Yes, it certainly is a fair ammount of work to do, but it is relativly simple work (good for an intern or new staff memeber to the art team) ;-)
Logan showed the ship material on Twitter a while back, it should just be a matter of copy/pasting in place, sections of the textures accross to each other, the hull texture map itself looked fairly simple. No clue what the window/lifeboat texture looks like though.
I have no clue how much the size of the patch required to do this would be, but if it gets marketed as a great new feature, perhaps even with the addition of the type 6 fed texture for all ships, I'm sure most wouldn't be that concerned with the patch size, ofcourse I can only speak for myself!
Suppose this is a decision for the powers that be ;-)
To the best of my knowledge, Cryptic doesn't use interns.
I don't know it could be done quickly. Devs are a few builds ahead of us and on different builds of the game. There's also database hackery and I gather that's one area where there's been turnover before. Something to consider is that even if there are people at the company who know how to do something like hook a texture up into the game, they may not be available. (And in some cases, there might not be anybody left at Cryptic who's done it before.)
I'll point out an example of this with Heretic and the DOff system. That was really his baby in many respects. And they just added Warfare Specialist DOffs. AWESOME! And what's more, Jeremy seems to know how to make their powers work!
But... uh... there's no way to sort for them in the DOff search function. And somebody who'd never made a new DOff type before might not know that they should probably add that in or ticket that for someone to do.
I think, really, the best solution would NOT be to design tons of variations of textures that people may or may not use. In this case, I think the best solution is just to give the Galaxy class (T4, T5, Dreadnaught, Fleet Tier) the 5 extra textures it would take to have a canon deflector on all variations.
And, frankly, I think the place to release those 5 extra textures is probably in a TNG bundle. Because it's weird (and not terribly cost effective) to give Galaxy owners (a large percentage of STO, perhaps, but a small one when it comes to passionate Galaxy pilots) that much extra love without folding it into something special. Because, otherwise, you're going to have everyone asking for something equally special for their favorite ship.
In this case, I think it should be a paid feature not because it's expensive to do but because, if you don't charge for it, you'll be taking these requests all the time.
To the best of my knowledge, Cryptic doesn't use interns.
I don't know it could be done quickly. Devs are a few builds ahead of us and on different builds of the game. There's also database hackery and I gather that's one area where there's been turnover before. Something to consider is that even if there are people at the company who know how to do something like hook a texture up into the game, they may not be available. (And in some cases, there might not be anybody left at Cryptic who's done it before.)
I'll point out an example of this with Heretic and the DOff system. That was really his baby in many respects. And they just added Warfare Specialist DOffs. AWESOME! And what's more, Jeremy seems to know how to make their powers work!
But... uh... there's no way to sort for them in the DOff search function. And somebody who'd never made a new DOff type before might not know that they should probably add that in or ticket that for someone to do.
I think, really, the best solution would NOT be to design tons of variations of textures that people may or may not use. In this case, I think the best solution is just to give the Galaxy class (T4, T5, Dreadnaught, Fleet Tier) the 5 extra textures it would take to have a canon deflector on all variations.
And, frankly, I think the place to release those 5 extra textures is probably in a TNG bundle. Because it's weird (and not terribly cost effective) to give Galaxy owners (a large percentage of STO, perhaps, but a small one when it comes to passionate Galaxy pilots) that much extra love without folding it into something special. Because, otherwise, you're going to have everyone asking for something equally special for their favorite ship.
In this case, I think it should be a paid feature not because it's expensive to do but because, if you don't charge for it, you'll be taking these requests all the time.
This I agree with. If cryptic were able to release a "TNG Bundle" pack with Galaxy class interior (engineering,bridge,ten forward and transporter room etc) along with the choice of some cannon related hull textures for the current Galaxy class. I would be happy with that.
Miranda class:
4 parts, 3 options each.
4^3=64 different hull parts. Times four different hull materials is 256, times four light options is 1024.
That's base hulls. Then each aprt has it's choice of a pattern options, 4 slots each with 14 options, including None. 4^14 = 268,435,456 possible pattern options, not counting color options. Two choices of 99 different colors makes for a big enough number that I'm not even going to use it for effect.
1024 hull options times 268,435,456 pattern options makes for 274,877,906,944 different possible mirandas to fly. Sure, a lot of them look like each other, but inside those nearly three hundred BILLION different miranda variants there are quite a few distinct ones. Things get quite a bit more nuts in ships with more parts like the Prometheus or ships with a lot of premium costumes available like the Akira.
So... tell me again how Cryptic doesn't give you enough customization for your ship? And if someone gives you more, please point me there way because I've never heard of them.
That's actually a little bit misleading, what people are asking for is greater customisation on ships more inline with the way you can customise your captain. As you yourself mentioned, the huge bulk of the variation in the way ships look is actually from the patterns you can apply to them, but to be honest, for the people that prefer thier ships to have a more canon look, all those patterns are of no use.
