Painting Ships.

[Coam]

I didn't see this suggested, so apologies if it has been suggested already.

Occasionally, it comes up that one part is more useful than another for a certain use case - ie, the FL-T800 is a useful thing to have on a 1.25m spaceplane, but the style of the tank, with its black bars, doesn't really fit into the style of the 1.25m airplane parts.

I'm aware that if one really wants a craft painted a certain way, they can edit the textures of parts. This has the problem of editing the part for all ships using the part, however (unless you duplicate the part, but then you've two copies of the same part...)

With some kind of integrated painting system, one could repaint the FL-T800 white, making it fit in better with the overall design - perhaps with the ability to save the new paintscheme for future use, or simply have it cover the one craft. Beyond making rockets look more coherent, I'm sure someone out there just wants a space-station painted in all sorts of crazy colours, or to camouflage their fighter jets.

I can see some problems with it, both in that some parts may not fit being repainted very well, and in that it may detract from the overall style of the game (where rockets are clearly assembled of differing parts, rather than looking entirely consistent on the outside.), but I'm interested in what others think nonetheless.

If going for realism, perhaps paint could induce a slight weight penalty. (As with the Shuttle's white tanks.)

Edited February 13, 2015 by Coam

[Alshain]

It's been suggested before, but it is a good suggestion. The mod that does it hasn't been updated in a long time (and it's restrictive licensed) so people have been just wanting it stock.

Edited February 13, 2015 by Alshain

[SaturnV]

The problem is all stock models and textures are not designed to be paint. Not the space engineers style

[Alshain]

The problem is all stock models and textures are not designed to be paint. Not the space engineers style

You can do a pretty decent job with almost every fuselage and structural piece. Painted versions are less textured, but Wanderfound does a "wanderful" job at it. I never actually bothered myself, I'm just not that artistic.

Edited February 13, 2015 by Alshain

[Daze]

Or it would be nice to have some different textures in tweakable

Edited February 13, 2015 by Daze

[Alshain]

Or it would be nice to have some different textures in tweakable

That would be a bad idea. The painting mod just layers color on top. New textures mean more memory and there is already little of that as it is.

[Van Disaster]

Well the paint mod creates a new material, which is a bit less than ideal. B9's new wings have a rather cheaper implementation of surface colour - either way it needs a new shader, but the actual business of recolouring is not complicated. Actually painting on the texture map itself is another matter.

FSTextureSwitch module lets you swap any map you like already - go try it on a part and watch your memory usage bloom...