example, below is the color for Gallente ships from Tristan’s .red file:

<MaterialDiffuseColor>
<name>MaterialDiffuseColor</name>
<value json="true">[0.2901961,0.3764706,0.3843137,1.0,]</value>
</MaterialDiffuseColor>

for those who want to test, here’s the same colour as HTML ( 0.2901961 * 255 -> convert result to hex )

What does it give us? Instanced ships items (i.e. unpacked ships) would have to contain a few more numbers, that are then used by the game client to replace the default Diffuse Color a moment before rendering the ship on screen. Would that put a lot of strain on GPU? A little bit, yes, because client would have to keep many more shaders at runtime, but the amount of actual texture files would be exactly the same.

Here I replaced the default Gallente color with this:

And this is the result (requires WebGL compatible browser):

Tristan ‘CCP Punkturis’ Edition

Now that I’m not a CCP developer, I don’t know if EVE Online client works exactly the same way as CCP WebGL. But I bet CCP knows that already 😉

TL;DR: Hull colors are numbers, saved in plain text. You can easily change them a moment before displaying ship on the screen.