Stefan 008 Bond
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- Nov 14, 2007
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- Stefan 008 Bond
Primer found here
To me, the coloring and texturing professions are in need of serious overhaul. The whole process is completely out of reach for the average player in terms of both cost and time. The result is that the entire profession lines of tailoring, texturing and coloring are essentially dead weight. We have very little demand or mu% for any stackables in any of these professions. This in turn frustrates and drives away our artists and designers. As a result the TT digests a lot more exotic skins, textures, texture extractors, cans of paint, wools and hides than it should.
The Positive:
According to Entropedia, we have 34 colors of paint and 240 textures
34 x 240 = 8,160 possible combinations! In one field!
We already have an extremely wide assortment of options available to us, and some of the textures are truly beautiful.
Why then is the entire system completely inaccessible? It’s truly a shame. And it is one of the many things suppressing our economy.
The Main Problem:
Put lightly, the entire system in it’s current form is obtuse and cryptic:
In order to color a simple shirt orange, a player would have to research the forums and find out that you need 323 (cryptic amount) of paint cans in order to reach 100% application. Furthermore, you would need to research even deeper to find that in order to really get 100% success rate for sure, you actually need to color all 3 fields. In One Go. That is 323 x3 = 969 paint cans. You also need to find and locate someone with appropriate skills to do the job (this part is fine actually). Additionally, if you don’t like the result, you must bleach the entire product losing all fields.
I am not sure i need to extrapolate on the costs and sheer ridiculousness of what it would entail to make a shirt made of areanatrox skin. Anyone who has even looked into what it would take to color or texture a simple shirt a simple color or texture has probably had that “Are You Kidding Me?” moment. This needs to change. It is not helping the players, economy or MA.
Proposed Solutions:
The Mechanics:
Coloring and Texturing can be “Worked on Incrementally” -
Player’s should be able to slowly apply their chosen color or texture to any of the fields incrementally over time. All skills and results currently in place can still apply. For those who do not know, it is possible to apply any color/texture you want, regardless of skill, albeit with obvious poor results. This would matter a lot less if we could still apply more afterwards. In this way, skills are still valuable, but the average player can still start a “project” to color some pants brown etc. Looted 15 brown cans on that last run? Sweet! Apply them to those pants you have been working on maybe you will get some good % today.... These are powerful and rewarding results. Bonus for it creating a fast ped cycle as now player gets back 90% tt on coloring to cycle again instead of stacking it in storage for months.
Fields need to be able to reach 100% application independently of the other fields -
Yes you can work on just 1 field at a time, and later start working on another field. No more having to save up for the entire process on all fields at once.
Fields Need to be Independently Bleachable -
Going hand in hand with the new complete control process of each individual field, this one is a no brainer.
The Cost:
While adding the functionality above would help alot as far as accessibility, and ease the burden of saving for such monumental applications, it does not ease up the overall cost.
Short of a complete overhaul of the entire system which would take a lot of work for MA, I have a couple of out of box ideas that might actually work and be much easier to implement.
Do you know what happens if you place a midastree board into a refiner? It will “break down” that one board into 21 pieces of midastree veneer. This is contrary to how a refiner is normally used to refine a higher number into a lower number. But that refiner is a magical tool! It has the ability to break down into more pieces as well!
It is possible then that we could mitigate the insane costs of coloring/texturing in one of 2 ways:
Introducing another refining step after refining skins to hides:
Thus creating more skins for the same tt value. This way is a bit presumptuous, and would work much better for skins than textures using ores, but it’s possible, the way EU is coded, the blueprints could “auto adjust” to the new much lower tt recipes for textures. But again it’s only a thought to throw out on the table, it could work in some cases IF the game has the ability to auto adjust tt returns on lowered recipe costs. It’s probably not the best way, but worth mentioning
Option 2: Introducing a new refining step after textures are crafted
This option is a lot cleaner and straight-forward. Take your textures and refine them into more textures for the same tt value. The problem is there is still a lot of costs with clicking these texture bps, so the first option, although much stickier, has the potential to cut costs more.
Paint cans suffer a bit less from the extraordinary costs because cans aren’t subject to the “destructive” crafting process. Even still, it is worth mentioning, if needed, paint cans could also be run through the refiner to make more for same tt as mentioned above.
There might be some other creative solutions out there as well that would not take a mountain of dev time from MA, let’s hear them!
Expanding the Profession:
There are a number of areas where we can expand on what we can apply colors and textures to.
Using the concept of the makeup masks we have in game, we can create other masks too!
Weapon Skins and Armor plating Skins
These 2 jump right out to me. The idea of the skins/masks works well here because it’s not permanent, and you don’t lose the colors/textures on the mask when the weapon or plate (if L) breaks. Similarly, UL gear isn’t permanently changed for future owners. Players will have their own skins they have worked on or purchased that they like to use.
