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| My Police Comet |
Yesterday I asked about the way in which we all name our ships over on Tweetfleet and here on the blog. I got some amazing answers, formulas and strategies from everyone when it comes to naming conventions for their spaceships. Not surprising to me. I expected it, our ships are important to us. They are, after all, the extension of ourselves inside of Eve. They are our vessels in more ways than the obvious. So it is only natural that we all take ownership of them and want them to reflect even a small part of our own personality.
So the natural extension of all this is the following question, "Is there anything else that can be done to express that personality?" I already mentioned yesterday the idea of having names attached to saved fits so that the newly fitted ship holds onto the name it has been given. I also like the idea of ship names showing up on kill-mails, to preserve some individuality and personality long after our ship goes boom boom. Neither of those two things seem all that difficult to implement. But again, my knowledge of what it would take to do so is less than zero. But, if I've learned anything during the last eight years, it is this - if you don't ask, you won't get. So it's worth asking.
Ok, so how about ship names actually being printed on our ships? We have some reason to believe that Alliance Logos will eventually be appearing on our ships someday soon™. If that is possible, then would it also be possible to have the name we've given our ship also appear? Now I'm going to go right ahead here and assume that it is probably impossible to constantly update thousands of ship names that can be changed on a whim at any time. That seems like a good assumption. So what if we tie the saved fit name into a permanent feature? Once fitted the ship name can no longer be changed? As long as that ship is alive it is stuck with the name it was given? That would cut down the sheer amount of information being asked of the server, wouldn't it? Would it be enough to make the idea fall within the realm of possibility?
Would you be willing to trade the ability to re-name your ship at anytime for the ability to have said name displayed on the hull of that ship?
I honestly don't know if any of this is possible. I'm just asking the questions and pondering the possibilities. I'd be willing to trade extreme customization on ship names, which is a relatively useless feature, in order to have more permanent ship names emblazoned on my ships. But that's me. And I'm weird like that.
How about you?
Comments
I'd rather have longer names, the "Progenies of the Great Apocalypse" (Songtitle from Dimmu Borgir) or the "March of the Swordmaster" (Rhapsody of Fire) are still waiting to be named and undocked :) One can't even name a ship "Never Gonna Give You Up" without hitting the character limit
Though I will admit naming a ship "Under Pregnant Skies She Comes Alive Like Miss Leviathan" (Cradle of Filth) might be a bit excessive :D
Just a thought. And yes, longer names would be great!
It is possible to have a dynamic texture that is built from current ship name and the parameters given. It would even allow players to keep changing their ship names on the fly and have the new name appear on their ships. But CCP has to think of the worst case: A fleet of previously unknown ships arriving into the grid. That's a lot of textures the client would have to start generating on the fly, which would appear as a dip in FPS.
Pre-baking those textures on the image server would reduce that performance dip, and it is already used for corporation and alliance logos as well as character portraits. But in that case the client would have to retrieve a lot more data from the image server, and the names would appear on the ships at an unpredictable rate.
A lame solution would be to fetch that name texture only when targeting the ship, which would work fine for small-scale encounters, buy would reduce the wow factor of flying past an unknown ship.
There should certainly be a market for "Grr Goons","Fedo on board","If you can read this, you are webbed" or "We break for nobody" stickers that players could put on their ships :)
V