Player Created Paint Jobs

[Ryoshu]

I suggest a new feature for Elite Dangerous, where players are able to create paint jobs for their ships. I recommend this feature be accessible in the large space stations, where ships must dock in the interior, and it would display as a feature of the station (like Outfitting or Shipyard) when players view the station information in the System panel. Players would be able to create paint jobs for their ships without paying with ingame credits or money outside of the game. However, once a player decides to apply the paint job to a ship, then the player must first pay real money to make the paint job available for their use ingame. Once the player makes it available ingame, it will always be available ingame. Any time the player wishes to apply that paint job to the ship, then the player must pay credits ingame for each time it is applied. Paint jobs would be ship specific (ie: a paint job created for a Viper cannot be applied to a Vulture).
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As far as exact cost of the real money amount to make the paint job available ingame, I think it should be low (around the same prices as individual paint jobs sold in the store).
I think the credit cost for the painting of the ship ingame should be low as well.
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As a supplemental suggestion, I think it would be grand if players could share paint jobs amongst themselves. For example: Player 1 creates a paint job. Player 1 pays real money to make it available for Player 1 ingame. Player 1 would be able to share the paint job with Player 2 ingame. Player 2 still has to pay real money to make the paint job available for Player 2. Player 2 can then apply the paint job using credits. This would allow for friends/groups/clans/guilds to share the same paint jobs among themselves.
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I believe this paint job feature would allow players to further enhance their experience in the game, while enhancing the revenue stream for Elite Dangerous, without shifting the balance of the game itself. I would further suggest that any paint job found violating the rules (ie: EULA) set forth by Frontier could be removed from the game without refund to the player.

 

[Deathwatch]

The issue is then they would have to give us the program also the fact it would need checks to stop people doing stuff that would affect the age rating now im sure there are members whom would happily review the paint jobs etc, as we also have mods on the forum which are members.

 

[Psycho Romeo]

I honestly feel like this implementation has too many steps. I would rather just see a more comprehensive livery section.

 

[Ryoshu]

@Deathwatch The feature would be part of the game client you already have, but would be implemented in an update. I (personally) do not see a need for checks to stop players from creating inappropriate content, because players can report it to Frontier as they would for inappropriate text ingame. However, what you said does make me think a checkbox for Show Custom Paint (or something similar) would be a good idea. That way players can decide to filter out all custom player paint jobs or not. This would allow them to still see Frontier paint, and any ship with a custom paint job would just look unpainted.
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Regardless of my disagreement on your point for moderating, if it were to be implemented, I think something similar to Riot Games' feature for League of Legends, where the community can review and judge for themselves as a collective. This would escalate only the reports where the majority of players agree it is inappropriate to Frontier for final review. I think that's how they do it over there, anyway (it's been awhile). Thank you for the comments, sir.

 

[Ryoshu]

@Psycho Romeo The steps (as I see them) are to (1) take your time customizing the paint job (2) Publish/pay money it when you consider it finished (3) Pay credits to apply the paint job to the ship ingame.
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However, the related requirements I suggested for space stations could be considered additional steps (ie: prerequisite step to locate and travel to a space station with the paint job capabilities). I'm not sure if that's what you consider too many, but thank you for the feedback. I do agree that more offerings from Frontier are very welcome, regardless of them allowing us to create additional content or not.

 

[Psycho Romeo]

@Psycho Romeo The steps (as I see them) are to (1) take your time customizing the paint job (2) Publish/pay money it when you consider it finished (3) Pay credits to apply the paint job to the ship ingame.
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However, the related requirements I suggested for space stations could be considered additional steps (ie: prerequisite step to locate and travel to a space station with the paint job capabilities). I'm not sure if that's what you consider too many, but thank you for the feedback. I do agree that more offerings from Frontier are very welcome, regardless of them allowing us to create additional content or not.

Sorry, I was in a rush and didn't really extrapolate.

I feel it's very important to ED to not pull the player out of the game. A poorly made paint job does just this. To safeguard against that would require to many steps of moderation and control.
An alternative would be to make the livery section more comprehensive. Instead of just three decal locations, there's thirty. Some decals are just colored fills that we can use to paint panes of the ship. Some decals are lines and stripes. Some decals are half images that when combined with another decal makes a full, larger image.

I like your idea (especially the part about sharing designs), but not the implementation. As far as the implementation goes, I would rather see a more comprehensive livery section.

 

[rkodey]

Charging for the basic "vibrant" colors it just... well... annoying. Does ED really think it'll be a meaningful revenue stream? Just make basic colors free. That's a big step in the right direction.

