girlyboy wrote:QUOTE (girlyboy @ Mar 17 2009, 02:07 PM) How about assigning the textures to different tech levels of the same ship? It's always bugged me that the lt int looks the same as the int looks the same as the hvy int, and same for fighters, scouts, etc. Even fighter-bombers look the same as regular figs. Only giga luxury versions of ships look different. I know this is probably because the code just uses the exact same model for each, and that might be bothersome to change, but this way at least no actual modelling or texturing work needs to be done -- use the same models, and just add a few new textures from the existing set?
Actually this is mostly a core issue, not a code one, and can easily be changed right now. Each ship level is considered a separate "ship" by ICE, so for Giga figs, there are separate "ship" entries for reg, enh, adv, and luxy Fighters. Right next to where you edit things like hull and scan range you can assign what model to use. Just by convention all levels of the same type have been assigned the same model, but they don't have to be.
In MS times, I'm not entirely sure they even used different looking models for lxy versions, that may have been a DN development Noir came up with. So yeah, its no problem for the Core Dev's to specify that different level ships use a different model. And that's what they'd have to do, call a "different" model because the name of the texture to use is part of the model file, we can't do the hot-swapping thing you suggested. So even if all you want is a different colored version of a ship we already have you have to create a "new" model that is the same shape as the old one, but that calls a different texture to use. However that's really not that hard to do.
