Customization issues, solutions and ideas hub

Ideas
1

Recruit 75 Here:

I’ve decided to make this mammoth of a post to hopefully fix the customization features of the game.

I really do wish @InterAction_studios keeps this topic open since this is indeed meant to be a large hub of discussion surrounding customization, both of spacecraft and of UI theme.

One of these issues is the rather steep pricing for certain customization options.

I still stand by my statement, that paintjobs should be permanently unlockable instead of charging keys every time you change them.
The same should also apply for exhaust styles. This should also apply to the UI theme’s glow size and font brightness.
Alternatively, the price for changing exhaust should be 30-40 keys instead of 55. The paintjob prices do seem to be fine I guess.

Additionally the price for the shield should be 15 keys and the name change of ships 10-25 keys. People can suggest their own price tweaks in replies if there’s a good reason to change them.

Customization Coupons

Since then, I realized that limiting my coupon idea to only my potential future boss is selfish, so I give you permission to use my free customization coupon idea as a part of your own ideas if you mention this post and ping me.

These coupons can be an additional reward for competitive missions and maybe even as an occasional reward for regular planetary missions. Once a coupon is in use, the user can customize everything for free in a limited amount of time. The proposed duration for its effect ranges from 10 minutes to 3 hours.

How long should the customization coupon last?
  • 10 minutes
  • 20 minutes
  • 30 minutes
  • 45 minutes
  • 1 hour
  • 2 hours
  • 3 hours
0 voters

Customization Options and Tweaks

I’ve revived a long forgotten topic about bomber customization and I’ve also made side suggestions like:

(You can ignore the part about stars since there doesn’t seem to be a solution for that problem)

Thanks to @GgWw1175, I’ve discovered that the base windshield for all three existing family of ships have an orange-yellow tint to them which makes windshield customization awkward. Can the base paint be completely desaturated without any tint?

I also wish there were more options instead of just 5 levels for changing the size of the HUD glow size

You can also suggest or link your own topics about new paintjobs or customization tweaks.

Other people’s ideas which I like

Here we go again, yet another promotion of ideas I want to see in-game:

For Idea 1, if it gets implemented, there could be a method of calculating the keys required to change color by calculating the degree of change made to the H/S/B values. This would really make life A LOT easier for players who really want their ships to look perfect.

(Idea 2 isn’t important in this context, feel free to ignore that one)

I also found some new ideas for customization that I quite like:

Mainly the different shield texture options.

On @SpryterTerraxian behalf, I wish the chipped effect of paintjobs to be removable/customizable for 5 keys.

While I don’t focus on lightly colored base paint on ships atm, I still agree with GgWw’s opinion that the ship base color should have a brighter base paint, while still retaining the option for the base paint to be pure black.

If I find any more customization ideas I really like, I’ll add it here and announce the addition. You can submit links to your ideas in replies as well.

Once again I must state that the idea medals belong to the original owners and NOT me.

I sincerly hope that this time, iA does listen to these ideas, many of which have been resuggested A LOT.

As always, may the forks be with you all!

11 Likes
2

homie

2 Likes
3

IA might look into this after the balancing i guess, this is a good time to look into this as IA is working on spacecrafts. so posting spacecraft ideas might be relevant.

4

Hmmm, what if the customization coupon lasted 24 hours like the “insights”? That would make it more efficient.

3 Likes
5

There have also been complaints about the color of the ships’ bases being excessively dark, which can make it hard to achieve brightly colored ship hulls that actually look good (there’s a topic from 2020, and @1galbatorix1 has been complaining about it in private for a while). I’d like to request that they be rerendered with a lighter material/texture, ideally as close to pure white as possible.

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6

What if you use that customization process to do it little by little?

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7

Good work, that was indeed a massive oversight of mine.

1 Like
8

Indeed. The difficulty to color base of the ship in bright and vibrant colors drives me nuts. Many of my designs needed to be scrapped because of that. It would be really, really nice to have them colorable like other parts of the ship.

