'NFS Style' Ship Customisation

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

Hello!
I used to be a fan of the Need For Speed games, right from the original (no, not Underground, the actual original from 1995 you silly millennials!)

When Underground came out, I used to spend more time customising my car, than actually driving it. I stuck with those games for a while until I basically got bored of them. Lol

However, how cool would it be, if we could customise our ships in a similar manner to the video below?
First applying an overall paint (like we currently do), then choosing it's finish (matt, metallic, etc), then choosing other sections of the ship, which are currently unpainted, then apply decals, in various sizes, rotations, layers, colours, and finishes, until we make a truly unique ship.
As well as be able to move, resize and rotate our ship name plates and IDs.

Spoiler

[video=youtube_share;PmGw6gD4g_Q]https://youtu.be/PmGw6gD4g_Q[/video]
Skip about 2 minutes in (and probably mute it) to see a very advanced version of what I mean. I don't expect quite this level of detail. Lol

Obviously, with us being able to make our own ship styles, selling individual paints in store wouldn't be as profitable.
However, you could instead sell;

• Paint Colours
• Paint Finishes
• Decal Packs(basic geometry, letters, numbers, more geometry, plus the decals we have already)
• Layers (yes, you can only do so much with 1 layer, having more will lead to better designs, so sell them!)

Plus you can purposely leave out some effects, and/or impose a decal limit on us, so you can still sell pre-made paint and limitless decal sets in store that can't be made by us, and would be perfect for people who don't want or need that level of customisation.

Obviously, it's a lot of work... Lol

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[Hellfire85]

I support this idea! Let us make unique designs!

 

[Sweet&Dandy]

I’d honestly be more interested in customising the interior as that is what I spend the most time looking at.

 

[MK Regular]

I like this. +1 from me

That said, I can imagine a few people who might be a little bit annoyed if the prices of ship paints and decals that they had purchased were permanently reduced. I'm not really in a position to say what should be done in this situation, since I have bought a few things myself. As much as I would like a store credit from the reduced prices (gib me free stuffs plz), I'm not sure if one should be given.

 

[Six6VI]

+1 Played Need For Speed World until the wheels fell off...
EA killed their servers the same weekend I bought ED, yay!

World had an option to mirror any vinyl layer along the centre line of the car though. This provided automatic duplication of an object from one side to the other, and helped with the size, distortion and placement of a second number layer using the mirrored duplicate as a guide before turning it off (because it was back to front).

[Linked vid appears to allow mirroring left to right side, but not on the hood or trunk - World handled this differently (or the vid maker hadn't found that option yet?) Also, this version has significantly more sponsorship sticker options, and the text editor would have made life so much easier.]

Example: Single layer(s) on hood with reflected layer(s) on front fenders
(guard above wheel arch).

Spoiler

Selection of vinyl polygons, blended graphics and finishes was awesome, but no letters and a limit of 33 layers per vehicle, to reduce the profanity prevalence I suspect? However, if you were patient, and really determined to make a WWII Spitfire replica with squadron markings that actually existed...

Spoiler

And then I had this fleet theme rule that dictated any vehicle with four doors MUST be a taxi, which worked out great, until I finally got my grubby little paws on one of these...

Spoiler

Lamborghini Estoque - Public transport future concept...
(Yeah, I caught flak several times for that one, lol!)

------

Back on the topic of why this is relevant to ED, I already posted a suggestion for similar, but limited editing tools for the ship name and ID decals. There is a lack of centred consistency in text positioning and you can't move, scale or rotate plates to align or prevent fouling with ship panels. I'd like to see that addressed first, and if it leads to a more versatile 'whole ship' editing suite later, bring it on!

Considering FDev's current store model it seems unlikely we'll get a full customisation suite that might adversely affect paintjobs sales. I also heard a rumour you can edit ship exterior mesh files directly in Photoshop (etc) to create any paintjob you like, but as it's only a local copy, nobody else can see it in game.