Custom paint tags

[gemini]

Well, in Theory there is a decently blank spot of a generally similar size for each size class of ship.

As for having decals on House ships, I was thinking similar to the way USAF planes get the logo of their squadron emblazoned on the tail.

Civvy/Generic ships could have two logo slots, for a faction logo and for a generic flight group logo, and House ones could come with just a flight group logo.

If you wanted to get uber-fancy, civvy/border worlds/any other generic ships could have entire ship specific new paint jobs in addition to their logo slots.

Another option is to make faction-specific variants of certain ships with slightly edited stats to reflect their faction affiliation (IE say the Unioners increase the power to their Unioner-Hawk-Refit but that subtracts some armor) an edited paint job and pre-set logo and a single slot for a flight group emblem like house ships.

Then the generic ones would still have their two availible slots.

Realistically speaking, a simple logo isnt hard. A 2D plane mesh with a transparency enabled logo on it, hardpointed 1 millionth of a mm above a flat spot on the hull. Bingo.
You have generic sizes, say 3 or 4, and a few dozen logos, so about 100-something simple models, a few dozen textures.... The most tedious part would be hardpoint equipping. hours and hours and hours of alignment and re-alignment.

My guess is that it would never happen unless someone experienced and capable (in hardpointing) volunteers to join the team and do it for the next version after 4.85.

Theres certainly enough graphical talent and team/faction logo projects to draw on for the actual artwork, and to model the objects themselves simply requires the modeler to work out a general set of size brackets and constantly make, orient, hardpoint equip, and texture a bunch of flat planes.

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Saga of the Gemini; http://discoverygc.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=24486