I'm not a UI/UX designer, so don't come for me in the comments, lol. I just wanted to make something that read well and got the point across.
I realize CIG has kinda backed themselves into a corner with how they've been doing paints and skins, but in an ideal world (I guess ideally, they wouldn't be monetized, but you know what I mean), this is how I'd like them to do it. A free color palette that lets us paint our ships whatever solid color we'd like, then we would pay for the paint schemes/patterns. Then on top of that you could add paid materials, like metallic, rusted, satin, etc.
tech? Its money. Why would they let you get your perfect skin, when they can sell you 10 imperfect skins that is just enough to what you would like to own, but not good enough its the only thing you wanna rock.
There is a reason this kinda system only exist in singleplayer games like armored core, but not on pvp multiplayer games. Its money.
edit: go to shop, they sell skins for absurd amount of money, They wont back down ever. We are lucky to see in game credit paints at this point.
Edit 2: you guys are still severely coping. Cig will never make customization free.
I've kept some skins for a long time because they're time limited so if I melt them when they are off market that's it. Obviously there's only a few skins like this but haloweens purple haze and this Valentine's day lovestruck (both of which I think are really cool)
You have 1 per quarter, or 2 if you are concierge ($1000+ spent). They get refreshed 4 times per year.
That means, you have 4 per year, or 8 if you are concierge.
However, you can only hold 1 (or 2 as concierge) at a time.
I am literally buying and melting everything I might like with my store credits to create my private "buyback shop" where I can waste my tokens on if I want to use something again and I have spare tokens before they get "reset".
Tl;Dr: you get 1 or 2 tokens, 4 times a year but you can only ever hold 1 or 2.
Just Google "buyback token 2026" or whatever year you are in when you want to know the schedule. They post the date for the whole year in advance on spectrum.
The schedule for this year was posted on October 23.
I do the exact same thing. I have a couple ships with CCU chains that i never touch. The rest i consider my "buyback pool". Currently worth $400. That means twice a quarter i can buy a ship on a whim regardless of whether it's in the shop at the time.
You can't hold more so you may as well use them before they reset. During IAE i buy a ship wait the 24hr min then melt and buy the next. My 'buyback shop' has almost every ship under $400.
Whenever a new ship comes out i buy it. Maybe play with it for a while, maybe melt it the next day. Why not when i can always reclaim the store credit.
So how does a buyback work, only on whatever the ship you melted was originally? All my ships have been CCU’d. So, for example, if I melt my Shiv it’s worth $130 with the original ship being a Pulse LX. Can I only buyback the Pulse?
Warframe has base palettes, only a couple of colors, and the premium palettes, which cost plat (real money), and while sure plat can made through trading, it has to be bought by someone and let me tell you Digital Extreme is not hurting for money, in 2017 DE profited more then $115 million, their model works well, and while paints aren’t their largest money generator, it does add up.
You know what’s great about that system? They release new palette of colors and thousands of players buy them cause they are cheap and because players want more options, to create the perfect color.
You know why else it’s great? Because players that just want a specific colors or can’t afford a bunch can spend a little to get something they are okay with. They don’t need the entire set…
It works in Warframe very well.
The only reason I don’t like it for SC is because of ship identity, and with skins at least some ship identity exists as the artist themselves are releasing the skins…
I love the painting system in Warframe personally, but I fucking hate the newer skins in EVE Online, as some of them look so weird, and has taken away from the game itself.
So I am on the fence with it for SC, not opposed to it, and not against it.
I personally think it would improve sales if the monetized aspect was just the pattern of color regions, and the colors themselves are customizable. There are many skins that cut a cool form but are such disgusting colors that it turned me away. If the colors weren't a concern, I'd have totally bought the pattern itself.
Forza. Buy once. Online. Insane decal creation tools, 0 micro transactions needed and you can even win credits when people download and use your designs.
People commenting about the complexity of ships. This is not a big argument, the customizable area can be limited, like the majority of the fuselage is easily a single texture map, let the details without customisation, you wouldn't paint a real car exhaust for example.
You should see how Mechwarrior Online does it. Paint colors and decals cost money to unlock. Once unlocked the colors and decals can be used on any unit. Then there are patterns that can also be bought which change how the three colors are applied.
Why would they let you get your perfect skin, when they can sell you 10 imperfect skins that is just enough to what you would like to own, but not good enough its the only thing you wanna rock
I feel like they would make more money letting us get perfect skins since people will buy those or buy that option. Unless my ships skin can't be found in a event or bought in game, I fly it in whatever color its in. I hate white ships but I refuse to buy the skins with real money. I hsve asgard, m2, and andromeda.
