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Give Us More Ship Parts Please! I will PAY for Them!
plb1982
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
One of my favorite parts of the game is customizing my starship... I really enjoyed doing it at each rank up... swapping out saucer sections, pylons, nacelles, etc. I'd spend 30 minutes sometimes just playing around with possible combinations.
And it was always awesome that two of my toons could have the same ship, but make it look totally different!
...Then... I got to 50. And I started buying C-Store and Lobi ships. And I played Romulan. And there is a really, really disappointing lack of customization.
Some of the newer ships aren't bad... the Armitage, for example, has a lot of options, and you can give a lot of variety to the look. Of course, that's basically just a new skin for an older design that was already customizable.
The Vesta is... decent. I feel like I can get a little bit of a design difference, though I consider it a bare minimum.
The Scimitar is a joke. The "customization" options are barely in the category of a tweak.
The Dyson ships... appear to be as bad or worse than the Scimitar.
And then there are ships like the Avenger and the Mogh that aren't customizable AT ALL (save a little taillfin option).
Why? WHY?
What was wrong with giving the player a bit of design freedom? I mean, we have all these character design options (thank you for that), but the game is built in a way that our ship is as much or more our 'character" than the actual captain is. So why leave so little opportunity to differentiate and customize?
You want to make cash, I get it. I am willing to drop cash. This could be mutually beneficial. Sell me a big ol' pack of nacelles, saucers, hulls, and pylons and let me use them to customize my ships. Charge me way too much, I'll pay.
JUST GIVE ME THE OPTION. PLEASE.
And it was always awesome that two of my toons could have the same ship, but make it look totally different!
...Then... I got to 50. And I started buying C-Store and Lobi ships. And I played Romulan. And there is a really, really disappointing lack of customization.
Some of the newer ships aren't bad... the Armitage, for example, has a lot of options, and you can give a lot of variety to the look. Of course, that's basically just a new skin for an older design that was already customizable.
The Vesta is... decent. I feel like I can get a little bit of a design difference, though I consider it a bare minimum.
The Scimitar is a joke. The "customization" options are barely in the category of a tweak.
The Dyson ships... appear to be as bad or worse than the Scimitar.
And then there are ships like the Avenger and the Mogh that aren't customizable AT ALL (save a little taillfin option).
Why? WHY?
What was wrong with giving the player a bit of design freedom? I mean, we have all these character design options (thank you for that), but the game is built in a way that our ship is as much or more our 'character" than the actual captain is. So why leave so little opportunity to differentiate and customize?
You want to make cash, I get it. I am willing to drop cash. This could be mutually beneficial. Sell me a big ol' pack of nacelles, saucers, hulls, and pylons and let me use them to customize my ships. Charge me way too much, I'll pay.
JUST GIVE ME THE OPTION. PLEASE.
Post edited by plb1982 on
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While it would be cool to see more customization options, it is not likely going to happen very much.
Several? The Vet ships and the Dyson ships are the only ones I can think of off hand (I guess the Guramba too). Sure, BoPs and the Intrepid-style sci ships have "wings", but they have customization options so it can't be that hard.
As for not having enough ships in game that are similar... that's sort of the point. Whatever it takes to make it happen.
so
o/ Signed
The Oddy and Borty do not have much, if any, customization either, because of their pets.
I'm not convinced it would be that difficult to even give those ships some different nacelle or pylon options.
Can the different versions of the galaxy do a saucer separation? If so it would imply that it woudln't be to difficult on the Oddy. What about the MVAM / Advanced Escort options? I don't have either of those ships, so I don't know.
...Either way, I think it's a poor excuse for the devs to use. And it certainly doesn't fly with ships that don't have moving parts, like the Avenger or Vesta (I know the vesta has some customization, but it barely qualifies).
Heck, the regular Romulan ships as you rank up barely have any customization options, and you are stuck with only one choice!
Cut paste resize exciting items, add a few tweets so they look a little different and release them on another class.
Ships are the main thing people play with, hell just look at the PvE queues to see what's the most popular, this would be a gold mine for the devs.
Also do rep costume unlocks like you have for ground XII kits but for space kits. There's another sinkhole that would keep us playing.
Join The Space Invaders,..... Federation and KDF fleets.
I just have a hard time believing it could be that hard, especailly if you give the players some basic scaling options.
I mean, players already have head, body, arms, legs... they seem to fit together alright. Don't know that saucer, hull, pylon, nacelles could be THAT much more difficult. "Impossilbe" certainly seems like a strong word.
I remember reading the same nakedsnake001 did.
It went something like this:
For every combination of (example on an Assault Cruiser) hull, nacelles, pylons and saucer the modeler has to set up where they're placed in relation to each other so they don't do stuff like bump into each other.
As I understand it in the worst case it means with 4 skins you get something like 4*4*4*4=256 combinations that need to be set up by the modeler before the ship is ready for purcahse.
When you have additional parts like a neck the amount of combinations increases as well.
Same when you add in another skin pack with 2 more skins you end up with 6*6*6*6=1296 combinations where you previously had 256.
When some of the parts don't interfere with each other you may omit one or two factors, as stated what I describe is the worst possible scenario. But it's still a lot of work and the modeler still needs to confirm the ship is not messed up for every permutation.
