Skinning

[Tenshu]

The IMG shipline material file is 342kb.
That includes quite a few textures.
Someone who does texturing for the mod should be able to shed more light on the actual size of a ship's textures.

Mechanically:
Each different texture style would be a different ship.
Such different ships would reference different material files, where the textures inside are named the same as in the other material files.
This means only 1 CMP file is needed. (CMP files reference texture names. The game is told to pick that CMP and look for the appropriate textures within certain material (MAT) files.)

This would require some FLHook work as it would mean that your ship current ship is replaced with another.
Overall:
Minimal work required aside from the actual texture making, QA and FLHook mechanics. The last aspect could prove to be annoying depending on the sheer number of textures.

I would assume it would be done by a request based system like you would for SRP.
Perhaps even limited to established RP groups and official factions.
I can see it getting out of hand if it was open to all.

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