That's actually a little bit misleading, what people are asking for is greater customisation on ships more inline with the way you can customise your captain. As you yourself mentioned, the huge bulk of the variation in the way ships look is actually from the patterns you can apply to them, but to be honest, for the people that prefer thier ships to have a more canon look, all those patterns are of no use.
Indeed. I just want a proper Galaxy class deflector on my T5 retrofit. Im happy with material 6 but you cant use it on the standard Galaxy class. I like the look of the new fleet material, but this doesnt have the Galaxy deflector that material 2 and 6 have.
That's actually a little bit misleading, what people are asking for is greater customisation on ships more inline with the way you can customise your captain.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this, actually. What features of captain customization should apply to ship customization? Are you viewing picking pants/tops seperately as analogous to picking different material options on your hull and nacelles, or the like?
Mostly however I was aiming my comments at some people earlier in the thread who claimed that there just wasn't enough customization at all. I think that's absurd. I'll readily accept that there are canon accuracy problems in many of of the costumes and I'd love to see them fixed, but if your goal is customization then there is plenty of that here.
And for that matter, for the people who want canon ships then there are very few customization options of use to them. That goal could be best satisfied by only one costume per ship, maybe two in some cases, where the most effort could be spent getting it just right and none spent accommodating the customization options.
Also on a general note, I think it's pretty dangerous to say that feature X would be easy to implement. Even if you've got a ton of experience in the field, without experience in the codebase they're working with now it's impossible to really judge what would be easy and what would cause unforeseen consequences. It's not too hard to imagine plenty of possible solutions to a problem, a lot harder to work out the actual cost and difficulty of implementation. A lot of good ideas are only really good at the start of a project, and at this point would probably mean rewriting huge chunks of the ship costume system.
Of course, that's far from an expert opinion either.
Comments
To the best of my knowledge, Cryptic doesn't use interns.
I don't know it could be done quickly. Devs are a few builds ahead of us and on different builds of the game. There's also database hackery and I gather that's one area where there's been turnover before. Something to consider is that even if there are people at the company who know how to do something like hook a texture up into the game, they may not be available. (And in some cases, there might not be anybody left at Cryptic who's done it before.)
I'll point out an example of this with Heretic and the DOff system. That was really his baby in many respects. And they just added Warfare Specialist DOffs. AWESOME! And what's more, Jeremy seems to know how to make their powers work!
But... uh... there's no way to sort for them in the DOff search function. And somebody who'd never made a new DOff type before might not know that they should probably add that in or ticket that for someone to do.
I think, really, the best solution would NOT be to design tons of variations of textures that people may or may not use. In this case, I think the best solution is just to give the Galaxy class (T4, T5, Dreadnaught, Fleet Tier) the 5 extra textures it would take to have a canon deflector on all variations.
And, frankly, I think the place to release those 5 extra textures is probably in a TNG bundle. Because it's weird (and not terribly cost effective) to give Galaxy owners (a large percentage of STO, perhaps, but a small one when it comes to passionate Galaxy pilots) that much extra love without folding it into something special. Because, otherwise, you're going to have everyone asking for something equally special for their favorite ship.
In this case, I think it should be a paid feature not because it's expensive to do but because, if you don't charge for it, you'll be taking these requests all the time.
This I agree with. If cryptic were able to release a "TNG Bundle" pack with Galaxy class interior (engineering,bridge,ten forward and transporter room etc) along with the choice of some cannon related hull textures for the current Galaxy class. I would be happy with that.
That's actually a little bit misleading, what people are asking for is greater customisation on ships more inline with the way you can customise your captain. As you yourself mentioned, the huge bulk of the variation in the way ships look is actually from the patterns you can apply to them, but to be honest, for the people that prefer thier ships to have a more canon look, all those patterns are of no use.
Indeed. I just want a proper Galaxy class deflector on my T5 retrofit. Im happy with material 6 but you cant use it on the standard Galaxy class. I like the look of the new fleet material, but this doesnt have the Galaxy deflector that material 2 and 6 have.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this, actually. What features of captain customization should apply to ship customization? Are you viewing picking pants/tops seperately as analogous to picking different material options on your hull and nacelles, or the like?
Mostly however I was aiming my comments at some people earlier in the thread who claimed that there just wasn't enough customization at all. I think that's absurd. I'll readily accept that there are canon accuracy problems in many of of the costumes and I'd love to see them fixed, but if your goal is customization then there is plenty of that here.
And for that matter, for the people who want canon ships then there are very few customization options of use to them. That goal could be best satisfied by only one costume per ship, maybe two in some cases, where the most effort could be spent getting it just right and none spent accommodating the customization options.
Also on a general note, I think it's pretty dangerous to say that feature X would be easy to implement. Even if you've got a ton of experience in the field, without experience in the codebase they're working with now it's impossible to really judge what would be easy and what would cause unforeseen consequences. It's not too hard to imagine plenty of possible solutions to a problem, a lot harder to work out the actual cost and difficulty of implementation. A lot of good ideas are only really good at the start of a project, and at this point would probably mean rewriting huge chunks of the ship costume system.
Of course, that's far from an expert opinion either.