One interesting thing about this idea is that MA’s propensity to recycle game assets actually becomes an advantage here! Just about all the armor platings in game have the same exact default graphic and size.. Mindark would only to create one “Mask” or “Skin” that would work on all of them, One simple makeup mask to be applied and removed from armor platings would work on over 90% of the plates in game! Obviously there are a lot more weapon assets but similarly they are recycled so it wouldn’t be nearly as many masks to create as one would think.
Created in combination with the ideas outlined above, this would be yet another project for players to work on creating cool skins for their weapons and platings. More demand, better economy.
Expanding Even Further:
Let’s bring another woeful profession into the mix: Carpentry
Carpentry suffers because of both coloring/texturing issues and estate issues (low demand).
Again we are crimping our artists and alot of already made wonderful game assets go to waste.
I figured not to make a separate post concerning player housing. The reason being that aside from enjoyment factor, the big reason it is important is because it can drive an economy.
I do feel, MA should seriously consider offering players that finish a mission chain (insert ideas here) access to simple instanced housing. These can be very simple cube rooms or preferrably a 2 room setup (bedroom etc and main room) that can offer a chance to kick start these professions.
Additionally, it would be most beneficial if each planet had its own housing instance.
These instanced housing need not be able to be seen by any other players. Bonus points if your friends can come visit, but only when you are there via a temporary invite. I don’t believe this will negatively affect existing estates and functionalities. If you want to sweeten the pot for existing in game estates, we can explore some “social buff” ideas as far as meeting in game estates.
By giving all dedicated players access to something they can call home, it enhances the gameplay.
It also, most importantly has the potential to seriously impact these mentioned professions and kickstart a new area of economy.
Just some rapid fire additional ideas:
“Masks” for apartment walls and floors, again there are a lot of recycled assets, this is a good thing! I don’t believe there is even more than 50 difft apartment designs to consider. Savvy coding could even make these masks universal through efficient tiling. These should also be usable in the instanced housing.
MA could consider lowering the painting tax from 10% to a lower %, the increased activity will more than make up the difference.
Pets need clothing and gear, all should be customizable
Tattoos and additional jewelry also,
What if we applied the “mask” idea to all clothing? Then the base garments could somehow break (if L)and yet you do not lose the colors textures on the “mask”? Simply buy another plain shirt etc to apply the mask on.
Welp, that’s all I got on this topic for now! Feel free to rebuke, debunk, add, twist and pinch I am not a colorer or texturer so I'm sure some of the sesoned pros would have additional thoughts and comments! As always, the player's notes series is designed from the perspective of the average end-user, not from expertise!
Thanks for reading!
~008
To me, the coloring and texturing professions are in need of serious overhaul. The whole process is completely out of reach for the average player in terms of both cost and time. The result is that the entire profession lines of tailoring, texturing and coloring are essentially dead weight. We have very little demand or mu% for any stackables in any of these professions. This in turn frustrates and drives away our artists and designers. As a result the TT digests a lot more exotic skins, textures, texture extractors, cans of paint, wools and hides than it should.
The Positive:
According to Entropedia, we have 34 colors of paint and 240 textures
34 x 240 = 8,160 possible combinations! In one field!
We already have an extremely wide assortment of options available to us, and some of the textures are truly beautiful.
Why then is the entire system completely inaccessible? It’s truly a shame. And it is one of the many things suppressing our economy.
The Main Problem:
Put lightly, the entire system in it’s current form is obtuse and cryptic:
In order to color a simple shirt orange, a player would have to research the forums and find out that you need 323 (cryptic amount) of paint cans in order to reach 100% application. Furthermore, you would need to research even deeper to find that in order to really get 100% success rate for sure, you actually need to color all 3 fields. In One Go. That is 323 x3 = 969 paint cans. You also need to find and locate someone with appropriate skills to do the job (this part is fine actually). Additionally, if you don’t like the result, you must bleach the entire product losing all fields.
I am not sure i need to extrapolate on the costs and sheer ridiculousness of what it would entail to make a shirt made of areanatrox skin. Anyone who has even looked into what it would take to color or texture a simple shirt a simple color or texture has probably had that “Are You Kidding Me?” moment. This needs to change. It is not helping the players, economy or MA.
Proposed Solutions:
The Mechanics:
Coloring and Texturing can be “Worked on Incrementally” -
Player’s should be able to slowly apply their chosen color or texture to any of the fields incrementally over time. All skills and results currently in place can still apply. For those who do not know, it is possible to apply any color/texture you want, regardless of skill, albeit with obvious poor results. This would matter a lot less if we could still apply more afterwards. In this way, skills are still valuable, but the average player can still start a “project” to color some pants brown etc. Looted 15 brown cans on that last run? Sweet! Apply them to those pants you have been working on maybe you will get some good % today.... These are powerful and rewarding results. Bonus for it creating a fast ped cycle as now player gets back 90% tt on coloring to cycle again instead of stacking it in storage for months.
Fields need to be able to reach 100% application independently of the other fields -
Yes you can work on just 1 field at a time, and later start working on another field. No more having to save up for the entire process on all fields at once.