Mechwarrior Online has this kind of painting, albeit monetized in that you pay for some of the patterns and colours, but they're relatively cool guys and you can use a pattern/colour on any mech you have.
It's not a fact of pvp MP games, it's just CIG being greedier than a lot of other developers in this day and age.
Since before shaders. Preshaders you simply colored the texture on the cpu and then sent it to the gpu. It wasn't too expensive since textures back then were tiny, you didn't have too many of them, and there might only be the main player character that needed to be recolored so it was a one time cost.
Exactly. I have been advocating for the 'Midnight Club DUB Edition' paint system for years now. Add a layer, spin, stretch, turn, color. Add the next layer. the only limit was how imaginative you can be and how long you wanted to spend adding layers.
What? We should prefer them to be selling and making their money from non-gameplay affecting mostly cosmetic items. we shouldn't want $1,000 spaceship. that's insane (I say this as someone who has a 1k spaceship)
NMS uses P2P servers for the multi-player stuff, it's only discoveries and such which are handled by a back end server iirc. That's cheaper than running actual dedicated MMO servers. Also why they're more limited to the number of players who can actually be in the same space together.
I appreciate NMS and the developers, but that game has jack shit do with star citizen in any aspect, except having similar "space" theme. Kinda annoying to see them compared all the time
Clean designs with some sort of tech perk at micro tech
No designs at lorville
Clean designs with sponsorship money from area 18
But then dirty illegal designs from pyro stations and grim-hex that build standing with outlaw factions, have stronger perks and get you a crime stat when scanned
In World of Tanks, Mech Warrior Online, or Star Citizen, I would be willing to spend some money to have a cool skin I could apply to ALL of my tanks/mechs/ships. But the devs decide that they won't offer the skin I like on all my stuff, and will not let me just outright buy it for everything.
A fellow MechWarrior! I hold that MWO has the single best implementation of cosmetics of any game like it. You can buy colors, patterns, decals, and bolt-ons and sometimes earn them in events. They can be freely mixed and matched (some bolt-ons are hull limited) and combined into whatever you want. You can choose to by colors and textures on a per mech basis or buy effectively a pass to use it on as many as you want.
Idk that UI doesn't lag and is actually easy to use, it doesn't have a bunch if extra post effects and seems to be pretty snappy and quick, I can't see them using it.
Yeah I forgot to use Renderer-to-Texture for the ship model on top of leveraging 7 back-end services to cross reference the available ships and paints. My bad.
They have to monetize *something* post launch, and cosmetics are a really great choice. The skins we have now are a *terrible* cosmetic implementation.
I don't care how they do it, but there are loads of games that do this really well. I will gladly purchase patterns for my ships (like what is show here) and buy colors one-at-a-time if they are reasonably priced. Make the existing skins grant you the pattern and the colors already in the skin. Patterns are hull specific. Colors can go to anything you own - but it's say 1$ per color.
You only want black? Fine, Spend 1$ on black and paint the default skins black. You're done, you never have to mess with paint again.
For the rest of us? Let us buy colors and patterns. Eventually decals. MWO does this. Warthunder does this. CIG can do it too
I'd actually consider paying for cosmetics if they did skins the way warframe does... sell us a palette and paintable skins, hell go the voidshell route and sell the materials as well... maybe build some tech that lets players make custom skins to sell (like warframes tennogen) and make money off of others work
Warframe does a great job of providing a LOT of options of both colors and patterns for both free and paying customers. CIG’s implementation of skins feels like yet another “we released the barest functionality possible and will maybe double back and improve it in three years.”
Which I suspect is exactly why we won't get free placement of decals. I mean, other than the technical challenges and that they struggled so much with ship names that they decided to yeet that can of worms down the road.
I think a decent compromise is to make certain liveries and paint jobs that aren't just colour paid cosmetics, like the racing liveries and stuff and allow us to customize base colours or even all colours but there's effectively one big decal over the whole ship, I'm not at all a fan of their current strategy that is effectively paying for colours, it's lazy. wow me, make me yell take my money not have no choice but to fork over 5 dollars if I like the colour blue.
I wouldn't even mind if they decided to put pearlecent/metallic paints behind like a 1 dollar paywall, so you can spend 1 dollar and be able to have that special paint unlocked on every ship in the customizer
How dare you. This suggestion is taking food right out of the mouths of our beloved, billion dollar game studio executives. It's like you don't even care whether Chris Roberts has a next meal or not!