As for custom paints:

For what it's worth iRacing implemented custom paints in a really great way:
- Each custom paint is a 2048x2048 pixel "skin" where they made a simple template for each car (i.e. ship) with a wireframe layer to show how the skin gets draped over the model. Simple, easy to follow, no special program needed to do the painting.
- So, that takes care of your own car (ship) right away.
- Then, they basically said: Distribution of paint jobs is up to the user. We take no responsibility for the content. (Which is smart.)
- In order to see anyone else's paint, you need to get it yourself.
- Thus leaving it up to the community, creativity started shining:
- First, someone posted a big ZIP file that everyone could contribute to
- Then, TradingPaints was created - a windows program that would synchronize paint jobs with a server, only updating selectively and optimized.
- Teams (i.e. Wings) could make their own paints and share, etc.

So... ED: All we need are the templates and let us do the rest!!

 

[Deathwatch]

Sorry, I was in a rush and didn't really extrapolate.

I feel it's very important to ED to not pull the player out of the game. A poorly made paint job does just this. To safeguard against that would require to many steps of moderation and control.
An alternative would be to make the livery section more comprehensive. Instead of just three decal locations, there's thirty. Some decals are just colored fills that we can use to paint panes of the ship. Some decals are lines and stripes. Some decals are half images that when combined with another decal makes a full, larger image.

I like your idea (especially the part about sharing designs), but not the implementation. As far as the implementation goes, I would rather see a more comprehensive livery section.

Something like Forza Motorsport did or something right ?

 

[kevin-nightwolf]

multiplie ways to do this.

1: they dont need to give out any programs. they add in an in game editor.
2: about age rated things. this could easily be controlled by: each time you are done with a new skin. you will need to submit this up to aproval. and since the devs might be busy, this can be solved so players can vote on what they think should be approved and not.
and that players that submit skins theirselves have as a duty to vote for other skins once in a while.

and if a player just keep voting yes or no on everything without really judging, they may be expelled from making skins and voting.

this has been used by several developers for several games and this rtechnique has prooven itself to work!

(etc a skin need minimum 13 votes in order to pass.

as with this i would also honestly love if it were some sort of a "marked" in game wherre you can when you have created your skin, you can sell it. and make profit in the currency "cr" i game by selling skins. this would be an awesome way to earn money too.

and the way of creating skins: using decals, shapes and objects to form a skin by rotating, scaling. its incredible what you can do with this tecnique of skinning

 

[Blaubart]

Definately woudn't allow to upload anything from a photo or else you open the gates of hell for anyone concerned with security. (just htink about the spread of a virus)

Tinkering stuff togther with preset decals is fine from a security standpoint i guess. However, i have serious doubts if the Community vote system works as you expect it. First thing, that came to my mind, when i read your post, is the Battlefield4 emblem system. (for those who don't know it: It's basicly what kevin-knightwolf suggested with the usage of decals, just in stead of a spaceship beeig the canvas, you had a square that you could fill to draw something with such preset shapes, which was then shown on the players shoulders, weapon or vehicle in dedicated areas and - in case you got killed by somebody - you saw it a little bit larger in the deathscreen next to his name)

95% of the players used them resposibly. but that means every 20th guy was eighter a clown or an ignorant hater. Drawing genitalia, or swastikas and stuff like that... you could report them. But it took the admins quite a while to remove this stuff and you can't really present such images out in an open forum to "judge" by the community if the main idea of the "judging" is to hold it back from public.

Then there is also the problem with local laws. Example: While most(!) european people agree that third-reich-symbolism should not be spread. You can find shops to buy replicas of such symbols in some south-east-asian countries and they don't even connect those symbols with history. They just think they look cool. I'm pretty sure there will be other topics of conflict we're not aware of, two.

At the end, it is the internet and there will always be trolls and real morons to abuse their anonymity. Banning the player? the troll will just claim his son/brother was it.

The only way I see this to be possibly realised is with very restrictive options. Where you have a few basic patterns with exchangable colors and then you can only add very few free movable decals with a limited range of colors. (like 5 or something) Everything else would exceed the adminstrative budget of FD, i guess.

Don't get me wrong, i'd love to have this feature. But... i know the internet :-(

 

[Mossarelli]

I had this idea some time ago that players should be able to make paint jobs using photoshop or an ingame paint brush tool like Forza did with shapes and colors.
Players that want to buy these paint jobs however does not pay real money, they pay in game money and the majority of the money goes to the artist into his bank account. The artist can set the price of the paint job between an interval depending on how big the ship is and how many decals and layers he puts or based on how long time he spent working on the ship.

Paying real money for the paint job feels funny if the player does not receive any benefit from it. Steam introduced the pay for mods thing that Notch sold Mojang for, so I don't see how it would work with real money. Unless the player specifically accepts a TOS that all money goes to frontier to support the development.

