To begin my article, I’ll start with a story. Over a year ago, I used to be a Director of a nullsec PvP corp named War Trident which was part of the Trifectas Syndicate Alliance. Two of our Members, Anton and Kerry, a married Australian couple, used to attend our PvP fleets. For ISK-making they would mine in our ‘home’ system and manufacture those materials into ammunition and ships for us to explode while patrolling out in the Oasa drone regions.
They played the game as a couple having come from other MMOs. But at some point Kerry’s interest in Eve began to wane and was logging on less frequently. When I asked her why this was the response was simple:
‘In other MMOs where I have a character, I feel more invested in them, I can make them look the way I want them to look, they represent a part of me, my style. I just don’t feel connected to a ship in space that’s the same as every other ship in space.’
This was an interesting point; a ship is indeed something to which it is difficult to find an ’emotional’ attachment. While from one perspective it does have character it has no individuality other than its name. Sure, there is the ISK value of that ship that makes you feel the loss when it explodes, but it’s not really a representation of your identity in the game. Of course this would naturally be an argument to re-implement Walking In Stations so we can interact and use our in-game avatars in a more meaningful way, but we all know how that went when it was originally introduced. There might be hope for that in the future in the form of Project Legion, but that’s a speculative article all on its own.
So I digress. There has definitely been an undercurrent of support in Eve for being able to create your own identity. Many of our identities in Eve are defined at the moment not by the ships we fly, as they are just tools for achieving a goal, but the Alliances and Corporations with whom we affiliate. This is the core of Eve’s community-building appeal.
Back at Fanfest in 2013 this image was shown during one of the Keynote presentations.
Most people looked at the unusual structures and wondered what they may be. But the Eagle Eyed among us noticed something about the ships in the foreground – the logos on them were not the traditional faction logos, but appeared to be Corp logos.
Speculation back then was rife about what this could mean, are we going to be able to put Corp and Alliance logos on ships? Clearly if CCP were publishing pictures of this it was something being considered, or was it?
The answer back then in the CSM minutes (or so I believe, and I’m paraphrasing) was ‘It’s impossible at the moment due to the way Eve currently works with Ships, Corp and Alliance Logos.’
However, FanFest 2014 came and we were treated to a Tech Demo on fully customisable ship painting. The video is below.
This quite understandably caused a hubbub; clearly ship painting was a very real possibility. However, this was just a tech demo of which nothing ever came to fruition. (Anyone remember the Revenant flying through the asteroid belt tech demo?) So most of us were resigned to the fact that it probably will never happen.
2014 did however introduce the ship painting programme which was released in March of 2014 (the Dev blog is here ) which introduced customisable ship skins that were purchasable from the Noble Exchange which was revamped later as the ‘New Eden Store’.
This clearly was the first step towards ship customisation which allowed pilots to purchase 1 or 5 run blueprint copies to skin a ship with one of the available ship skins.
It was a system that was hobbled by Eve’s limitations in handling ship models. Each ship model has to be stored and maintained in its own entry in a database, which then required its own entry in game market. Having potentially thousands of ship models (which were all basically the same) and their entries on the market would result in a gigantic increase in requirements for player computers, the CCP servers, and CCP’s time in implementing as every single ship model would have to be written into the game database, stored on local hard drives and loaded into memory when required. Considering the eve client is already around 12GB, this method was hugely restrictive and would result in a huge bloated database of ships that really served no purpose other than to slow down Eve as a whole.
The second main criticism was from the playerbase. Players of Eve are often quite happy to lose ships in a fight with its ISK value attached to it, but as soon as you start adding a real world monetary value to what in essence a bit of pixel ‘bling’ then players start to think twice about it. Despite the fact that many news outlets are happy to tout the actual real world money loss of ships in terms of its value in PLEX, it all still boils down to the fact that asseets lost are valued in game ISK and not real world currency, unless you choose to sell your PLEX gained with your own money.
The short of it – the original Ship Painting Pilot Programme, wasn’t as successful as hoped both in the way it is currently being used in-game and in its acceptance and acquisition of the ships and blueprints by the player base. Indeed, I was also a critic of the programme. I refused to buy any of the ship skins because quite simply I couldn’t stomach the fact I was going to lose actual real life money in a game for which I was already paying three subscriptions. I just didn’t see the point and I didn’t understand the angle at which CCP was aiming. When the original Dev Post went up my comment on the thread was ‘NO MICRO TRANSACTIONS’.
