Personally I am greatly impressed with the designs of ships, missions, and other game content that have been created by this very talented player body.

I am left with one question. Why not use this?

Why not let the players who can write some of the game code, add in their ships, etc. Of course it would have to be certified by guild and they players will have to know the right code, etc.

But this just seems to make sense. New features get continually added while the DEVs get to focus on their Bigger Picture.

Why not?

Agreed. I can understand why things are how they are, but I'm sure 90% of the players want to help, and most of them are entirely competent enough to do so. Not me, but lots

I'm with Dank on this one. While I don't think that we should open up the code database for players to write content for, or anything, simply because the game becomes that much more exploitable, I think things like the Mission editor are a step in the right direction.

However, player created graphics are something that I see as something that is a practical possibility, assuming that there is a reasonably simple way to manage something like that.

the problem with letting the player base design things for the game is everyone has a different idea of how things should, work, look, sound, etc. and the only ones who realy know what the big picture is are the devs. So while the player designed content may look good to some it will undoubtedly look bad to others and it may or may not fit into the big picture.

While i would like to see dev run contests for various design fasets, i think openiong the flood gates for anyone who wants to hack out a mission on the mission editer or anyone who can crank out a 3-d model is probably not a good idea. We don't want the devs to be forced to sift threw all our bad ideas for the relativly few gems*, and thereby prevent them from having the time to add content of their own.

besides i expect the devs want to keep a level of creative controle since the game univers is their creation.

* In this context i define the term "gems" to mean the ideas, models, etc which are universaly accepted as well thought out and developed, and fit into the both the existing univers and the dev's intentions for the future of the univers.

Yeah. That would be neat and useful. It totally makes sense. Me, i'm a graphic artist. I also like to make 3d models. And program...yeah so anyways, if it were opened up, i'd help for sure. I'd make a lot of stuffs. Ships especially. :o

*EDIT*

Oh, that's a good point, Lord Q. That makes sense. I especially like the dev-created contest idea. That would probly be better than just opening Vendetta up. Definately, not probably.

Of course the devs could still control what goes in or out, but still opening it up more...

I think the devs are running into the same problem a lot of ambitious people do: They want to do everything themselves. The problem is things get so big they get out of hand, but they don't want to relinquish control of their baby. Some people would rather see their creations die (screenwriters come to mind) than have someone else get their grubby hands in and mess things up. They are great programmers, they are great designers, they are great creators. But ultimately, there are only 4 of them, and there is no way 4 people have enough time to pull off such a large endeavor. Games like WoW and Ultima Online have full time content creators, whos job it is to make things up for players to do. I realize this game isn't quite to that point yet, bus as frequent buswars prove, we're quickly getting there.

/me designs the uber EC 1001 with 10S and 10L ports

you get my drift ?

Why not? In large part, I think it's just because they're not ready to yet.

To be completely frank, I'd actually rather not have the devs implement any of the player designed ship models right now. Yes, many of them look awesome, but right now I really don't see there being a need for them. I honestly feel that right now we have enough ship models in-game - maybe only just enough, but at least for now I don't think there's a problem. What I do think we'll need more of soon, is Capital ship models, as right now all we have is the HAC, and the Trident (and the Trident is maybe too small to qualify as a Capital ship). But before we'll really be able to use any more Capital ship models, I think the devs will need to finish all the game-engine stuff for player-controlled cap ships. Until then, I really don't think the game needs any more models.

For player-created missions, that is something the devs have said they want to have. But again I think it's just something that they're not quite ready for. The mission editor is nearing completion, but probably needs a fair amount of polishing before it will be ready for the player-base to have access to it.

I don't even know if they said player created missions specifically, as in "you write the storyline." I think the idea is more to have player-designated missions. I.E. commander Maso decides to designate a patrol mission to sector blah... killing x number of hive bots. The reward is automatically given upon completion based on the difficulty.

The devs never said they were designing the mission editor for us.

In the June 29^th News post, Incarnate said "User-defined missions are a very old design goal for us, and one that is hopefully now drawing nearer."

I suppose user-defined might not mean user-designed, but I would guess (and hope) it does.

My two main concerns with new player content would be consistency and quality. When you give players the option to upload whatever they want, those two things tend to break over time. And I know I wouldn't be happy to see the game filled with all sorts of wacky designs that are contrary to the game's current content.

In other games this level of customization is acceptable only because gameplay is split up into multiple servers. Meaning if you don't like what you see, you can leave. But this is a MMORPG with a persistent universe. You can't just leave or change servers when you see or encounter something you don't like that ruins the atmosphere of the game.

But in regards to other content like custom skins and HUDs, I'd imagine that they won't be a problem simply because only your Vendetta client will see those changes, rather than everyone else. Obviously custom HUDs will only affect you. But ship skins may be different. Either...

1. The entire skin will be customizable, but will need to go through a manual process of approval. Very time consuming and laborous, once we have thousands of active players on at once. But I wouldn't rule out the possibility just yet.

2. Only parts of the skin will be editable, in the form of decals. I'm willing to bet that this is what they had in mind, since much less memory is used up and load times won't end up being ridiculously long. But even this solution may prove to be a challenge, with thousands of players having custom decals.

