Alternate textures for individual ships (Not texture packs)

[Space Shaman]

Let's say that you want a smooth shell of advanced armor covering your ship. Problem is, advanced armor has a beveled look to it making your ship look like a tiled floor. Alright, you install a texture pack that fixes this.
Wait, there's a problem. You have a ship that incorporated the tiled look into it's design! Now it's all wrong!

How could this be solved?
You could use standard armor but now your hull is weaker.
Schine could add different looking advanced armor, but they already have a version for each color.
The solution is alternate textures. Now how would that work?

You would be able to choose which blocks would use which textures in build mode.​

For example, you could make all yellow crystal blocks look like shining honeycomb.
If you want your computers to look like grey standard armor, you could do so! And you could accomplish this without changing how other ships look on your screen like a texture pack would.

Other examples:​

Smooth advanced armor? You got it. Girders to marble pillars? Boom! it's there. You want your thrusters to still look nice when you aren't moving? Make them a solid glow color or even as black as the great void!

REMEMBER!
This affects ALL blocks on a ship of ONE block type.
This means you can have brown armor that looks like hardened fungus and then have grey armor that looks like cement!


Addendum
Q: How do you keep people from hiding their systems by making them blend with the walls?

Well if that's a problem there's this idea:

A,1: An astronaut tool called a scanner that when used would highlight visible blocks that meet the search criteria.​

A,2: Alternatively instead of highlighting blocks, it would emit a hum that "increases" somehow determined by proximity and number much like a geiger counter. For the gyger method, the position to use when checking the scanner's proximity to systems should be offset from the player a couple blocks in the direction they're looking.
Include a light on the scanner device that increases in brightness just like the hum for accessibility.​

Addendum 10/16/2016
Q: So sets of blocks like all the advanced armor colors, or all lights would use the same set of textures?

A: Not necessarily. They should be capable of having a different looking texture for each shade of each kind of armor. But also be able to change all of a set at once. Perhaps have a checkbox that toggles whether block ids that have been changed individually get changed.​

 

[Heillos]

This strikes me as a very heavily exploitable system, since PvP players could easily hide computers and key blocks on their ships by giving them inconspicuous textures.

The general intent of the idea has some merit, although implementing it well could prove difficult.

 

[Space Shaman]

I suppose I didn't mention that you shouldn't be able to swap any texture to any other texture. Just ones that convey a similar idea. For example some sides of race gates make a very nice floor. Immagine computer systems that look to be made by a different race or company than usual.

This strikes me as a very heavily exploitable system, since PvP players could easily hide computers and key blocks on their ships by giving them inconspicuous textures.

A good way to negate that could be a "scanner" astronaut tool. It would highlight "main" systems (referring to functional blocks with ui).
Perhaps even have search filtering.
[doublepost=1476597642,1476597301][/doublepost]

This strikes me as a very heavily exploitable system, since PvP players could easily hide computers and key blocks on their ships by giving them inconspicuous textures.

The general intent of the idea has some merit, although implementing it well could prove difficult.

Keep in mind that you can still just put the computers behind the walls

 

[Jake_Lancia]

I would suggest giving each block a fairly large preset set of different textures you can choose from in advanced build mode. That way, the problems with 'inconspicuous' computers and such can be largely avoided while allowing for the 'smooth' advanced armour look you suggested, among other things. It could even factor in to the NPC system to give the different randomgen factions' ships different looking hulls and computers from everyone else. One faction might have very alien computers while another would use retro-styled computers, for example. Yes, it would use a lot of space in the texture sheet/s, but it would allow for much more diversity without actually adding more blocks.

 

[Shadow2Lead]

This would be great, however i assume it isn't possible because we have separate blocks and block ids for each color of hull.

 

[Malacodor]

The game somehow has to keep track of the textures used by each block. Where should this information be stored?

 

[nightrune]

The game somehow has to keep track of the textures used by each block. Where should this information be stored?

The game already has a lookup table for each block. It's not a far stretch to retile in game.