WARNING: THIS IS A SUGGESTION

THIS DOES NOT CONTAIN DRIVER CUSTOMIZATION TEST PATCH

Hello Racers,

I've had these concepts laying around for a while which was developed alongside with Suits Update. I narrowly avoided cancelling that project due to the amount of compromises I had to make in order for them to work and going down ingame customization route still remains a tedious task.

I bring this up because we are getting closer and closer to Graphics Update and I think some sort of revamp regarding driver appearance system would offer high value in the short-to-medium term with what I imagine would require moderate effort compared to remaking it from ground up.

Requirements:

Addressing Template Issues:
Some wireframes are out of bounds, some are too close and interfering.

Separating Textures:
Shoes are part of suits texture, perhaps we might have all items separated but located in the same folder. This will ensure the ability to switch shoes separately from the suits.

Providing Better Coverage:
Some areas of suits use the same textures from other sides, such as sides and back sharing the mapping. Increasing suit texture size to 1024x1024 might be crucial in accomidating all mappings sparately without quality setbacks.

Allowing Basic Customization:
Suits are locked with glove and shoe combinations, some don't even match and you cannot reassign different types either.

Adding Switchable Shadows:
Drivers have car footwell shadows while riding on motorcycles. It would be nice to toggle them, later you can use it to detect vehicles requiring it and automatically toggle that perhaps.

Considering Female Driver Types:
Female types are using male textures, adding separate files for female types or improving the double function of existing templates would be nice.

Here's the UI types and brief Pros and Cons evaluation of each:



Buttons UI: Arrows below the driver are switching driver types and rest of the arrows change available textures. Custom textures can be selected by clicking on them like you do with helmets.

Buttons UI in Multiplayer: Everyone will have access same amount of color choices, custom textures inputs won't appear online and would translate as default texture inputs for other users due to lack of hosting.



Sliders UI: Arrows below the driver are switching driver types, sliders control colors of single texture and slider arrows control the items, not the textures. Custom texture can be selected by clicking on them like you do with helmets.

Sliders UI in Multiplayer: Users who may load custom texture inputs for suits, gloves or shoes will probably not going to appear online and would translate as default texture inputs for other users due to lack of hosting.

My Favourite is probably Buttons UI due to the balance between simplicity and customization. Most suits are either white, black, red or blue anyways and preset colors should be sufficient.

Takeaway is to enable modders to mitigate quality setbacks themselves, because as it is right now it requires lot of compromises to make new suits work while they aren't even properly customiable in first place.

Perhaps the Developers themselves could come up with a third solution based on their insights.

The sliders solution sounds like a bad idea because, when changing the RGB values of the suit, any kind of textured detail on the suit will be tinted and that will look bad.

As for separate textures for gloves and shoes, I think that's also too much. If people want different gloves and shoes on a certain suit they might make different variants of the same suit texture.

I think only having 2 textures, one for the helmet and one for the suit, should be enough. Obviously the suit texture should have a good enough resolution for all the suit items to be included without losing quality.

Quote from Silver Razor :

The sliders solution sounds like a bad idea because, when changing the RGB...

I think it is equally bad idea compared to car skins then.

Quote from UnknownMaster21 :

I think it is equally bad idea compared to car skins then.

I don't think that something like this looks good:

Sliders is actually a good idea. Take simple plain white suit and you can color it to any color you want without it looking weird.

Suits skins should be uploadable though for more customization in multiplayer. Gloves could be just colorable with sliders.

Quote from Drifteris :

Sliders is actually a good idea. Take simple plain white suit and you can color it to any color you want without it looking weird

I'm not even sure if it would look that good even with such a texture. As an example you can check how the original RB4 GT skin looks on the wing where "RB4" is written: that area is supposed to be dark grey while it still gets colored.

I think that instead of the slider, a better idea is having a set of colored default skins to choose from.

Quote from Silver Razor :

I don't think that something like this looks good:

I do not care. It is existing in a first place, so it should be then removed by having sliders to car skins then.

Besides... I have experienced in my life that something which you might find looking not good, may not be so on others. Someone's junk is a someone's treasure.

Quote from Silver Razor :

I think that instead of the slider, a better idea is having a set of colored default skins to choose from.

Sounds reasonable though, but then again, it would be considered as reskinning. I do see your point though that certain areas should remain intact, logos for example.

But... this would go into endless discussion about what is looking good and what is not. It would become as a beauty contest, related to someone's taste or most similar taste.

Point was originally however in functionality, which I would like to see those hm... sliders. However, I do see a grain of sense in your comment of that.