Show Your True Colors

Bitfighter Idea!

In this idea, there would be the allowance of one to customize their ship/weapons.
There would be a tab in the main menu of Bitfighter that says "Customize". From there you can change the color of your ship. The color of your ship would only be shown in FFA (Free-For-All) games (to make sure there is no confusion of teams). You can change the whole color of your ship, or you can change the color of the ship pixel-by-pixel to incorporate more colors on your ship. For the exhaust of the ship, same rules apply.
Plus, you can change the color of your weapon sprites too. For phaser, you can see that there is a red sprite and a purple sprite combined to make the full phaser particle. You could change the color of each of the sprites in the full phaser particle.
(Same for the bouncer particle.)
For the triple particle, I don't see any second sprite incorporated into the triple particle, but if there was, it would be the same configuration setup as the phaser, but if there isn't, you could just change the one sprite's color incorporated in the triple particle.
For burst, we can see a white outline and a yellow middle. You can change both individual sprites in the burst particle.
For seeker, you could change the color of the exhaust, (what is coming out of the homing missile to propel it forward) and the body.

One overall rule:
No black.
If a player colors their whole weapon black, they would have an advantage because people can't see/barely see it, (FYI: because of the white stars in the background) making it hard to dodge the bullets.
If a player colors their ship all black, they would have an advantage because they would be hard to see, (FYI:You would still see their nametag) making it hard to hit them.

Interesting ideas I'm for it being client side only though cause I have some concerns.

1. I don't think weapon color should be able to be changed as you could say turn the phaser bouncer or the triple phaser or bouncer color and confuse people (particularly new players.)

2. You would still be unable to see ships if they are on a colored loadout/goalzone allowing for hiding same goes for bullets.

3. People "might" be able to disguise themselves as walls and shot unsuspecting ships.

Dear Amgine,

1. Phaser's particle is smaller than a bouncer's, so people would easily catch on to what the weapon is once they see the size. Plus, they would see if they bounce or not to prove which is which. For triple, I think anyone can easily see 3 projectiles coming out of a ship.

2+3. You would still see their nametag. Plus, they will be shooting, so you'll obviously know they're there. For bullets, 99% of the time they would be shooting in the black background and since they can't use black, people would see the bullets and where they are coming from.

Thanks for your thoughts!

I like the idea!

I think maybe just the ship colors should be customizable. Customizing the weapons and exhaust might get a little tooo psychedelic.

Update:

Now that I think of it, weapon coloring shouldn't be added.
As amgine said, it would confuse new players, and as furbuggy said, it would become well, too out of control. I totally agree with these opinions on the matter.

Furbuggy, I think colored exhausts would be fine, it's not going to be quite a confusion or hassle at all, just a little touch-up for the ship to make it look cooler.

Thanks for your responses!

Here is a thought Maybe if ships were given some sort of team label or name label you could alow for customization ship art. However one rule would be no solid colors.....

Ship exhaust would be cool to

[watusimoto]

We've explored different ship bodies, but didn't like the result. The idea of picking a color in 1-team games is interesting; maybe you would be assigned one at random, but could choose an override if you wanted.

I'm kind of neutral on this at the moment, but can't think of any reason why it wouldn't work.

What if customization of ships was allowed in team games ( But no solid colors.) but to make sure that you would know who is on your team there would be a "name" label for each ship and it would be colored for your team OR each ships would be given a heavy glowing outline of the teams color something to that effect?

[watusimoto]

The problem is that customization to the level you are thinking is hard. The ships aren't bitmaps that can just be redrawn.

1. How is bitfighters "art" drawn?

2. Can we change it to a better system that's customizable?

[watusimoto]

Drawn as vectors/linework... look at the code:

https://github.com/bitfighter/bitfighte ... r.cpp#L177

...if you can read it

Arg got a headache looking at that.

Is it possible to switch to shaders or maybe a sprite based system someday?

I think shaders might even come in the future, but sprites would require quite a lot of work (Watusimoto's words). But then we have SVG, which is like a sprite (image), but with vectors, so maybe eventually Bitfighter could support those, but would it be worth it?

Maybe there could be a ship.svg somewhere that could be interchanged (always respecting the Ships' constant radius), so people could make their own, etc. But then we need to be able to place thrusters, etc...

[Quartz]

We do have to consider what such graphics would do to the size of the game. (Particularly sprites) It's not a huge selling point I suppose, but the ridiculously minuscule size of Bitfighter has always been significant in my mind. I remember when those 256MB thumb drives were the norm, and you could throw Zap! on it and we thought we were so cool.

[Skybax]

I think that in this day and age where even the tiny Indie games take up three gigs of data on my computer, Bitfighter could stand to beef up it's megabytes a bit. I highly doubt it would do that much harm.

[watusimoto]

I've looked into SVG, and it would be hard to implement, and probably be incompatible with shaders on some level. So SVG is out.

Libetro?

https://github.com/libretro/common-shaders