Currently as the Vendetta Universe of equipment stands we have three areas, Large weapons, Small Weapons, and "Your Battery". While this gives the game a simplified feel, we miss out on an area of diveristy Vendetta is so severely lacking.

By means of add-ons to current ships, I would want to use that to expand upon the current level of customization, which to a logical point is pretty minimal so far. Now seeing Luis wonderful skill as an Artist and a modeler, I wonder if this idea, could be easily implemented, providing it is time consuming.

Now in my Idea each ship would have designated add-on amounts, for example the Behemoth may have a hull extension slot/ or Add-on area, or some form of armour plating able to be bought and put on.

Heres an Example

The Raptor currently has around 8300 armour and no variants, now we all agree its stats are low and not what we would expect from the TGP, now perhaps a way to solve this would be that the Raptor has many add-on slots making it more verstile in the ways it can approach combat than say a Prometheus.

Add-on slots would be limited to a certain area, for example a Valkyrie may have an Additional Engine slot, perhaps a small booster slot which at max, the best equipment in can handle, could provide around 10% extra thrust to your regular turbo.

Unfortunately these add-ons would need awhile of tweaking to get right, and many such as armour plating and small engine add-ons would need to be actual models attached to specfic points on a ship., ill provide a visual of what I have in mind if i have time, I think the Idea may be confusing to some, or either my skills at explaining things just isnt up to snuff ^^ lol.

Yes.
Please add visual add on's as well.

i agree. The ships needs A LOT more custimization.

Chikira, are you trying to say that the things we equip on our ships whould actually CHANGE the ship's collision mesh, its shape, it's textures, and the points at which weapons fire from? (i.e. You could actually SEE what another player has equipped as weapons simply by looking closely at their ships?)

That would be very very cool, but I think that kind of customization is a good ways off. It seems like it would require sweeping changes to the core game engine.

I doubt that Lebs.

LeberMac:
Ship Appearance

Aside from the changes in appearance caused by the modular configuration of the ship's hardware (engines, weapons, etc), ships will also have a certain level of aesthetic user-configurability. Ships may have portions of their colors defined by the user, plus different ship "livery" (skins) may be available to users belonging to particular factions. Thus, advanced characters may have access to special ship configuration options, further setting their ships apart visually.

From http://www.vendetta-online.com/h/universe_ships.html

The first sentence leads one to believe that such a system is in the design documentation and planned for sometime after "soon".

{EDIT}Wehhh~ double post ><
Fixed now.

Nice doublepost, SS. Heh. If it's after "Soon™", then I think it must be coming up quicker than expected, because wasn't this new release "Soon™?" Oh goodie!

"When will THEN be NOW?"
"Soon."
-- Spaceballs

That page that SS quoted used to say a lot more (it used to talk about how weapon loadouts and cargo would affect ship appearance) before Incarnate edited all of that out. You can still see what they intended by looking at the concept drawings for the Valk, Maud, and Prom:

http://images.vendetta-online.com/extras/ItaniSmallFighter.big.jpg
http://images.vendetta-online.com/extras/SercoSmallFighter.big.jpg
http://images.vendetta-online.com/extras/NeutralSmallFighter.big.jpg

The Maud also used to have a sort of configurable "cargo trailer" thing behind it, but that picture appears to have vanished. w00t for mysterious concept art.

Leber Mac wrote:

Chikira, are you trying to say that the things we equip on our ships whould actually CHANGE the ship's collision mesh, its shape, it's textures, and the points at which weapons fire from? (i.e. You could actually SEE what another player has equipped as weapons simply by looking closely at their ships?)

That would be very very cool, but I think that kind of customization is a good ways off. It seems like it would require sweeping changes to the core game engine.

Reply:

No, it would more likely be like adding things on in say World of Warcraft or the late Earth and Beyond, and making these visible enhancements/ add-ons *at least in Earth and Beyond* was done by different points on each ship where an "Attachment" if you will would be equiped. Now the attachments would be seperate models, added on top of the orginal model. I dont know if this would require any changing in the core game engine, I hope the vendetta engine could handle something like add-ons and im sure John and the boys wouldn''t build one without such a capability since they are building an MMORPG, not a regular RPG. However some add-ons or attachments would have to specified to certain models.

I'm gonna take a screenshot of the equipping screen, and kinda detail a ship into showing what i mean, just to help those who may have a kinda hard time grasping the concept. It could also just be me lol.

Well, Chikira, I -think- it may be able to handle something along this type, since for the longest time one of the biggest problems with capships is that the turrets didn't really like mothering to it. Same with the docking object. But, as can be plainly seen, that problem is fixed. Or at least worked around for the time being.

I just want to be able to put guild logos or insignia on my ships' hulls... at user-defined locations, of course. and also, new color schemes.

/me imagines a silver and blue RevC flying around with "PANASONIC" in waylonics on the side.

I was on the other day, and realized how MUCH of a loser I really am.

Just flying around, i found myself wanting to play VO and TieFighter at the same time. Then I came to my epiphany. ship skins for VO. (after a grueling search, i found this thread and it was the closest match)

I realized that this is not COMPLETELY possible, but if some were given access to the ship skins to "mess with" i would like to see what they had come up with.

Now, each of these ship skins would be contained locally, so no one could see you flying your hornet/x-wing, but every hornet you saw ingame, would look like an x-wing to you.