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9

It’s also impossible to achieve a shade of yellow that looks good currently, would be nice if it were fixed

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10

Another thing: the customization coupon could be applied for a fixed amount of customizations rather than a period of time. I feel like that’d be a better way of going about it

3 Likes
11

I’ve seen this suggestion and it’s obvious indeed that the hull paint is considerably darker than what’s shown in the color picker. So I’ve added this to the list of ideas made by other people that I like.

1 Like
12

That’s a really long time. That would help make the coupon more valuable but I fear that it’s role as a reward for competitive missions might be narrowed down to only a few prestigious competitions like Weekly or Ironman, or for the top 3 people in the daily/space race challenges.

The actual value to a user might also vary too wildly, some users may spend only a few dozen keys worth in customization, while others may spend thousands of keys worth.

I intend for these coupons to be used only when a user has their mind set upon solely on customization and not playing missions.

13

To be honest, I don’t think there is a particular need for this at the moment. Customization is very very cheap the way things are now, so I think the pay every time you change can stay. Don’t most of us paint a ship once and then leave it anyway?

Making it a time-based thing will just mean people will wait for such coupon and then customize all their shit for free. I don’t like it at all, but I can see a single use cusomization coupon that will enable you to edit one of your ships for free, no matter what you change.

I also always had this idea of premium account but for customizations and I still think it could work. You buy with IRL money, like with CHL and once this thingy is bought, you have free customizations of everything, forever, perhaps with access to some paintjobs and stuffs limited to this license, but that’s not at all neccesary. However, I am not sure how many people would even be into such a thing, it always sounded to me like something nobody would even buy, so that’s kinda why I didn’t post this idea before.

14

I think you should be able to pay once be after that be able to change the color to anything you wish.
But really, 75 keys just to name a ship? 10 lives cost 50. The name doesnt even do anything

15

I’ve given the new VF series of ships some customization, and I love all the paintjob options it has.

Having said that, it has its issues:

  1. Strobe lights can only be mounted on the rear parts of the ship. We need the option to add strobe lights to either the wingtips, the trim, or at the rear of base of the main wing, sandwiched between the wingtips like these:

    raven
    raven1024×1024 44 KB

  2. For some odd reason, only the bottom winglets generate wingstreaks, which also looks odd and ugly. Maybe all four of the winglets could generate wingstreaks, that would further make the VF ships unique as the only family of ships with quad wingstreaks.

    raven
    raven1024×1024 44 KB

4 Likes
16

There are two problems with making the base texture brighter:

  1. When the base paint is dark and there’s no shininess, it looks very flat and uniform:

image

This is because certain rivet details on the base texture that used to be fully white have now been squashed against the other whites

  1. Too-bright bases “shine through” any paint, even if it’s at 100% strength:
    image
    image

This is because the modulation used to overlay painted textures does not behave correctly at edge pixels (it never does, it’s just that you can’t really see it unless the underlying layer is really bright).

But I’ll try to re-render the bases to achieve some balance.

I’ve added 2 more placements. Due to implementation limitations, all spacecraft must have the same number of strobe placements, so that means other spacecraft also got +2

Added to v.103 (@Recruit_75 :medal_sports: Idea)

I initially thought that this would results in visual glitches, but it turns out that wingstreaks (as exhausts) are fully 3D, so it’s possible. Who would have thought.

Added to v.103 :medal_sports: Idea

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17

Changed in v.103 :medal_sports: Idea

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18

I see, interesting. I did notice this while painting my Raven today, but I didn’t think much of it.

19

Giving the option would be… complicated. It’s much easier to either have it or not. Will poll it.

3 Likes
20

Maybe we could increase the range of how bright or dark the ship can get, so that we can still have pure black ships but also pure white ships like what GgWw wanted.

Tbf, this is also an issue with really dark paint, so while this is indeed off-putting, the alternative of limiting base paint lightness or darkness is worse IMO.

1 Like