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R&d school that allows you to change the visual effects of ship weapons and consoles
davidbrunell88
Member Posts: 43 Arc User
There should be a school you can level up that allows you to change the effects of all or most weapons and ship shields and deflector visuals. Right? Its been like 12 years now why is this not a thing.
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- Cryptic makes money directly from lock boxes and indirectly from dil (for rep gear) to sell you weapons with different visual effects. That keeps the servers running.
- The devs have said it's not easily done to change the visuals for a weapon, they have ruled out offering any kind of "weapon visual slot"
I wish we could do one or the other, since I hate having a crafted or rep or story episode weapon not match the rest of my loadout.
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It's also a big technical challenge and there's really not much to be gained besides decoupling weapons from their visual identifiers (ie. information of use in gameplay) to spare a few folks the burden of just equipping weapons with the visuals they want.
So yeah not going to happen and, OP, ranting about CBS for wanting to maintain a consistent setting (ie. something reasonable you do in sci-fi world building, the show kept weapon visuals consistent between factions and eras too...) is not a way to make friends on the internet (PS. Paramount made the Kelvin Timeline movies.)
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The reason myself and others want a feature like this, is because there are many weapons out there that are unique equip. For example, I'd love to use the quantum phaser, however since it's unique equip that would mean having seven normal beams and sound effects and one very different beam + sound. That's something I simply can't put up with, that kind of thing bothers me a great deal, so since there's no way of having all beams have one or the other appearance and sound I simply can't use it at all.
The majority wants this feature so they CAN have a consistent load out rather than a rainbow, not so they can do something crazy with it.
Make like a Borg, and adapt! Like, for an all blue Phaser set, I use Andorian Phasers + the Quantum beam.
Having said that, I'd love to have access to red Disruptors (Lethean). As a Fed-aligned Rom, I can't. So, maybe Cryptic could ease a bit up on that (as AP, usable by all, is 'red' too).
It's always tricky to profess to speak for 'the majority.'
The Terran Rep disruptors are also red.
Thanks. Those withering ones are kinda meh, though, as they don't come with a dmg resistance debuff. I really want the Lethean ones.
In the past I used Andorian phasers on my sci toon, but I eventually stopped because I didn't like the sound.
Assuming of course that there was any intention to provide consistent weapons FX across those limited weapons, which by the simple fact that they were restricted to one or two examples is evidently not justified.
The "majority" (it's not wise to use the term unless you have data) is going to be disappointed because there are big structural factors pushing against the implementation of this idea (weighed against subjective desire and personal preference.) It's a prohibitive technical challenge (Ten Forward), it violates a canon rule (ie. that weapon types belonging to a faction or era have consistent weapon FX, and this is a principle followed closely by STO), and it argues that action needs to be taken over an easy alternative (player initiative), representing a poor cost-benefit. You may want consistency, but I say it still behooves you to equip your ship accordingly (especially if it's at the level of "can't put up with") in light of the very low probability that this feature will ever happen.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
I was referring to the majority of people who want this feature, not majority of the playerbase.
It's disappointing that Cryptic won't at least give us alternatives though, like Omni beams for all beam types, and allowing us to equip them like turrets (i.e. more than one) so we aren't forced to rainbow them.
It's also disappointing that the episode reward beams are usually mismatched, which means either ignoring the FE sets or living with rainbow beams.
Yes, that's the way it is. But those of us who care can continue to say so in the hope that Crypic might someday raise the priority for this change above "never."
And I'll continue to say that I'm avidly against the idea because changing weapon visuals breaks a critical interface between setting and gameplay (ie. that [insert weapon here] is [insert weapon here] because of a consistently identifiable weapon effect.)
If any of what you mentioned is a problem (as opposed to a purposeful trade-off for min-maxing. You're forced into rainbow combinations provided your top priority is maximizing stat advantage over visual. That's a choice.) then the way to address it is to expand set offerings though mission reward updates and strategic choices for future content (ie. theme new reputation, lock box, and fleet holding weapons around established variants that could use an expansion, where it makes sense.) That way, you get more consistent weapons around priority gear without nuking a major gameplay concept and visual tenant in the IP. It's also within the realm of possibility since it just represents changing priorities in the normal course of content development, not implementing a new system with all the costs, hurdles, and opportunity trade-offs that involves.
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Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
Well... there are the Bio-Molecular Phasers from the Undine Rep, but they're a bit subpar. There's also the Plasmatic Biomatter weapons from the second Xindi Box. Those aren't too bad.
Wait a minute, how is that escort with the visible combat impulse engine trail zipping around at 50 impulse like it has a hyper impulse engine in the actual slot? And why is that Reman colored Fed shrugging off Phaser fire like he's actually wearing an anti-phaser shield?
This "argument" got tossed once we got ship equipment visuals - no longer does what you "show" equate to what you "carry" in regards to your shield/deflector/engine.
Personally, I still sit and wonder, to this day, why I'm not allowed to look at whatever gosh-darn ship I want on my screen, heck, with weapon colors looking however the heck I want, while the rest of you get to see whatever ship I'm actually in shooting whatever rainbow I have equipped? 25th century technology lost the ability to do "local skin/mesh swaps" like we could in, oh, a game called Starfleet Command? Or a lot of the Elder Scrolls Games?
Space Barbie is endgame outside of PvP, they say. To "neuter" this argument, make all PvP areas automatically disable any customizations to visuals (assuming that the coding to do so isn't deathly prohibitive)...
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as far as i know startrek online is aroundt 2010 and so its not 12 years plus the r/d system is only 2 maybe 3 years now
but yes on the idea on letting you schange the effects i agree with you on that
it wouldt be a cool thing to do
If I remember correctly, that was an unintended side-effect of using Champions Online code to save time developing STO. Would be a nice alternative solution, though it wouldn't do anything about having several different weapon sound effects (if only I could mod those the way I can mod my WoW sound effects ...)
Do I have high DPS? No. Do I play on Elite or Advanced? No. But I have fun and fights are challenging enough to not be boring and again, the sound effects/looks don't bother me at all. I have several different sound effects for the different beams and they're not all one 'flavor', there are phaser, tetryon, plasma, from what I remember. Still, it works as intended. Her Nandi moves things out of her way and quickly enough to suit her.
I don't want to derail this too much, but this is a common misconception even among WoW players. WoW mods that modify game files can and will get you banned, but sound mods don't work that way in WoW. You drop your desired sounds in an override folder, the client detects them, and they are then used in place of the default files, which are still present and unaltered. An example of one I use is to change the gun sounds from their current soft pop sound back to the original, loud bang sounds from vanilla.