If that is the due to a limitation of the ship implementation, it is the most illogical implementation of a customizable system I have heard of, having each variant manually positioned by the modeler, is a massive waste of resources.
As far as I understand it the game uses hardpoints for weapons and emitters, why not just have the ship parts aligned with the hardpoints.
For example a Hull has several hard points e.g. Neck and Pylons, different hulls would have different positions for the hardpoints.
The Pylon model would not be aligned with the Hull variant but its x,y,z coordinates should be based on the hardpoint that it is attached to, so the Left Pylon would sit on the Left Pylon Hull hardpoint etc.
Each Pylon would have two hardpoints one where it joins to the Hull and one where it joins the Nacelle.
The Nacelle's x,y,z coordinates should be the location of the Pylon's Nacelle hardpoint and so on for the rest of the ship.
That would mean that rather than x amount of model variations only one for each part would need to be made as the ship's configuration would be the alignment of the pieces.
This must be done in some manner for characters at the moment because the weapons are held on the characters hand hardpoint and the Weapon effect fires from presumably a point based on the gun's model, regardless of characters proportions.
"I walked away from the last great Time War. I marked the passing of the Time Lords. I saw the birth of the universe and watched as time ran out, moment by moment, until nothing remained. No time, no space. Just me!"
I just played around with the Miranda/Centaur parts and I think I can say it would not work.
Or rather it would only work with ships that are extremely similar, far moreso than some of the parts we can mix and match in STO.
Maybe it's just an illusion but from what I see with that ship alone some angles and permutations and how they're positioned go way beyond what an automated system can achieve.
Also depending of the combination the whole center of mass for the ship shifts in the editor and I seriously doubt that's the machine doing that, it's been manually preset that way.
Like a pack of nacelles, obvioiusly wouldn't be able to fit on all ships due to their odd pylons, The Fleet avengers side ons for example
But just a set of variable skins, With subtle changes to their busards, or vent shapes would be enough for me to buy
Same for saucers, Relatively the same as the ones we have, but with variable special features, different bridge layouts, or geometry cut outs
and for hulls, some new deflector arrays could be a nice superficial addition
i'd like to argue this point...
animations do make it harder for customization, but does not in any way make it impossible. look at the Multivector, it has 4-5 different costumes, each satisfactorily unique in design. yet it's multivector console does keep these changes in all the related animations and pets, with the exception of the reintegration animation, but that's because the animation is basically a pre rendered visual, as opposed to alot of the game's animations which are actual entities.
the problem with the latest ships is not animations. the avenger doesnt even have any animations unique to it. the problem is cryptic is starting to get lazy, knowing they can sell a ship without any customization. this is as much our fault for buying it, as it is their fault for not including it.
one of the main reasons i love the older ships is their customization. its very unlikely anyone will make a ship exactly like my Nightfire. yet my avenger is identical to every other ship in the game. since i play for fun, the multivector will always be superior in my eyes.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, I'm just saying that I have a hard time buying it because I've seen it work easily other places.
Think about charater creation... there are literally an infinite number of locations that a character's hand could be, based on size and movement. Yet, for the most part, Cryptic gets the weapon to stick with that hand and make it look convincing. Same thing with weapon placement on hips or back.
So how does this work? Well, obviously they're snapped to a structural point... hand, spine, hip... so that once the player defines the location of that point, the weapon placement follows. I really cannot imagine it being THAT difficult to have a similar system for parts attachment. Hell, there are a lot of games out there that let you design something by connecting "snap" points to one another.
You're forgetting something: everyone has two arms, two legs etc.
No matter how you scale a character, the underlying structure is always identical, just stretched or shrunken down.
It always looks kinda like this:
http://www.webreference.com/3d/lesson98/98-1.gif
With ships it's a different story given how heterogenous their lineup is.
Just compare the Galaxy to the Promenteus: one has a neck, the other has 4 nacelles.
There are already fundamental differences there.
EDIT: I don't like being right on this though if I am.
I'd love more parts for various ships...or parts like Venture skin working on the Nebula.
But I dabbled with 3-d Modelling myself enough to know....I'm not that good at it.:) And that's it's a pain in the butt.
This is a Romulan Nemesis era D7 refit I designed years ago opposite a regular Klingon D7.
The Avenger class (and the Mogh class) deployable armor when entering Red Alert? I think this counts as an Animation since it changes the appearance of the ships surface textures
It would certainly make things more difficult where optional parts are concerned
Yes, because that is SOOO easy to do......
Obviously, there are differences, but the underlying principle is the same. You are snapping an interchangeable part (weapon) onto a point that has a near-infinite number of positions.
And, while, yes, the Defiant is a heckuva lot different from the Galaxy, there are a ton of Fed ships that follow the Saucer/neck/hull/pylon/nacelles design:
T2 Cruiser & Sci
T3 Sci
T4 Cruiser & Sci
T5 Cruisers (both)
Excelsior & Refit
Oddyssey
Avenger
Plus a ton that are only missing the neck like almost all the escorts, T3 Sci, etc.
For KDF, a huge chunk of them have the same layout as well: saucer/neck/hull/wings/nacelles. ALL the BoP parts could be interchangeable.
Animations as someone else mentioned are easily disabled as to some combinations looking wrong / goofy really simple solution for that, if the player want's it to look like that they use it and if they don't yeah they don't use those part combos having the choice is still superior to having no options at all.