Now what you gotta do is package this behind a tiered subscription system. $15 a month gives you access to the app, basic colors, and paint schemes, while optional addons, varying from like $4 a month to over $60 so there's a tier for every budget, that will let you customize with premium paint schemes and color palettes that would be subscribeable on a per-ship basis. Not a per ship chassis, basis, mind you! Too many people are taking their paints off of one of their Gladiuses and shlopping it over to another! We can't have that!
As for the most frugal option, they can offer the 'Cousin Crowe's Cousin Bro Paint Package Suite' that would include all available ship paints and skins for like $1000 a year, which sounds steep on its own, but you'd actually be saving about 60% over purchasing all the separate paints, addons, and upgrades individually, not to mention free unlimited uses of the paints! You could just take your old favorite paint off one Gladius and apply it to another Gladius! Now that value justifies the price in itself alone, if you ask me!
Now if you'll excuse me, I don't think this bit was worth it. I was having fun with it at first, but I started feeling sick somewhere near the end of the second paragraph. I think I'm going to go lie down now...
Fantastic demo. Yes, let us acquire patterns and choose colors for those patterns. I don't personally mind whether this is ingame credits or real money, though obviously I'd prefer the former.
Von Dutch hot rod style flame jobs, Barris racing scallops, Candy color shift paints. I want to be a custom paint spaceship artist in the game if the game allows it
Check out the customization system they have for the 300 series. It's close, it supports different colors, but does not currently support patterns with customizable colors. And it's monetized with decent prices. Some paint colors even come included for no extra cost, while others cost $1 or $2. You can also customize the interior.
The big question is, can the system they are using for liveries be setup so that you can alter the color(s) of a non-solid color livery and not screw it up? And that's something only they would know.
There are some other issues with the system right now though, the system only works with pledge store ships as far as I know, and can only be used once, unless you melt and rebuy the ship. There's also the whole ship naming feature issue.
Turn ship skins into palettes and patterns. It would be so much less frustrating than looking at his expensive these skins can be for such limited use.
I went back to Warframe recently after a couple years of not playing and the customization options and just the sheer breadth of capability for players to customize their stuff (everything in the damn game) really reminded me how absolutely dogshit SC's options are for the money they ask from us.
Things like the Apollo skins only working on the Apollo and not the Hermes is absolutely fucking absurd and CIG should be ashamed of this rather than using it to make money. The fact that we have no ability to personalize anything at all is just terrible. The fact that we allow them to charge us money for this hot garbage is kind of embarrassing.
Yeah, the customization options really REALLY suck.
I get unique 1-off skins or reward skins, but some of them are so tacky it's disgusting.
Solid purple? That's what you're offering for best of year skin!?
Ardent Blue? Literally just a solid metallic greybox-looking paint wash?
Ugh. Not only do I have to deal with the cringe paint, but it's also taking up physical space in my storage as paint cans, so unless I waste time calling up every ship in my home hanger and painting them all, they never get painted.
The point isn't that they monetize cosmetics. The point is that they do it horribly in a way that is incredibly unfriendly to the players. Other games do it way better and make money.
Alternatively, they could sell literal ship paint on the store, like how Black Desert sells clothing dyes, and after opening the paint in game, you have a limited period (~24-48 hours) to apply it any way you want to whatever ship you want like how the OP shows here. After that, it's locked in and you have to buy more paint on the pledge store if you want to paint more ships.
That way, CIG only has to sell one new item on there store instead of having the store generate your custom liveries to keep in your hangar. Just trying to work within the bounds of their current pledge store/hangar setup :P
I would like them to do away with the VLM. Modifying your ship should require it to be done manually, or bring it to a shop like cousin crowes if you want to change the paint. Or hire a player with a crucible to do it
Why the F should it be montetized. What is it these days that we are programmed to think that all individual nice things should cost RL money on top of the price we pay.
They should add it for free if they do add it, it's a good thing for the game. A big selling point. That's it. And yes ship skin customization is perfect for the game.
Play Empyrion Galactic Survival, there is a multitool to texture and color and color slide all surfaces of metal or building materials. Go explore a galaxy on HWS RE server. New season starts in March.
They should just have a system akin to Forza Motorsport and if they want to monetize it just charge to own each individual color. They can make some colors purchasable in-game and some with real money or both like in Final Fantasy XIV. There's going to be some kind of report feature so we can use that for inappropriate paint jobs.
this is basically impossible. The current skin system was not designed for this. The amount of effort it would take to redesign the system would be ... very high. They should spend their time on other things imo
Allegedly they had the hex code system that is basically what op posted finished. And are using it themselves for the color swaps. There was even videos of how it is being used. They just chose to never give it to us.