Fast forward a few months and some interesting Dev Blogs come out about the behind the scenes work that CCP has been doing to the Eve client.
First off CCP Mankiller posted a dev blog concerning changes being made to the mechanisms by which the Eve client stores and renders objects in space. Ships used to be stored in the eve client as a single .red file. An example from the blog:-
- Moros: model/ship/gallente/dreadnought/GDn1/GDn1_T1.red
- Incursus: model/ship/gallente/Frigate/GF4/GF4_T1.red
- Scorpion: model/ship/caldari/BattleShip/CB2/CB2_T1.red
- Rattlesnake: model/ship/caldari/BattleShip/CB2/Guristas/CB2_T1_Guristas.red
Each ship in eve, including any skins it had, were stored in this way. When you want to add in variants of ships you basically create lots and lots of .red files for each ship. CCP Mankiller and his teams solution to this was to break down each ship into its hull model, faction and finally race. For example:
- Moros: gdn1_t1:gallentebase:gallente
- Incursus: gf4_t1:gallentebase:gallente
- Scorpion: cb2_t1:caldaribase:caldari
- Rattlesnake: cb2_t1:guristas:caldari
So what does this actually mean? The first is that you can break down and model each ship and then mix and match the files as required. Now this makes complete sense when you need to add additional variants because its literally the skin you add and not the entire actual ship again and again. This had a huge knock-on effect in terms of the performance of the Eve Client. You will still need a file for every skin, so what difference does this actually make? Well, none really, but there is more to come.
The second piece of the puzzle came in the form of a dev post from CCP Snorlax in the form of the Download on Demand Client (you can read the Dev Blog here). On its own, it doesn’t seem that significant. But when you consider this basically solves the problem of needing to have gargantuan databases on a player’s computer of many thousands of ships and their skins it becomes one of those changes that enables far, far greater expansion and extension of the Eve universe – a groundbreaking change in humble clothing. The skins get downloaded as and when they are needed with no requirement to keep them permanently on a local client. If you never come across a certain type of ship, you never have it downloaded onto your PC. Only CCP will be required to hold all the files.
But each ship still needs a place on the market right? The Download on Demand client has solved the massive database problems and file bloat, but while it is still required to make ship skins using a blueprint and an original ship, you’re still going to need an entry in the database as the ship is still its own unique object as far as the back end database is concerned.
So what was the third and final piece of the puzzle?
On last nights o7 show was the revelation of a conceptual Ship Skinning System aka Super Kerr Induced Nano Coating, which conveniently shortens down to SKIN Coating. The concept can be seen in the image above. The key point of this revelation is that it appears the whole ship skinning system is moving away from the skin-as-a-BPC idea and over to soul-bound skins. In essence, you get into a ship of choice and you can then select a pre-bought skin from a list and it is immediately applied to your active ship. When you get out of that ship (even if its destroyed) it returns back to its base model.
The two main barriers in creating infinite ship skins may now have potentially been hurdled. As the ship will always return back to its base model, there is no longer any requirement to create its own entry on the Eve database, nor any additional entries on the in-game market, which makes the logistics of adding skins to the game a much simpler task. It also means, once you buy a skin, you will never lose it, which addresses one of the biggest criticisms about the existing ship skin programme; you will no longer be losing actual currency playing Eve. You will only ever be losing ISK when a skinned ship is destroyed.
The door has quite literally been thrown open on the rampant creation of as many skins as CCP, or (more importantly) we the players desire. Could this mean that creating custom skins for your Alliance or Corp could just be round the corner? It could very well be. I would be very surprised if this isn’t the foundation CCP has been laying. I could be totally wrong, but the old phrase of ‘It’s impossible at the moment due to the way Eve currently works with Ships, Corp and Alliance Logos’ is definitely no longer the case.
In addition to this, it could be a huge money spinner to CCP. Imagine for a moment, if every player group in eve wanted to create a skin for their Corp or Alliance, how many potential people that could be? And what if they applied that skin to maybe 5 of their doctrine ships at $5 each? It could represent an significant income stream. Because at the end of the day, if you had the chance to fly in a fleet of your corp/alliance mates all showing the colours of your group when Eve’s player corp identity is so important to you, wouldn’t you?
But then again you might just want to fly about in a fleet of flesh pink Deimoses. I know a particular someone from the Declarations of War Podcast who certainly does.