3. Or ship skin changes will be client side only. I seriously doubt this will be the case, since part of the reason people create those skins is to show off. Without that ability the fun factor of custom skins is sort of eliminated.

I'm up for customization, but not to the point where it'll kill the game's design with inconsistencies and quality issues. And I don't mean that as an insult or anything. Everyone knows that anytime custom content is introduced in a game, most of the stuff that comes out is crap. It's a fact of life. And throw that into a game with only one universe? You've got a recipe for disaster.

I'm lazy, so I didn't read this entire thread, but it would seem that everyone's responding to the original post without reading the others anyway, so I'm no worse off than everyone else.

Not because the player designed content is pure crap. Most the ships "designed" by players amount to large blobs with more blobs stuck on top. A rare few amount to boxes with blobs and boxes attached. None of the above come anywhere close to either fitting into the game thematically or quality-wise. And the three-two designs that do both of those things just happen to be entirely 2-d, and with Waylon in california, unrealistic to implement (no offense meant, the atlas is a sexy ship too, but it would take way too much time without a pro artist.)

I've been fortunate enough to avoid the "mission suggestions" but I seriously doubt they're any better, considering the sort of "fiction" we have in the role-play forums. So there.

Luckily, I read all the posts except for genkas.

User-created ships are not all that easy to use. The existing ships fit into a fairly narrow tolerance for poly count, size, and structure. This ignores artistic continuity, which has been touched on earlier. There's also a licensing issue, and a potential for plagarism issue.

Some users have worked hours on their designs. Consider it will take considerably more time for the devs to find and fix any problems with the unfamiliar models. Think it's easy? The Vulture STILL has problems.

that, and then you have issues with converting from one file format to another, and whether the conversion process adds any unwanted errors, etc, etc.

True, but "it's hard..." is no excuse for having sub-par ship designs. Heck, I'd fly a poor ship if it had a great design, rather than flying a great ship with terrible design.

I'd fly an asteroid if it had a railgun.
-:sigma.SB

It isn't that we're ignoring the abilities of players, or that we wouldn't like to use content created by the userbase. Nor are we so stuck on ourselves that we want to limit the game to our own content.

The problem is really that almost no one who offers us ships or content or whatever.. is actually someone who makes content for a game. Even assuming that the content is totally fantastic, with detailed textures and.. everything else, who knows how the texture coordinates were defined? What was it modeled in? Am I going to need to spend hours hunting down stray verticies left over from the modeling process, or other random artifacts? Cleaning up a ship for use in the game, made by a non-guild person (or non-game-developer) can take a few days to a week. Worst case, it could be longer. We're very busy as it is, and we're trying to add the most "fun" per hour of development in as short a period of time as possible. This doesn't mean that we wouldn't *like* to take advantage of people's offered contributions, but I just don't have time to get involved in it right now. I mean, we haven't even had a chance to add some of the content we already *have*.

And that's just on a technical level, entirely aside from content quality, continuity, etc etc. It's one thing to make a cool looking "model", but a model is really easy.. I mean, I could model several new ships a day, no problem (I'm not exaggerating). It's the rest of the process that would take waylon about a month to do. That's right.. it took about a man-month each for the prometheus, the valkyrie and the marauder. And that's not counting custom shader development for each ship, and fallbacks to non-shader-capable cards. The models took a day, maybe two with tweaking. Very few of the ships submitted have any kind of texture on them, and that's a big part of the time consuming process.

It isn't that it's impossible for us to use player-submitted content, it's just that it's not as trivial as some people think. Please do keep posting to the design contest thing, I intend to go through that and make use of it. So, please keep submitting things, I am not arrogantly ignoring your contributions, it's just a non-trivial task that I haven't had a chance to get to yet. We do the best we can with the time we have.

If people would like to learn more about texturemapping and coordinate definition for use in realtime games (it's rather different than creating content for TV/film and the like), take a look at Waylon's own tutorials:

http://waylon-art.com/uvw_tutorial/uvwtut_01.html

I'm sure there are more game-related tutorials out there, some of which probably use Lightwave instead of 3DS Max (we currently only support Max, but it's not impossible to support other formats.. it can be sticky though, as problems in format conversion can result in messed-up texture coordinates and the like, which can make the process of fixing someone else's "ship" more time consuming than for me to create a new one from scratch).

When I get a chance, I'll make a new thread where I'll post content creation guidelines and such (poly count, formats, creation-time texture resolution, game texture resolution, what shaders and effects can be done when and how [certain effects cannot be used simultaneously, and creating custom shaders, with backpropogation to Mac and Linux, can take longer than building the entire model/texture].. and let you guys take your best respective models and churn out textures/coordinates for them, and we'll see about actually making use of things.

There will also be some legal requirements, of course, people will have to sign and fax us a form that turns over the intellectual property of the content. But, I assume that's no biggie. Anyway.. gotta get back to work now. Please do keep up the creativity and submissions.. they're cool, and we aren't ignoring you.

I don't really do models, but aren't there programs that can clean up strays and such?
Since the converting to use in-game has tutorials, I'm going to take it that there isn't any software to do that. If only there was an easier way to do it...