I have based the following ships on weapon config / ship contour in a starwars state of mind. (but hell, i could probably see some other ship configs matching out there in other movies or shows...)

hornet = x-wing
maud = tie fighter
hog = a-wing (or snow speeder just for kicks)
wraith = that's the snow speeder!!! lol
valk = naboo starfighter
prom = tie bomber
centurion = speeder bike, cause this ship is almost as useless.
centaur = y-wing
vult = lambda-class shuttle
bus = t-wing, or a floating disposal bin
moth = the only thing that comes to mind is the battle droid carrier
atlas = because it looks nothing like it, slave-1
raptor = that droid fighter, what's it called.. a tri-fighter or something?
rag = the one and only, millenium falcon

teradon = star destroyer
light frig = corellian corvette
heavy assault = three words... immobilizer class heavy cruiser!
the connie = nebulon Kuati Escort Frigate.

now where do i find the skin files?

The problem with Chikira's idea is that he fails to realize that the addons did indeed change the ship's profile in EnB a LOT, and, while that didn't matter at all because of the contemptible way combat was done in that game, in VO similar changes would severely affect (or should affect) a vessel's performance in combat like Leebs indicate, otherwise it wouldn't be realistic. Hell, in EnB ships got fitted with extra wings, cargo holds and other stuff; imagine running into a cent that has wings so it can carry two more weapons, but its collision mesh and performance are unchanged; now that would be F****D up.

No, a more realistic and truer-to-VO method needs to be implemented, which will take time and work, and I for one can wait until the polar ice caps melt. JUST SAY NO TO TURN VO INTO ENB.

thanks for reading and answering the old thread.

forget it, i dont care who comes up with a "it's in another thread" comment.. i'm posting this on it's own.

Jexkerome said:

The problem with Chikira's idea is that he fails to realize that the addons did indeed change the ship's profile in EnB a LOT, and, while that didn't matter at all because of the contemptible way combat was done in that game, in VO similar changes would severely affect (or should affect) a vessel's performance in combat like Leebs indicate, otherwise it wouldn't be realistic. Hell, in EnB ships got fitted with extra wings, cargo holds and other stuff; imagine running into a cent that has wings so it can carry two more weapons, but its collision mesh and performance are unchanged; now that would be F****D up.

No, a more realistic and truer-to-VO method needs to be implemented, which will take time and work, and I for one can wait until the polar ice caps melt. JUST SAY NO TO TURN VO INTO ENB

Reply:

I think you've had the typical reaction, Heres the problem, World of Warcraft and Earth and Beyond had a Successful game going, with Vendetta it has yet to be seen, im not doubting the Devs and I think they have alot going for them but you cant simpley say that anything which draws from the success of those games is turning into those games entirely.

Unfortunately I think you assume everyone to be of lower intelligence than yourself.

Anyway im not playing VO until a form of marketing push is done. I've all done there really can be done without more content and a more in depth, customizable universe.

Chikira out.

Hello

having more customization options is something that i would really appreciate, and, based on this picture, i think, it´s something we´ll have someday

http://images.vendetta-online.com/extras/ItaniSmallFighter.big.jpg

about the collision mesh, there´s a simple solution to it, every part that the player could attach to the model would have it´s own mesh, or, at least, parts that would really add to the model geometry in a significant way, such as, adding wings to an atlas (there´s a picture of a winged atlas somewhere in the forum, I think it´s from waylon´s website)

for instance, weapons attached very close to the main hull would not really need a collision mesh

what I really don´t know is, if it would create more data to be sent to the server to the clients, I think there´s ways to deal with it, at least, in games such as WoW they probably have, since you can modify your character in a million ways.

Seems like Chikira is going with the not-so-subtle "Do what I want or I won't play, I'm serious" threat. He also seems to fail to understand that a four-person company with a small stream of cash doesn't quite have the capabilities to churn out a game as fast as EA (May the All Die horrible deaths)or Blizzard.

As for WoW, Luis, since they use the typical "roll dice and add bonuses to see if you hit" to decide combat, changing an avatar's looks is no big deal at all as it doesn't affect combat.

What you say of the meshes for each piece seems like a good idea, but like you, I have no idea if that would be feasible. Anyone?

What I wanted to say, was not about customization affecting combat, Jex, but, that it could affect the ammount of data sent back and forth to the servers

I´m not sure if is it possible to just inform to the system what your character is carrying once and then, just reference to it using some kind of simpler Id or if it needs to be informed at every single cycle

Ah... right, tellin' everyone else what your avatar is carrying. Yeah, I suppose that adds bits to the packets, but from what I read around here whenever that subject comes up, VO is very good at sending them packets quickly and efficiently. Still, we definitely need someone with more network know-how to tell us how feasible this would be.

As roguelazer and Scuba Steve and others have posted, this was originally a major part of our design. After we failed to get funding for a larger team, we had to scrap this and a lot of other stuff.

That said, it is not impossible. We have a whole hierarchical "parenting" system for attaching sub-objects to objects and so on. The turrets are a very simplistic example of this. "user-designed" structures, including stations (notice how they're all constructed of identical modules?) has always been something we wanted.

However, it would take quite a bit of development time to do. The art for it, which Luis could no-doubt do a great job of, is only a small part of it. In fact, the worst part would probably be the actual implementation, interface design, and testing / balancing / tweaking of lots and lots of equippable "stuff".

I am all for doing this (I mean, I came up with the concept and wrote it into the original design, that's a big vote). But right now I have other, bigger fish to fry. Like "faction system does not work". And "storms do not serve original intended purpose" and "economy needs to be redone" and "mission editor has to be finished and released to userbase" and "hive needs to be expanded and put into production in the whole universe" and "more missions" and so on. That's aside from all the marketing, business, and other stuff I'm trying to get together.

So yes, this is a cool idea, and yes it's something we want, but it's probably not going to happen immediately. There's a lot of other features and gameplay that's much easier to implement that will have a much larger impact on the game as a whole.