Randomized Ship skins and stats

[djs4000]

Hey,
I have a simple idea for introducing some variety to the current ships: Add a recolorizing option. Think starcraft units, how they are the same model, but change highlight colors. Could be easy to implement if you have a specific color in the texture get replaced by a hue selector or a set of colors.

And while we are on the subject of ship variety, maybe have randomized stats/weapon slots on ship types. You could implement what the stat ranges and possible weapon slots can spawn on a ship, that way you don't end up with a civilian shuttle with a large missile slot. I was thinking in the xml you could define what possible weapons slots could on certain ship. That way, you could have a Fang with all missiles, or perhaps a fan with a mixture of missiles and ballistic weapons.

[Hammish]

I like the first option and I think it should be a lot easier to implement once they have crafting in the game; with the current code you'd have to make an entirely different ship item for each recoloring (since the model and skin for things are tied to the actual item) but the crafting/upgrade system might make it easier to change just one attribute on something.  This way you could just precolor like 16 skins for each ship and then use crafting/upgrading to select the color you wanted.  It all depends on how the upgrade system ends up working, code-wise, I suppose.

[Lurler]

Actually we already did some prototyping with recoloring and it could be easily done with an additional texture layer that would accept different colors. So we would like to implement that as well.But definitely not until the release as it really doesn't add much to gameplay, so we would rather finish the game first, and then add such feature in one of the updates if possible.

As for different variations of the same ship - as you guys already mentioned yourself, we plan to add the crating/upgrading system and with that it will be possible to introduce variety for the same hulls without creating a whole bunch duplicates. So it's definitely going to be in soon