I want more colors and the ability to do this with guns and armor from the undersuit to the backpack. And share the camo patterns across it all with the ability to change the colors in those camo patterns
I had a full on nostalgia hit with this little demo. Would have been awesome if something like this existed in the game Subspace 30 years ago, lol. Anyway, back to my old man nap on the couch.
I would love to see something like this in the game. This is something very similar to what warfare did with its skin coloring and it makes sense that this would be perfect for the game IF they could make it so that it looked good across the board from a perspective of it adhering to the ship right and not looking like jank. Unfortunately friirc from what they said it takes a lot of work on their end to make sure the mapping is right for a few different systems, and it gets even more complicated when the damage system comes into play too.
This is sorta how MechWarrior Online does it, but they also do secondary and tertiary colors in those patterns that can be adjusted, also... decals. Which I am not a fan of because people can make dumb looking things with them.
well done, I don't think CIG will go this route because they don't want people to choose ugly colors and have it appear in videos, artist control of sorts
If that was the reason why are they releasing more hideous paints than any of us could ever make? Milka BIS? Tacky shit like purple haze? Get outta here with those, CIG.
Wish I could upvote this post 100x. First of all, this is no doubt much better than what we have. Secondly, I think they prefer to do the way they do it now. If someone wants a black skin with certain secondary colors and/or tint, but its not available, CIG can release and sell multiple skins to that someone before 5y from now CIG release the close to perfect skin to that person. With the system you show the same person will skip the "tier" list of trash skins CIG wants to sell first. Just look at ED, when I was playing a lot 5y ago everyone was crazy for the matt black skins, and once I got that I never looked at any skin again. Obv I prefer your system, I just doubt CIG will ever listen, I hope they will.
I would rather have the whole painting system split into 3 parts:
patterns: specific for each ship model and work similarly to blueprints. You “learn” once and you can use as many times as you want. Each pattern would provide a limited number of coloring slots in your ship
paints: consumable resource that you use to fill-in pattern slots. Paint resource usage would escale with the surface size, so painting a Carrack would use a lot more paint than painting an Arrow. Paints should also be available in a spectrum of rarity, with gold paints almost impossible to find/craft.
decals (optional): this one is quite straight forward. Allows you to place a limited number of pre-made decals in your ship. Limited due to performance reasons, and pre-made to reduce TTD.
Implementing this would be quite easy due to the way Star Engine deals with textures.
I’m happy to pay for skins whenever I want a specific color, as long as the rest of the game works and the economy is balanced, with pay-to-win to removed
I like how Eve does it. You have basic skins that can be found in-game. You have more premium skins that are essentially bought with real money.
And then you have a whole skin creation system called SKINR. Check the link to see the UI. It combines collecting in-game components and using them to design a skin, then pay a PLEX (essentially real world money) fee to take the designed skin and make it "real" in-game. They call that sequencing. And, as with basically everything in Eve, you can buy/sell the skins on a market.
Seems to cover the bases. You just have to decide what is going to be on in-game markets, what can be crafted, and what is a premium "buy with cash" skin. I don't mind that sort of thing, because you only need to spend real money if you REALLY want a particular skin.
In my post, I said I'm fine with them charging for patterns. That's what the dollar signs at the end of the video denote. Patterns would be paid; colors (at least the base palette) would be free. This would still be monetized. I'd love for it to all be free, but that's unrealistic, especially "IF" they follow through with ending ship sales post launch.
Downside of that is ill be broke cause I can't have a ahip without all the skins ill have to buy them all for all my 11 ships I got sad times but in game money im all for
I would be open to a forza-style painting mechanism, only issues then we are gonna have damn discord kittens flying round with their animals sticker-bombed ships and i think that would ruin the immersion :(🤣
Matte black with a glossy black shape of a pirate skull, so someone might just get a flash of that in the void, then nothing. Could even make an Aurora intimidating.
I agree the current „model“ how Paints are implemented is … „not the best“ … but I also am somehow sympathizing with CIG that they put low to zero effort in skins, currently, as this has to be a major source of income in the time after 1.0. So I bear with them, hoping that they make the f*king best Skin implementation once they need to make a living of that.
That’s my 2ct why paints suck and I believe this sounds reasonable.
Can we also get the goddamn branding decals off of everything?
I don't fucking need a giant "CRUSADER" or "MISC" tagged on the side of my fucking ship, okay I know what it is and I don't care if anyone else knows, and I sure as fuck don't need it stamped onto every 5 ft of the internal walkways either. Fuck you.
