...I think the novelty has worn off. Paying for fancy paint so long after the matter seems oh-so-F2P. And it's so much better than the normal Vult's paint, or any ship's paint for that matter.

+1

Yeah, probably. Anyone who signed up specifically because "OMG I GET A SPECIAL SHIPZ" is long gone by now anyway.

What you just said is "Hey devs, remember you told people some things back in the day? Why not make liars out of you guys! It'll be great!"

Does this seriously not seem wrong to you?

With Genka on this. But FFS, shorten the Goddamn name so the sector list's ass won't be sore anymore.

Actually that's right, I had forgotten it was based on a 3 month subscription, which if someone had purchased purely for access to said ship would be running out right abooouuut.... now :P

Bit too soon perhaps then. But yeah, would be nice if the name was... altered. Personally I find "Anniversary Edition" a bit of an immersion breaker. I think the point would still be made if it had a more story-oriented name, with a reference to the 5th Anniversary in the description.

Or no reference, you'd know why you got it, newbs would get to be confused :P

Does it do the game more service to have a special ship no one can get, or make the standard ship that everyone can get look really good?

I will not take a ship that was promised, all of a couple of months ago, to people who were willing to support us during a certain time (or had been supporting us, at that point), and give it to everyone else who wasn't there. That's the point of time-exclusive content. I don't care if it's "F2P-like". People spent real money to get that access.

I will consider changing the name and description so it's something more immersive.

I will also consider making new skins for the existing vulture. Generating the Anniversary Edition texture took me like an hour. So that's not too crazy. The problem becomes more of increasing download size with more specialized textures. It would be better to come up with a way to generate them in-game, using the same layering mechanics we use for the backgrounds. But, that would require some coding time. It would be a huge win for configurability though..

I am sort of gratified that people like it better than the default vulture, though? I hadn't really heard that. I mean, I thought it was cool, but my tastes do not always align with the userbase. (I think the Wraith looks stupid, unlike.. many).

I don't think download size would be that big an issue, vo is pretty small by mmo standards, and a skin would take what, few megs?

Yeah, I thought the special edition Vult looked cool Inc. I even bought half a dozen or so just to keep around in various colours, even if I don't fly them. heh

As far as any tweaked skins to make stuff look cooler, that would be fine and honestly a slightly bigger d/l wouldn't be a issue with me. But a big win if you could do it in game like you said.

The issue isn't one more skin, or even 10 or 20.. it's looking down the road. It's more art assets for us to maintain, and a bigger download for everyone. If we had a more flexible system that did the compositing in realtime, we could allow guilds to come up with their own special liveries and things based on a catalog of internal "compositing sources". There are tradeoffs to that too, of course, increased CPU/GPU usage time spent generating the images, but a lot more flexibility.

There are tradeoffs to that too, of course, increased CPU/GPU usage time spent generating the images, but a lot more flexibility.

I hate to break it to you, but keeping VO within ENIAC's graphics capabilities is kind of a silly goal. Even 5 years ago that 'increased CPU/GPU usage time' wouldn't have been a significant issue.

I'm not sure what you're talking about, Ladron. If we have hundreds of auto-composited textures that need to be generated with render-to-texture, that will take time. Probably at startup, although then one gets into memory management issues (it would be like an Extreme version of "pre-cache all textures"). Doing it runtime on demand would mean an impact on the user's machine when someone with a "new" texture jumps in. So someone jumps into B8 while your fighting, and you get a lag spike because we have to render a bunch of textures on your videocard. Or we could do it in software in another thread and hope everyone has extra CPU cores that aren't being used, but that'll be slower than the videocard doing it.

Say we have 4 textures per ship (diffuse, normal, specularity, illumination), times say 10 ships, with maybe 20 variations of each (major/minor faction liveries, guild liveries, "special" liveries based on accomplishment, etc).

That's 800 textures that need to be generated from the compositing library. Probably 1024x1024 (larger if they're capships). Even if we hope they'll only take a quarter of a second apiece, that's like 3 minutes to generate all of them on runtime. And it could easily take longer per texture, tough to say.. modern cards are extremely fast at this, and it could probably be SSE optimized as well, but not-quite-so-modern cards (GeForce FX, 6-series) might be quite a bit slower. Plus we would have to runtime compress them to DXT5 or the amount of video memory needed would be totally insane. Runtime compression takes awhile, as anyone has noticed who has enabled texture compression in the current client (and that's with it skipping most of the big textures, like the asteroids, which are pre-compressed).

We could then cache the rendered textures to disk.. generating a new RLB or something, so the given client never has to make them again. That runs into problems if the user is low on harddrive space or something, and it will take awhile to write all the stuff out to disk.. but that can be done in a separate thread. Still, it's not a trivial series of issues. Just because "modern videocards are fast" does not magically make scalability and system-resource logistical issues go away.

We can probably do something simpler, where we just runtime overlay another texture on an existing one, much as we do with ship coloring and station "dirt" and the like. But it won't look nearly as cool as even the "Anniversary Edition" vulture, which actually has all layers of the materials customized to one another.

it takes like 5 minutes to download the vo client. it takes a whole day to download wow and patch it to the correct version and about 1-2 hours for eve to download. I don't think adding a few skins and having the download take 6 minutes is going to turn anyone away.

Again, this isn't about 5 minutes vs 6 minutes. A single 1024x1024 texture moderately compressed with jpeg ("8") is about 750kB, depending on content. Multiply that times 800 in the example above, and you have 586 megabytes of added space.. bringing the total download to 7-800MB. That's a big deal.

If this were one or two or ten images, yes, I'd just add the images. I'm trying to think long-term and flexibility here.

Anyway, thanks, the desire for more custom textures is noted, we'll try to come up with a balanced solution.