Custom ship skins?

[ThunderWolf]

Would it be possible to come up with your own skins for the ships? When I say custom skins, think decals and paint scheme creators similar to those found in racing games like Forza.

[mbpoblet]

Very doubtful, as it would undermine FD's efforts to profit from selling them (although with this new paid modding Pandora's box Valve and Bethesda / Zenimax have just opened, who knows). :(

You might be able to hack the game files, somehow (would first have to decypher the format), and replace an existing skin with a custom one, but in that case only you would see the custom skin, everyone else would see the one you'd used as a base.

[ThunderWolf]

Thats unfortunate, I thought that would make the game just that bit more fun. As for hacking the game files, if I could even figure out how to do it anyway, like you said, it would yield little effect.
And yes, this paid modding thing will likey come out with a mod that will allow you to do something like this, but I am not willing to pay for something that is by law, free.

[mrozdoba]

FD have previously stated they don't want players to be able to have custom ships so as to avoid the galaxy looking like an inconsistent mash up of popular scifi shows. I doubt they'd allow custom skins for similar reasons, let alone that it would undermine the paid for skins.

As for this free by law claim, I'm not even sure what you mean? You don't get to insert random bits of your own design into most media, interactive or otherwise. If you can reverse engineer the server, build your own & hack the game to boot, that would be pretty cool. However you can't, so it's not relevant at this point.

[mrozdoba]

SVG skinning with textures generated on the client? Just brainstorming with an admittedly subpar brain :)

[mbpoblet]

Originally posted by mrozdoba:

SVG skinning with textures generated on the client? Just brainstorming with an admittedly subpar brain :)

Yes, anything vector based would use much less bandwidth. It probably isn't supported by the engine, though (and they'd still need to find some cheap way to filter out the dickbutt decals, and it'd still conflict with their funding model).

[mrozdoba]

@mbpoblet, indeed. I was more thinking about the distant (I hope) future, where the server is shutdown & with good fortune FD keep their promise to make the server available to players.

Hmm, re filtering decals, maybe make use of an image search engine to generate a list of keywords associated with the image & then filter on those? With an appeals system & considerable punishment for offenders once reviewed by human. Also a player based system to report offenders.

[Edit] You'd probably need to punish false reporters too, as anything involving human moderation is obviously to be minimised.

[mbpoblet]

Originally posted by mrozdoba:

FD keep their promise to make the server available to players.

Hah, that's a good one! :D :'(

Originally posted by mrozdoba:

maybe make use of an image search engine to generate a list of keywords associated with the image & then filter on those? With an appeals system & considerable punishment for offenders once reviewed by human. Also a player based system to report offenders.

This is almost certainly significantly more difficult than procedurally generating a galaxy and implementing planetary landing...[xkcd.com]

[mrozdoba]

Quite, but online engines (which I'd want to offload the task to) do a much better job now than five years ago. Also, we don't need a description of the item, just a word list which our algorithm allows to be mostly garbage. Thankfully the net contains plenty of obscene imagery to make comparisons against. Further, our source image to audit won't be an arbitrary bitmap but a (very) size limited svg.

I'm not claiming it's easy or even doable, but I do think it might be an avenue worth exploring. Does any multiplayer game attempt anything like this already? This is all just random ideas on my part btw, though I guess that's probably obvious ;)

Originally posted by mbpoblet:

Originally posted by mrozdoba:

FD keep their promise to make the server available to players.

Hah, that's a good one! :D :'(

Hence the reason I said "with good fortune" ;-/

[mbpoblet]

Well, I was talking more about what a company like FD could do with current tools, but yes, I think I read that Skynet Google can already (internally) generate a description for an image (and maybe even distinguish between a kitten and a puppy), and they might offer this kind of thing as a service sometime in the future (before discontinuing it for arbitrary reasons)...

[mrozdoba]

Originally posted by mbpoblet:

Well, I was talking more about what a company like FD could do with current tools, but yes, I think I read that Skynet Google can already (internally) generate a description for an image (and maybe even distinguish between a kitten and a puppy), and they might offer this kind of thing as a service sometime in the future (before discontinuing it for arbitrary reasons)...

Lol, yes that would be a concern. I nearly suggested google explicitly then thought better of it ;-)

I can't help but feel uneasy about any company whose name is misspelt.

[Ųŋĸńōŵņ]

♥♥♥♥ that funding model... prices they charge are outrageous... you can make a skin like that literally in a matter of minutes if you are experienced with 3d software for example Substance Painter... I mean yeah, sure... charge me 1 or 2 euro for a skin, I would buy it for my favorite ship but some of the prices are just nuts... we already bought the game + DLC and we will buy future DLC as well so holy cow... charging for "skins" like most games do now a days is just plain BS and makes me take some distance from the game (as for any other game that does greedy ♥♥♥♥ like this).

[Deimos2k5]

Making skins for myself is not the same thing as hacking files or going against policies and stupid rules, is SHOULD be legal and free of any charge! What a stupid fail by Frontier, I've been waiting for this game for decades, and now I can't have my personal livery... Total hate!

[Walmart]

Hopefully the quality of life DLC will help with this. It is one thing to sell some stuff for real money. It is another to do it to the extent ED does. It more akin to a free to play game.

[Ottomic]

Is it possible to raise the dead... twice?