Idea: Ship paintshop !!!

not without deep engine hacking, plugging, coding, whatever. impossible with conventional ini coding…

You kidz are weird. Time you came to reality lol

That is actually very simple in MP. Just need to make an FLHook plugin for the command /changemat *.mat to change the material file of the ship you use. (for this you will need to create some .mat files to match specific ships). This command can also deduce the player’s credits.
Also to avoid “buying” mats without knowing what is what, you can plug in a command of “/displaymat *.mat” and change it to default (or designed) after launching.

this will just not work at all eventually. i had two different ships and two different materials for them. two materials in different mat files had the same name. both models did require the material name for its display. although in the shiparch i defined the ships to the mat file they shall be using, i experienced glitches and issues. this can be worked around by taking more direction steps to the materials or the models but to really have a clean mod there is no way to have multiple identical materials for one ship without really deep plugging of the engine. besides, FL does not read out the shiparch ini permanently. so even if you make an flhook plugin to make the ship point to a different mat (which is possible with a complicated server and client hook as all visuals are called by the client, not the server), it would have no instant result. let’s ignore that you’d need a proper cheat detection that would ignore the material reference parameters in thy shiparch.

Gisteron wrote:
this will just not work at all eventually. i had two different ships and two different materials for them. two materials in different mat files had the same name. both models [d]did[/d] require the material name for its display. although in the shiparch i defined the ships to the mat file they shall be using, i experienced glitches and issues (answer underlined). this can be worked around by taking more direction steps to the materials or the models but to really have a clean mod there is no way to have multiple identical materials for one ship without really deep plugging of the engine. besides, FL does not read out the shiparch ini permanently. so even if you make an flhook plugin to make the ship point to a different mat (which is possible with a complicated server and client hook as all visuals are called by the client, not the server), it would have no instant result. let’s ignore that you’d need a proper cheat detection that would ignore the material reference parameters in thy shiparch.

First of all, the mat files MUST NOT have the same name, because the game might crush because of a confuse.

Second: Have you ever thought of making different shiparches???
An FLHook plugin may change the shiparch and save the player’s loadout. This is simpler but it may have some more bugs.
We should stop talking about it and start trying it.

BTW I remember I played once on a server that had a texture changing command plugged (only for factions that use civilian ships). I remember the feature but I don’t remember the server’s name.

now, there were multiple shiparch entries, and the mat files had different names. even though these were two different meshes, just the fact that the very material name (within the very utf archive) was identical caused the issue. and for such a purpose this name has to be identical because a mesh always refers to a single material. however, yes, exporting the mesh twice with different reference and doing two different mats could open up a possibility for this feature. certainly, the plugin is the minor difficulty. nonetheless, to implement this to all existing and new ships is, even if not hard work, still lots of work.

I’m glad you understood me.
Not all ships need to have this feature. Its like the “pimpship” plugin - only in specific bases. This feature can be used to tell the difference between the factions that use same ship, and to avoid buying a new ship and wasring a lot of money on buying the same ship just with another texture. Also, every colony can have a special design texture.
But thats not the point of the plugin. This is the desicion of the mod’s creator. The point is to enable this.

If it is implementable, the ship Model Cloner utility will take care of internal material names in mat files.