Read by Council Ship Primary & Secondary Colours

[Achriel]

I was thinking of AI factions and the like and had the idea that colours are a big part of determining who a ship belongs to. To that end I thought maybe we could use a 'place holder' block for the colours that are then applied during assembly or spawn. This should explain the idea in steps:

• During design all blocks are normal but 1 type/colour is selected a default primary and another a default secondary colour. Build as per usual (maybe these blocks are a drop down selection in the Core)
• When the ship is constructed in a shipyard (or spawned as a MOB) the default primary and secondary can be replaced with another colour of the same hull type.
• Factions can select default primary & secondary colours (setting for AI factions)

Substitution would be limited to Colour/Type combinations and affect all of those blocks on the vessel (as saved in the blueprint). This means slabs, tetra, corners.. the works.

The perk is you can have a rainbow of appearances without having to actually make another blueprint/schematic and it's particularly useful in AI Factions when they might well be using the same ship in many different factions.

Since this would only be a minor addition of stored data in the ship design (and could be ignored by simply being left blank) it shouldn't be a game breaker. Kinda like a ship wide search & replace on spawn/creation of a new vessel (MOB, admin or shipyard).

One could even have belonging to a faction makes your primary & secondary colours pre-selected and not changeable.

 

[dwwojcik]

This is a pretty genius idea. It reminds me of the company colors in OpenTTD- the game sprites are drawn with a specific marker color that the game replaces with your chosen company color on the fly.

 

[Achriel]

Thought I run this up the flagpole one last time, as a ship designer I know I could use this so much more than another color.

Adding in a faction primary & secondary color shouldn't be too hard, though I can see there being a lot of overlap as there are only so many combinations. Perhaps the option for 'accent' color as well? Should these be unique for each faction or only unique within a range of HomeBase location?