In Forza Motorsport you can completely cover the cars in custom decals and designs from parts manufacturers to real life race teams.
This would be great in Eve. Tayras with corp logos on, pirate ships with Hello Kitty decals on their hulls. There’s money in it for CCP too, selling the decals to companies would generate revenue. Starbucks would pay, DHL maybe, Lockheed, SpaceX, Intel…?
I know that the SKINS issue is controversial but people would add colour and personalise their ships in a lore sense and it would add some much needed humour, Eve can be so serious.
Maybe someone can tell me why it’s not possible, otherwise I can see a more vibrant living New Eden with SKINS 2.0.
Would be amazing but at the same time imagine trying to load grid with 5000 players all with custom decal’s would crash most people’s computers with all the memory needed and the “you have been logged out due to time out’s”.
Maybe if there was a select few of maybe 40 with only a few places designated on a player ship then at least it would be sort of do-able, but atm CCP is doing everything in their power to speed up game play maybe in a few years when tech gets a lot better I can definitely see this as a thing :D.
To add on to this. I believe skins/ships are setup to be symmetrical as that is how the graphics engine is setup. It just processes one half of the ship/skin and mirrors it.
Which is one reason why a lot of new ship remodels are symmetrical shapes and also why skins dont differ between LH/RH.
If you setup a “place your decal” anywhere element, it would increase load on the engine as it has to render everything separately, instead of just mirroring the other half.