John Crewe · Vehicle Director

It's still planned. We still want to let players paint their ships in game. There will be physical locations in the universe where you have to fly to and get your ships or vehicles painted. We do want to let players pick their colors. But we're still working out how far we go. We still want there to be some exclusivity and benefits to having these pre-made paints. We don't really want to lock off specific colors. That gets very messy very quickly. But maybe specific finishes or stencil patterns that are exclusive to paints that you get rather than create yourself.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

OK, so the idea itself is not dead.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

It's absolutely something we still want to be able to support and give players the freedom to make their ships more their ships. I think at the moment we do produce a fair number of tints each year, in each quarter. The system is still very much in its infancy as to where we'd like it to be, or personally where I'd like it to be. There's still a lot we can do to just add more variation. We're making an entire universe. So not all ships should be grey and black. I mean, I'm a big fan of black. I love black, but I'll get in trouble for making every tint black. So, like I say, we don't want to be like, oh, we've made a blue and gold tint, let's reserve that so that only people that have bought it can make blue and gold tints. There's got to be more to it than that. We just haven't invested the time into producing that system that's going to be really accessible for the players to be able to do what they need to do. But it's not off the cards. We were quizzing Chris about it this week. I was on holiday last week and saw it blew up on Reddit and I'm like, oh my God, what is this video? Oh, okay.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Like Ben says, it's something we definitely want to do. And the tools we have internally aren't really where we want them to be. They're not quite giving us what we want. So the last thing we want to do is work on an in-game player-facing version of a tool we're not happy with and just let people suffer that and then have to change it all down the line. We want to be happy with what we've got first and then we'll work on the player-facing side of it. So the flow will be, like I said, you'll go to somewhere like Cousin Crow's and you'll go to a terminal and you'll purchase your respray job for however many UEC, and then whether it will be hex codes or RGB values or sliders or picking swatches, we don't know yet, but you'll be doing that and going primary this, secondary that, tertiary that.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

One of the things is you can look at a lot of other competitive games that allow this sort of customization to their vehicles. The thing that I struggle to get my head around sometimes is just the sheer scale of what we're doing. And by that, I mean, it's very easy to develop a system that works on much smaller ships. But then when you've got ships that range from tens of meters up to kilometers, you need a system that's going to be flexible enough, or we need to make rules and put rules in place that, okay, these smaller ships will allow a certain level of customization versus these massive great big ones that might not.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Another good point related to that as well is not all the ships are set up to take paints at the moment, so we want to make sure that all ships are equal in terms of painting, because the last thing you want is, I've got an Argo MPUV and I've flown all this way to a paint shop to find out I can't paint my ship. Or if I paint my ship, what I picked as red here is sort of a weird pinky color because there was something wrong with the base material. We need to make sure all the ships can do it all at the same time and it all applies equally, because as we've been doing these paints and tints for various events, we found, this looks really cool on these three ships, but the fourth one, for some reason, looks terrible. And then we've had to go back in and reassign materials and do lots of fun things just to get it to behave how we want. So we need that in place across the board for them all before we can even consider the player side of it.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

I didn't see the name, but someone just put something in the chat about de-orangifying the interior of their RAFT. And that's something that, again, we need to spend time investigating. From my point of view, I would absolutely love to be able to have control over the interior of my ship and make it all dark greys and moody. But it's something we're not able to do right now. I don't know, John, you need to get some magic tech people to sprinkle the magic dust on interior CGAs and brushes and everything else.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

That's another thing we want to do, customizing interiors. We tried it in a very obtuse way with the 300 series, letting you customize the interior when, in fact, you're actually just customizing the dashboard and it changes trims in the back because they're part of the dashboard. So we can do it. It's not a great way to do it. And it absolutely doesn't scale across larger ships.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

And we've tried it internally using our tint system within our editor, but all it does is it just gives us another version of everything, the entire ship, and it's not able to do that in the client and in game. So we can prototype this stuff, but we don't have an ability to actually put that in the live product, which is a shame because I think it was the Starlifter we were playing with, and we started making the different variants and it was like, oh, this looks really cool in dark grey on the inside. But everything we need for the ship gets doubled. And that does not scale when we're trying to do hundreds and thousands of ships. It's just never going to happen, unfortunately.