(03-21-2021, 09:54 AM)Toaster Wrote: Can - for future reference - a clear reason be given as to why there won't be several variants of this ship?
Freelancer has no technical provisions for swappable materials, on the fly or otherwise. Material references are hardcoded into mesh buffer data upon exporting model, a part of the format structure that cannot be changed. Each 'reskin' effectively produces completely independent ship archetype and necessitates separate model files. This creates additional asset management burden, as any simple change, such as changing stats, would require changing all additional archetypes, changing hardpoints would require changing all models and so on. Maintenance cost increase is unreasonable for what little gain a 'reskin' would provide. To warrant having separate archetype and model the differences must be much more substantial (visible difference in geometry and possibly stats too).
In short it's limitations of both of mesh data structures (3d model) and archetype data structures (game logic object).
Some other games have this and even user-swappable colors and materials, in case of those it is a feature that had to be decided early on and engine had to be made with that in mind, however if a game had no such feature planned the engine, like in case of Freelancer, simply can't accommodate. It may become available later when Schmackbolzen finishes his OpenGL wrapper for Freelancer, right now however it's too early to say what kind of additional modifications would be required to provide this feature.
