We already know that there won't be any custumisation as far as upgrades go. So I was thinking. On the model you have a set of colours that show which units belong to who. Could you change the other ones? And other purely cosmetic things that would make your units unique like fins. You could unlock diferent colours/items/... by completing certain things like beating a certain AI 1v1 or winning a match with XvX players.
Or maybe a skin purchase area like other games seem to have (thinking AirMech's purely cosmetic skins, or Team Fortress 2's hats). A 'give back' marketplace may even be better, where (like TF2 example above) third parties can submit their skins, and have them purchased by others online, and split the 'profits' between Uber and themselves. I heard one of the TF2 home-modellers earned half a million through a program like this!
custom skins is an idea that comes up a lot, i think it has a lot of value especially if they do some airmech skins for registered airmech players and viceversa.
The Problem with just Skins is that they mess with the Readability. This isn't like Starcraft where there is only 1 Tank, 1 Large Mech, 1 Small Mech and 1 'Bike', Units can't be identified like that in PA, so the Devs need to pay a lot of attention to the unit's design and ensure that it plays it's part in 'identifying the unit'. Changing what the unit looks like, in particular the weapon, can rally mess with readability and can can confusion to new plays and even just overall if there turn out to be a large number of these 'skins'. Think about TF2, hate on hats all you want, but they Devs were careful about how they implemented them. Hats are perfect for a cosmetic because by the nature of being located at the top of the head they don't change silhouettes or make the character look different in any way. A Heavy is still easily recognized as a Heavy regardless of what Hat he's wearing. Mike
In League of Legends skins can get extremely outlandish, but they always keep the silouette of the original content, because silloettes represent hit boxes. Hit boxes can not be changed for obvious balance reasons, so skins have to match hit boxes for visual integrity. I just watched the TA Intro again, because I think TA does a good job of creating core content that is easily match-able on both factions. However, even these units would not meet the skin criteria of hit box and weapon system. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6mZZiI4ShQ Did Steve make the intro for TA? I love this intro. As far as an entire AirMech skin cross over, that sounds like a lot of work, and I am not sure AirMech will have all the units needed to match the core content for PA which isn't fully developed but if possible might be fun. Also, this discussion is all pretty far down the pipe, but modelers could certainly begin working on artistic designs as we speak.
As I suggested in the Original thread, the ideal way to handle it (for both games) is doing new Commanders(not just skins) for each other. I'm well on my way in that regard, but I'm still not letting myself lock down on anything design-wise yet, the Pics we've seen like the Whitepox pics are great, but until I can PA models in my 3D program or close up in game, I know I'll have to rework my models to some degree, but even if the details cahnge, the fundamental Proportions and such are still there so it's not so bad you know? Mike
When I said 'skins' previously I meant literally just changing the color schemes and/or a unit's textures, not messing with the actual models since it would definitely change readability and whatnot. The exception would be if the new models happened to be view-able locally only, as in your opponent will see default models on their monitor even if you have deluxe skins on your own, like how Counter-Strike custom gun models work and you see any models you downloaded, but others that don't have the models still see the defaults regardless). This would open to door to 'exploits' though since people could technically make their own models super bright and readable and the other player may be stuck with something a little harder to see from a distance (hypothetical here). Solution: lock the servers with a variable to allow/disallow custom models and do a hash check on their files to force consistency, or make custom skins only available after being approved from the 'store'.
But from what we've so far the majority of the unit seems to be Team Color as they're doing a 2-color system of some sort, so that wouldn't work. Mike
