Custom Skin/Paint System

[SpikedHelmet]

After giving it some thought I decided to go ahead with a long-wanted idea to have customizable paint scheme system. This system requires essentially building a template, a neutral grey base texture, applying highlights and layered details in such a way that allows quickly swapping out the base colors for any prefab scheme.

Here are some examples. The texture is still WIP and unfinished but gives an idea of what's possible.

The base texture:



I can easily apply a full single-colour scheme such as House Kurita red:



Or Liao green:



These full colour changes take only seconds to apply. More complicated would be common multi-colour designs like Steiner's assymetrical Blue and White, which would take a bit longer but perfectly possible:



And for people who don't like brightly coloured robots running around, we can also very easily do more militaristic schemes:




(This one looks really baller)

Or a combination even:



These are all done via Photoshop, not ingame or anything. What I can do is provide a variety of relatively easy-to-make schemes (after making the base texture) as prefabs. All that's needed is some ingame function/UI for players to choose which scheme they want.

[FLOZi]

Missed my favourite:

[smoth]

If you can get projection maps to wrap to model normals my shader work is ideal for this.

[gajop]

Custom paint jobs are cool, but for a single player campaign it would be great if you could customize mech loadout like you could in other MC/MW games.
Even if the mechs looked the same it would still be win in my opinion :p

[SpikedHelmet]

The textures are 3-layer, with details layer -> colour layer -> base texture. The colour layer uses the Overlay blending option in Photoshop so it keeps highlights and details of the base greytone texture. In other word, I have no idea Smoth.

@Gajop that's beyond my capability. Would need some extensive scripting crap. Also hard to do while ingame. Ultimately it'd be cool to have something like the Wargame series - you build your "decks" of Mechs in frontend menus and then bring them into games. But LOL Spring.

[FLOZi]

[gajop]

@FLOZi: Looks even better in-game!

@Gajop that's beyond my capability. Would need some extensive scripting crap. Also hard to do while ingame. Ultimately it'd be cool to have something like the Wargame series - you build your "decks" of Mechs in frontend menus and then bring them into games. But LOL Spring.

The first part may involve a bit of scripting but is far from impossible.
The deck lobby (frontend menu) thing is rather easily doable, but I would still much rather see the mech loadouts happen. It's so much fun collecting mechs and parts and assembling them together.

How's your schedule looking out? When do you reckon you'll start making the singleplayer campaign side of the game? (I'd like to help out but other priorities right now)

[SpikedHelmet]

My dream is as always to have a game similar to MW2:Mercs' RPG aspects and quasi-RTS, quasi-isometric shooter gameplay. You have your Merc unit management, hiring pilots, taking contract, buying better gear and/or salvaging, with isometric shooter style where your Mech aims at mouse cursor and moves with WASD. But then you can toggle RTS Command mode and give orders to your units.

That, and an actual Mechwarrior MOBA.

Both are far beyond my scripting and/or motivational capabilities. Unless I want to sit down and learn Unity hardcore over a couple years.

[smoth]

The textures are 3-layer, with details layer -> colour layer -> base texture. The colour layer uses the Overlay blending option in Photoshop so it keeps highlights and details of the base greytone texture. In other word, I have no idea Smoth.

Currently I do projection on the model. maybe if I overlay the texture on the actual texture. Just the problem is that it will not scale so if you want to have a lot of reuse there will be issues

[gajop]

My dream is as always to have a game similar to MW2:Mercs' RPG aspects and quasi-RTS, quasi-isometric shooter gameplay. You have your Merc unit management, hiring pilots, taking contract, buying better gear and/or salvaging, with isometric shooter style where your Mech aims at mouse cursor and moves with WASD. But then you can toggle RTS Command mode and give orders to your units.

That, and an actual Mechwarrior MOBA.

Both are far beyond my scripting and/or motivational capabilities. Unless I want to sit down and learn Unity hardcore over a couple years.

This is all possible with Spring, no need to become a Unity heretic. The first part is mostly GUI work, and the WASD movement/mouse shooting is something we already mostly solved with Ludum Dare games.
I'd be totally willing to help your dream come true (never played MW2, but I much preferred the MW4 Vengeance story to the MW4 Mercenaries style missions, but that's minor)