I like it though.

 

[kevin-nightwolf]

i said it works without problems. the game is guncraft. ive been speaking with the devs so i påretty much know how it works and i do know it works well.
virus have never been any problem (a quote from zman himself wich is a dev of that game)
it worked out fine for them. so why not here?

oh and yes the vote system works exactily as i said.


oh for my decal suggestion... i were thinking more like midnightclub los angeles....xDD
but i guess the bf game has a fine working system too (but i didn tlike it that much as i did with midnightclub)


the thing is that for EVERYTHING that is going to happen or already have happened has ALLWAYS a chance for mis-use

devs cant simply leave out every single feature just because of that.

it is more like a question of the teams administrative capabilities of a game. wether they want to spend time looking through stuff or not.


when it comes to guncraft uploading of pictures was never a problem. i was on chats with the devs almost every single day so i know a lot about their system. and it works as i said: someone make something. they add it for approval., then players can go in and verify. and if they do not follow the rules of verifications such as approing related content they culd even get baned from the game. and honestly that is one of the better organized systems ive seen so far.
the devs drop in from time to time to take a look at the content. and look on the votes. and they discover it very fast if something is approved that shouldnt be.
also if you dont aprove something you must write a reason for it aswell so the devs can review it if complaints are recieved.

so stop allways seeing the worst case scenarios i just tried to present some ways that might make this actually work. that i know has been used and that it worked well.



but what i truly belive most in is design with decals in game (specially the part where you cans eell the design to players in game for cr by putting it up on a market)
but for making it work. someone has to drop in check on the stuff. and administrate it so playuers that are being trolls can be excluded from this function. its allways gonne be like this IF a player is permitted to make own content


games to check out that prooves my point: blockstorm, guncraft, battlefield, midnightclub los angeles.

 

[CopperHamster]

Allow a ship to have two paint jobs: the personal paint job (and maybe some way to p2p share it with friends if they authorize it), and in game standard/store bought jobs that everyone else sees. That takes care of seeing rude or in some places illegal paint jobs. (I'll leave that to your imagination without mentioning any of the dozen of things that spring to mind).

 

[Antmax]

Just do it like in War Thunder. There are competitions and skin submissions that are vetted by the developers and the best get implemented in the game.

You can also make skins that only show locally on your own vehicle. So no sharing involved and you can do whatever dodgy thing you want.

My biggest concern is that I am suspicious about skins in ED. That they may be generated from vector art and not bitmap based at all. Might be why they don't antialias like other textures and have jagged what looks like 1 bit edges with filtering on the decals.

Might also be why it took so long to get even basic color skins for ships. And all the purchasable ones are simple like flags etc. Even the more fancy flaming skins have these low quality edges that suggest to me they may not be regular bitmaps. You can kind of see what I mean here. With low quality edges like blended 1bit masks.

Spoiler

 

[Fendalton]

+1 to the community voted submissions to skin designed, to be reviewed by staff and implemented.

However, the ship files are locked down in the client, and I am not sure of anyone who has managed to unpack the files to create custom skins. I was hoping for .dds files but they are a specific file type used by the developers, that I believe is an in-house program.

 

[Zenturi]

TBH for a totally unique skin on my FDL, I wouldn't mind spending a premium price for admin fees, just to check for acceptable or appropriate content by frontier

 

[kevin-nightwolf]

Just do it like in War Thunder. There are competitions and skin submissions that are vetted by the developers and the best get implemented in the game.

You can also make skins that only show locally on your own vehicle. So no sharing involved and you can do whatever dodgy thing you want.

My biggest concern is that I am suspicious about skins in ED. That they may be generated from vector art and not bitmap based at all. Might be why they don't antialias like other textures and have jagged what looks like 1 bit edges with filtering on the decals.

Might also be why it took so long to get even basic color skins for ships. And all the purchasable ones are simple like flags etc. Even the more fancy flaming skins have these low quality edges that suggest to me they may not be regular bitmaps. You can kind of see what I mean here. With low quality edges like blended 1bit masks.

Spoiler

http://www.elitegalaxy.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Orange-Ignition.jpg

was this skin just photoshoppet/gimpen on or did you actually manage to unpack the files?

 

[Xzandhor V'Tar]

I think this idea is simply amazing!!! I'd love to design my own paint jobs and would not concern about having to pay real money to apply them on my ships (if they cost the same as an individual paint job). I'd like the feature to let us create the number of paint jobs we want and save them locally and only upload to the servers (and pay) when applying them(this way we wouldn't overcharge the servers).

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

Epic Necro!

 

[Philip Coutts]

Good bye epic necro, fare you well! Closed.