Fields Need to be Independently Bleachable -
Going hand in hand with the new complete control process of each individual field, this one is a no brainer.
The Cost:
While adding the functionality above would help alot as far as accessibility, and ease the burden of saving for such monumental applications, it does not ease up the overall cost.
Short of a complete overhaul of the entire system which would take a lot of work for MA, I have a couple of out of box ideas that might actually work and be much easier to implement.
Do you know what happens if you place a midastree board into a refiner? It will “break down” that one board into 21 pieces of midastree veneer. This is contrary to how a refiner is normally used to refine a higher number into a lower number. But that refiner is a magical tool! It has the ability to break down into more pieces as well!
It is possible then that we could mitigate the insane costs of coloring/texturing in one of 2 ways:
Introducing another refining step after refining skins to hides:
Thus creating more skins for the same tt value. This way is a bit presumptuous, and would work much better for skins than textures using ores, but it’s possible, the way EU is coded, the blueprints could “auto adjust” to the new much lower tt recipes for textures. But again it’s only a thought to throw out on the table, it could work in some cases IF the game has the ability to auto adjust tt returns on lowered recipe costs. It’s probably not the best way, but worth mentioning
Option 2: Introducing a new refining step after textures are crafted
This option is a lot cleaner and straight-forward. Take your textures and refine them into more textures for the same tt value. The problem is there is still a lot of costs with clicking these texture bps, so the first option, although much stickier, has the potential to cut costs more.
Paint cans suffer a bit less from the extraordinary costs because cans aren’t subject to the “destructive” crafting process. Even still, it is worth mentioning, if needed, paint cans could also be run through the refiner to make more for same tt as mentioned above.
There might be some other creative solutions out there as well that would not take a mountain of dev time from MA, let’s hear them!
Expanding the Profession:
There are a number of areas where we can expand on what we can apply colors and textures to.
Using the concept of the makeup masks we have in game, we can create other masks too!
Weapon Skins and Armor plating Skins
These 2 jump right out to me. The idea of the skins/masks works well here because it’s not permanent, and you don’t lose the colors/textures on the mask when the weapon or plate (if L) breaks. Similarly, UL gear isn’t permanently changed for future owners. Players will have their own skins they have worked on or purchased that they like to use.
One interesting thing about this idea is that MA’s propensity to recycle game assets actually becomes an advantage here! Just about all the armor platings in game have the same exact default graphic and size.. Mindark would only to create one “Mask” or “Skin” that would work on all of them, One simple makeup mask to be applied and removed from armor platings would work on over 90% of the plates in game! Obviously there are a lot more weapon assets but similarly they are recycled so it wouldn’t be nearly as many masks to create as one would think.
Created in combination with the ideas outlined above, this would be yet another project for players to work on creating cool skins for their weapons and platings. More demand, better economy.
Expanding Even Further:
Let’s bring another woeful profession into the mix: Carpentry
Carpentry suffers because of both coloring/texturing issues and estate issues (low demand).
Again we are crimping our artists and alot of already made wonderful game assets go to waste.
I figured not to make a separate post concerning player housing. The reason being that aside from enjoyment factor, the big reason it is important is because it can drive an economy.
I do feel, MA should seriously consider offering players that finish a mission chain (insert ideas here) access to simple instanced housing. These can be very simple cube rooms or preferrably a 2 room setup (bedroom etc and main room) that can offer a chance to kick start these professions.
Additionally, it would be most beneficial if each planet had its own housing instance.
These instanced housing need not be able to be seen by any other players. Bonus points if your friends can come visit, but only when you are there via a temporary invite. I don’t believe this will negatively affect existing estates and functionalities. If you want to sweeten the pot for existing in game estates, we can explore some “social buff” ideas as far as meeting in game estates.
By giving all dedicated players access to something they can call home, it enhances the gameplay.
It also, most importantly has the potential to seriously impact these mentioned professions and kickstart a new area of economy.
Just some rapid fire additional ideas:
“Masks” for apartment walls and floors, again there are a lot of recycled assets, this is a good thing! I don’t believe there is even more than 50 difft apartment designs to consider. Savvy coding could even make these masks universal through efficient tiling. These should also be usable in the instanced housing.
MA could consider lowering the painting tax from 10% to a lower %, the increased activity will more than make up the difference.
Pets need clothing and gear, all should be customizable
Tattoos and additional jewelry also,
What if we applied the “mask” idea to all clothing? Then the base garments could somehow break (if L)and yet you do not lose the colors textures on the “mask”? Simply buy another plain shirt etc to apply the mask on.
Welp, that’s all I got on this topic for now! Feel free to rebuke, debunk, add, twist and pinch I am not a colorer or texturer so I'm sure some of the sesoned pros would have additional thoughts and comments! As always, the player's notes series is designed from the perspective of the average end-user, not from expertise!
Thanks for reading!
~008