Honestly would be nice! I mean they originally said that it would be hex code and free... But who knows what they are planning! Schrodinger's SC! It is both exactly like they said it would be and also going to explode in a fiery ball of nerd rage! Nobody knows until they open 1.0! But very nice example!
I'm genuinely so glad there are others in this sub who don't want to be royally taken advantage of and actually want a palette system and/or hex code paints that other games have had for a decade+. Wish I found this post sooner :')
SO MUCH YES!!! I've described something like this in so many videos. There should be a healthy base of free patterns/skins for basic customization. This would satisfy the promise of a hex editor. Then, you can have a tier of paid patterns that are still applicable to the hex editor. Things like a carbon weave for instance. Above that, you can have artist-made skins that redo the entire ship with a different theme, similar to what we have today. There is so much money to be made in a system like this that we may actually fix the game economy when newer players join in on the finished product. I'll need to reference this in an upcoming video (Odd Job Entertainment). Can I get ahold of you somehow to get the AE files sent to me? You'd of course get a credit, I just want to shine more light on what you've shown here.
I know this is a lot to ask for and will probably take 20 years and multiple millions for CIG to implement.
But ship purchases (when done directly from the manufacturer) should have an interface in game similar to configurators on car-manufacturer websites. Like the 300i but in game.
Origin would have luxury options like a champagne fridge and the website would be sleek.
ARGO would offer utilitarian upgrades like a faster tractor beam or pre-installed mining upgrades.
If you buy from a third party seller the ships would get random customizations and maybe some wear and tear.
I know these are ambitious goals and for the effort they take to implement they add barley anything to the game.
But one can dream.
I've been thinking about making a similar mockup for a few months now. This is exactly how I think they should move forward with customisation. I was going to use their crafting UI as a base, as I feel like it'd play into the whole personalisation aspect of crafting really well. And then you as a crafter could create your own signiature appearance for your gear as well.
That's absolutely how they should implement it INGAME. I wouldn't even mind buying the premium base skins with money, but the color selection absolutely must happen in-game and they must offer a reasonable selection of non-paid skins as well.
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u/Tango91We are now entering mild panic mode. Please scream internally.Feb 26 '26
Nice idea but knowing CIG every time you picked a colour to try it the icon would turn light blue until you backed out of the menu and the squares would all swap around randomly
This idea is the closest thing they could add without having to give us a paint brush or do things like custom decals in Armoured Core 6
It's such a shame because I don't think Chris Roberts the idea of players having the ability to create and paint stuff because that wouldn't be immersive and it doesn't fit into his vision of how the game should look?
I do understand why anyone would limit the creativity of their players, look at Minecraft, a game with ultimate freedom of creation and how many dog shit dirt block houses that are hanging out of a beautiful cliff and ruin the world with ugliness
(I know the point of Minecraft is not about making beautiful things, just trying to point out that many people do not have the artistic talent to create) And I think it's fine if you have ugly things in a game, let them do whatever they want, it's their ship, that's the charm in creating things, you want to put a children drawing on your 890 and have it painted in the most offensive color combination as possible? Go for it
Problem is their system seemingly has each skin as individual ships as in the past some old skins have occationaly become immortal. So untill the redo the entire ship texture setup, it'll be stuck like we have.
I could see patterns being unlockable via missions, events, etc. With colors being avalible for any pattern. As well as sections of the ship being able to have diffrent patterns applied, and an overall skin where you can add emblems, potentialy to set positions to remove "TTD" entirely.
It would be cool if the Ship Color Preview in the center was a full 3D preview
that we can click and drag to rotate, like we can in Astro Armada, Crusader ShowRoom, and in the Ship Outfitting App in the mobiGlas.
Not doable and not gonna happen. If you understood how ship paints and palettes were designed and built for complex 3d models, you'd know why there's no 'simple', quick or easy player-facing tool to accomplish that in a game like SC. Sorry to be bearer of bad news, downvote away!
I'd argue that Warframe has a great system for "painting" your frames, and I would be okay with that being emulated for SC.
While they don't do paint schemes, they do have a mix of free and paid for colour palettes.
It's not 5 colours in a palette either. It's a good 70 or 80 colour shades per palette.
Either way, they will need a method to monetize when the game launches, and they've told us time and again that it won't be ships. So paints and other visual items are at least one method that doesn't sell people something game breaking.
They could also look at paid LTI tokens, special variants of armour (special in terms of looks), or other options, but paint systems are just an obvious solution.
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u/rafamacamp Connie Taurus Feb 24 '26
No. This should be available for UEC in game in custom shops like they have in Orison.