Why dont they implement user designs into the PTS?

Examples:







So, what do you guys think? They could just give them other vehicles' stats. Seeing as we already know what they would look like, that means the devs would only need to actually model something, instead of think of design concepts...

Because it takes weeks to make a single vehicle model.

Edit: Maybe months. I remember the DICE said it took 8 months to complete a player model in Battlefield 2.

Because they'd still have to do the rigging and balancing on their end. Otherwise, what's the point if they're just going to give them other vehicles' stats? That's just jenky.

There's a free version of the unreal development kit, google it, the unreal engine is basically the most user friendly engine out there for content creation and modification. Mess with that for a month, and you should have part of your answer.

The first and last pics you linked are actual official concepts (the thresher apparently has a model but no rigging), and the rocket turret too but it was never used.

But yeah basically because they still need to do a ton of work to make things work. Upcoming player studio changes will make this "easier". But I still wouldn't expect to see fully unique (as in new skeletons/rigs) for a long while. Concepting/modelling/rigging/linking rigging to values in game/testing is not a small task.

That's why they put it on the TEST SERVER and take some time to get the kinks out.

That completely misses my point. To get it onto the test server, they'll still have to do all of the rigging and balancing, eating up their time. It takes a lot of time to take those paper concepts and turn them into in-game models.

Y'know, if they let the players handle all the modeling side of things they actually could get them in game fairly easily. I obviously haven't worked on forgelight before but I know in other engines it's a pretty simple task to import a full model with all it's bones and rigging and **** already done. The player does all that, SOE just ports it in and cleans it up. If SOE took that method we could get new **** every month, rather than one NS vehicle every six months.

That would very quickly over saturate the game with redundant vehicles.

Anyway, I'm not sure how monetizing would work with that. Helmets and camo are easy, since you can just give a portion of what was paid for to the artist. A whole vehicle though? How do you work out how much a person whould be paid for it, especially if it doesn't end up getting used much, or ends up being the most used vehicle in game?

How would it over saturate the game with redundant vehicles? SOE puts out a statement like say.... "We want to put in a small flying gunship that can hold about two passengers, we want it to have a pilot and a second seat to control the gun. It should be slightly larger than an ESF" etc and then people submit their stuff.

And why would anyone get paid for anything? Nobody's getting paid for the valkyrie, are they? Or the Harasser? Or Hossin? It's new content to keep people playing the game. People buy cosmetics for it same as any other vehicle, and since SOE is doing relatively little work they still make plenty of money. Far better deal than the current method of the devs doing everything since if they relied on the community to make the models all they'd have to do is import them and tweak them.

THOSE MODELS ARE FREAKING AWESOME. We need player designed VS weapons! That way, we don't have to use frozen fish to kill our enemies

You stated you wanted new **** every month. That's a lot of content being put in game that would need a lot of rebalancing of what we already have, only to be repeated the next month.

The devs are getting paid for those things. It's kinda their job. Also, we have people getting paid for making helmets and camos, and we expect people to make a whole vehicle for free? Especially if SOE is going to be making money off of it, not paying the people that made it at all is just slimy.

They look nice but there are some techincal limitations, aka polycount. Before we get Planetside on Dx11 these models would be quite risky to run..

I can assure you that people would gladly and happily make entire vehicles for free if it meant new content being injected into a game they love. I mean hello, just look at modders in all sorts of games, they almost never get paid and they often put out work equally as good as anything in PS2. They do it because they want to, not because they want money.

I mean there's no reason why they couldn't allow the community to make empire specific versions of pre-existing vehicles, for example. The only reason we have so much common pool stuff is because the devs don't wanna invest the time into making three different things for every vehicle. So why not let the community do it? Let the community make empire specific versions of the harasser, the atv, the lightning, the lib, the galaxy. I'm sure most people would appreciate that variety even if it's purely cosmetic and the vehicles have all the same stats and weapons n ****.

Dude, I've seen you posting about user-created content for PS2 a lot. If you want to design faction-specific vehicles, maps and other "hard" stuff, you should probably look here:
https://www.soe.com/careers/?locale=en_US

Those are designs (some of them really bad ones at that), nothing more.

All of them (except maybe for the Colossus and the Thresher) don't even have an ingame model, no place to rig up ingame physics, weapons or even just basic interfacing (like "Press E to enter").


Do you really want them to waste development time on some fanboy's pipedream (Picture of a VS Mech/BFR, I'm looking at you! ) ?

Which points to probably the biggest reason this stuff isn't in there: PS2 doesn't make enough money to hire the people needed to get this done.

^I agree with this somewhat.

Look at those ES Flashes for example. They look badass, add variety, and overall would make the game better. Think about it this way. If you let players create models, rig them, and submit them (kind of like player studio) then it will happen, even if they don't get paid. Hell, if you really wanted to pay them, make it like a fixed rate depending on the size of the model. Considering that most modders don't get paid, people would jump on it.

The potential is unlimited. In this community we have a lot of good modeling talent. The reason none of the models posted are rigged, and none of that concept art is in models is because players don't want to waste their time on something that isn't going to get used.

If SOE were to come out and say. "We are looking for modelers and riggers to come up with new ES varients of the existing NS vehicles. It will just be a reskin so no re balancing will be required, but it will add to the metagame." BOOM people would start doing it. I know if there was a chance that my model may get used, I sure as hell would try. (Though tbh, my modeling skills leave much to be desired). If the models are already made and rigged, then honestly it's not THAT much work for them to push it to the game. I have played around with plenty of game engines in the past (especially the unreal one that was mentioned earlier) and if you download pre rigged models form the internet, it's not SUPER hard to get everything working smoothly. If a noob like me can get a rigged model with some clunky animations to work in a few weeks of spare time, a professional could defo get it done in a reasonable amount of time.

Oh, I'm sure they could get a half ***** model with some clunky animation done in no time at all. And then T-Ray would (rightfully) throw them out on their ***.

I don't have a crystal ball into the industry, but if I had to ballpark the cost of getting a new vehicle into the game it'd probably be in the $50-70k range. You're looking at a couple of months of calendar time with overlapping work of artist/modeler/animator time, art lead signoffs, creative team concepts. QA, marketing and finally getting it into the depot.

Dude, I feel like you really missed the point.
The community will come up with the ideas. And we don't have to go around adding new vehicles, just RESKINS to the old ones, to make them LOOK empire specific.

Let me clear this up, the community does the modeling, and the rigging, and the concept creation, and everything but the in game animations, and putting it in the engine. Literally, the only work that would have to be done by SOE, would be animations, and a little bit of tweaking of values to make the rigging work properly with the in game physics.

I'm not saying it's super easy, or that it's simple, or that SOE should add new vehicles every month.
I'm just saying that A. We need more empire specific things, even if it's just the skins. and B. the community can help do it if they let us.