Fake lighting on ship hulls.

hawkkebank

I've noticed on some recent ship skins like the Discoprise, this Inquiry, a few of the Vor'cha types there is this fake, painted on "glow" on the hulls. Considering the amount of customizing options we have for light sources on ships some of these turn out very poorly.



Entirely red fake "glow" on the hull next to the blue impulse manifolds of the NX refit skin is just one of these examples.

If this is a feature that is going to continue and be expanded *please* also give us options to remove it from the hulls.. especially for circumstances where the light sources clash with the fake "glow" on the hulls.

phoenixc

In theory those vents are heat discharge radiators so I suppose it could be possible for the radiators to be so hot they glow blue and the hull plates could glow cherry red. If so it would be a really stupid design blunder by Starfleet, but it is vaguely possible.

Either way, they are a bit jarring so probably should be fixed, but they would probably end up very low priority so may not get touched until the next quality pass.

spiritborn

The thing is that way STO ships are rendered a "true" glow would be very hard(if not impossible) to do so it's a case of the glow color not matching the skin.

hawkkebank

spiritborn wrote: »

The thing is that way STO ships are rendered a "true" glow would be very hard(if not impossible) to do so it's a case of the glow color not matching the skin.

No matter how it's done, the problem is we have a lot of skins and vanity shields with different colors of warp nacelles, bussard collectors, and impulse vents. That "glow" is on such a high layer it even overrides certain vanity shields. It's a similar but reverse problem with the Legendary Gal-X. The Mirror hull markings on the Mirror skin are too low in the layers list, they should sit above vanity shields or they are far less useful. If a ship hull has a special defining trait like the mirror markings they should sit on the highest layer. It should work as if you want to use a vanity shield on the Leg Gal-X with no mirror markings use the standard Gal-X parts.

But the main point is still unchanged.. we should have the option to disable or recolor the fake glows so they match vanity shields and hull skins. If it can't be recolored, then just the option to remove it. Especially when you consider that "glow" on the Inquiry goes over the Medical vanity shield which is orange in the vents.. but does not go over the Platnium vanity shield, which means that certain vanity shields don't even hold the top layer, let alone other vanity shields like the Aegis and certain Omega rep shields which are only partial and still show parts of the main skin through.

It's all about the layering and transparencies with the ship decos and vanity shields.

inferiority

It should be entirely possible to mark the 'glow' areas on the skins so that they glow with the same color of the engines.
However 'entirely possible' does not mean it would be easy to implement.
I'd settle for these artificial glows to just be removed from the skins.

phoenixc

True, there is a lot going on in the layer stacks, a lot of which is invisible itself but changes the visual traits of the layers below them.